Battle Ground resident Valerie Johnson around 2010 at her heaviest weight of 200 pounds.
Battle Ground resident Valerie Johnson in January 2018 at 120 pounds.
A first-time author and Battle Ground resident looks at the mental side of weight loss in her book released earlier this year.
In January, “My Own Best Ally: A Weight Loss Story for the Rest of Us” by Valerie Johnson hit Amazon’s digital bookshelves. In it, Johnson touches on how she was able to lose — and keep off — 80 pounds.
Johnson isn’t a medical professional, something she makes clear in the opening pages of her book. Rather, she saw a lack in other weight-loss literature in looking at the mental hurdles needed to be overcome before real results could happen.
Johnson’s wake-up call came when she noticed symptoms connected to prediabetes. In the book she explains she didn’t go to the doctor before starting weight loss for fear of a diagnosis. After starting on a whim with a juice fast, those symptoms began to fade or disappear, providing concrete results that spurred her on.
Johnson was a proponent of incremental change, not going about something cold turkey, explaining she found a weaning approach worked better with human nature.
“If you can find something you like but it’s a little healthier, it’s easier,” Johnson said, adding that dieters shouldn’t force themselves to eat something they just can’t like. She touched on the idea of weight loss momentum, where the small improvements by incremental changes can make greater strides easier.
Johnson kept the book short — all-told the read runs 55 pages including recipes and “food swap” ideas alongside the narrative — in part to make sure the message was not lost in a large page count while also keeping people’s attention.
Growing up all over the West Coast, Johnson settled in Battle Ground in 2014, raising her two kids as a stay-at-home mom. She said she got the idea to write the book in part due to inspiration from another work, “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” written by author H. Jackson Brown initially as a guide for his son on his first year of college.
Johnson began committing similar ideas to paper for her own children with many having a focus on healthy living, eventually realizing she had enough material for a book. During her own weight loss she had people often asking her how she was doing it, further pushing her to get something published.
“If the 100 people I’ve talked to have these same questions, probably other people have them,” Johnson surmised. The book also helped her fill time normally spent raising her kids when her youngest began preschool in Fall 2017.
Johnson lost the bulk of the weight in early 2012. Since then she has focused on building healthy, lean muscle. She said that for several years prior to writing the book she was trying to figure out what in her thinking changed to allow for the weight loss.
“I didn’t want to put a book out until I had really tried to drive home how the change really happened,” Johnson said, adding she wanted to avoid an “eat this, do that” type of work.
“That’s kind of the missing piece of the puzzle sometimes, people … keep falling back on bad habits,” Johnson said.
One of those bad habits in her experience was stress-eating, Johnson said, commenting how before losing the weight feelings of being overwhelmed could lead to procrastination through eating.
“Exercise, it’s kind of tough at first,” Johnson said, though she said the first steps don’t have to be drastic. “It could be something just as simple as getting a pair of walking shoes and start walking.”
Raising her kids at home Johnson doesn’t go out on long hikes or hit a commercial gym, instead she exercises at home, generally in the morning before her kids wake up. Having the need to take care of the children makes it important to get the workout over with, giving her a structure to fall back on to keep her committed.
“Try to find little changes that you like and build on those,” Johnson remarked.
