By Jane Norris

Published: March 18, 2006

When Nilou Jones pours skim milk on her bowl of high-fiber cereal, it looks like an ordinary breakfast. But under its unassumingly crunchy exterior lie two powerful weapons in Jones’s quest to lose 100 pounds - calcium and fiber.
Jones is determined to lose the weight before her husband, Army Sgt. 1st Class Charles Jones, returns home next spring from serving in Mosul, Iraq. Since starting her self-improvement program in July, she has shed 43 pounds, closing in on the halfway mark.
The Charlottesville mother of two is striving for healthy, sensible weight loss through regular exercise and careful food choices, avoiding get-svelte-quick tricks and gimmicks in favor of solid science and taking control.
Over the past few months, Daily Progress readers have followed Jones as she has sweated off calories at the gym. These days, she’s exercising five to six days a week, for half an hour to an hour at a time, over at Gold’s Gym, where she attends step aerobics classes, walks on a treadmill, uses strength-training machines and even has joined a new cycling class.
Now it’s time to take a closer look at the other half of the equation. To fine-tune her approach to fueling her active - and actively shrinking - frame, Jones has been reading a lot of nutritional labels.
On the advice of a nutritionist, Jones has been adding calcium and fiber to her daily diet. It’s important to the busy mom to make her eating plan work with foods from the supermarket. With two energetic youngsters to raise, Jones doesn’t have time to waste driving around for special ingredients or expensive pre-packaged meals.
During a recent grocery store trip, Jones’s sons Cyrus, 3, and Arman, 1, munched bagels while Jones placed a bag of Gala apples in her cart next to a cluster of bananas and a merry orange pumpkin.
It was time to head down the bread aisle. Jones lifted several loaves and scanned the labels, pointing out what won her over to her current favorite whole-grain bread - a per-slice dividend of 3 grams of fiber and 15 percent of her recommended daily calcium, at the cost of only 50 calories.
Jen Cote, Jones’s personal trainer over at Gold’s Gym, has been encouraging Jones to look for whole grains. Whole-wheat pasta, lower-sugar instant oatmeal, whole-grain fig cookies and one-bite muffins were among potential choices that fit the rules of thumb Cote recommended to Jones - less than 5 grams of sugar and 3 or more grams of fiber per serving.
In the produce aisle, Cote pointed out a bag of prewashed spinach leaves.
“When you make a salad, always put some spinach in it,’’ she told Jones. “It’s full of vitamins. Dark green is what you want.’’
Jones also read the labels on products she selected for her sons. The flavor of graham crackers that made it into the cart was the one with the lowest amount of sugar per serving. Jones also checked labels for sugar content before choosing fruit cups, with which she hopes to broaden her younger son’s food repertoire. Here’s a fact that won’t surprise most parents: it’s hard to get both boys excited about the same foods.
“Cyrus is a fruit-and-vegetable guy, and Arman is a meat-and-potatoes guy,’’ Jones said with a knowing-mom chuckle. “It makes mealtime lots of fun.’’
But making the effort to plan healthy meals will pay off for the entire family, said Rita Smith, registered dietitian at Martha Jefferson Hospital.
“She’s setting such a great example for the kids,’’ Smith said. “It’s hard to say, ‘Johnny, drink your milk,’ while Mom’s drinking a Coke.’’
The recent whole-grain emphasis in the food industry has given families more options, Smith said. Bringing home whole-wheat versions of pita rounds, mini bagels, hamburger buns - even the whole-grain waffles Jones placed in her cart after some deliberation - can help children develop a taste for healthier foods, Smith said.
“Start them out young, and start them out right,’’ Smith said.
Smith also had a few numbers folks can keep in mind while reading labels.
Three or more grams of fiber per serving is good - “the higher, the better,’’ she said.
Calcium is listed not in grams, but as a percentage of the recommended daily amount. “If it has twenty-five to thirty percent per serving, that’s very good,’’ Smith said.
The figures are based on the recommended 1,000 milligrams for adults ages 19 to 50, but once you’re 51 or older, it’s time to aim for 1,200 milligrams to help guard against bone loss. By the same token, ’tweens and teens ages 9 to 18 should strive for 1,300 to help their growing bodies build bone mass.
Reaching the 1,000-milligram mark may sound daunting until you look in the dairy case. Smith recommends low-fat dairy foods as good sources of calcium. A couple of glasses of skim milk and a container of nonfat or low-fat yogurt, for instance, will add up to about 900 milligrams.
It’s harder to get the same amount of calcium from leafy green vegetables, because “we don’t absorb the calcium from them very well,’’ Smith said. So dive in and enjoy the greens, but don’t forget your milk.
“If you have your three [recommended daily servings of] dairy, you’ll nail it,’’ Smith said.
If you don’t consume dairy products, a serving of calcium-enriched soy milk also packs 300 milligrams of calcium.
Hitting the daily fiber-intake mark requires a similar can-do strategy, Smith said.
“Folks feel overwhelmed when they hear twenty-five or thirty grams of fiber,’’ Smith said.
But starting the fiber quest at breakfast can spread out the task. People miss opportunities when “they have juice instead of fruit, they have white toast instead of whole wheat,’’ she said.
“Popcorn is a great high-fiber snack,’’ Smith said. Regarding popular microwave kinds, she said, “That’s really easy, as long as you get the ‘lite.’ They add negligible fat.’’
Portion control still matters even with healthy treats, Smith said. She suggested trying single-serving bags.
Jones’s trainer, Cote, shared a favorite calcium-and-fiber treat of her own - spooning out some low-fat plain yogurt and adding fresh cantaloupe or mango chunks.
“You can retrain your palate to eat healthier,’’ Cote said. “Try to eat healthy all the time, and once in a while you can have a treat.’’
Jones treated herself last week to one of her favorite meals - a trip to the Indian food buffet at Milan restaurant. Jones made sure she didn’t coast through her morning workout before joining her mother for lunch.
“I was lifting weights going, ‘This is for the curried chicken,’ ’’ she said with a laugh. “Today I decided to reward myself.’’
Rich in vegetables, Indian cuisine can be an appealing choice, and nutrition experts recommend eating a variety of foods. But approach any buffet without some sort of strategy, and you can end up starring in your own gourmand-gone-wild video. Even when a meal is a reward, it’s important to make smart selections.
“I made sure I had a good serving of salad so I wouldn’t load my plate with proteins and starches,’’ Jones said. “I had eggplant, and spinach, and I will have a light dinner.’’
By the end of the meal, flavor and quality won out over quantity, and Jones went home satisfied - without jeopardizing her progress. Thanks to the hard work Jones has been putting in on her eating plan, she has reached a point where she’s eating less, but not feeling hungry.
“I am so not starving myself,’’ she said. “I am totally eating.’’
Another payoff Jones recently discovered was more subtle, but equally welcome.
Jones recently helped her sister move to a new home, which meant doing her share of heavy lifting. Jones had been storing some of her sister’s furniture temporarily in her own basement downhill from her driveway, so moving the items to the truck literally was an uphill effort - and literally a slippery slope, thanks to recent rains.
“I enjoyed sitting down when it was over, but I wasn’t huffing and puffing,’’ Jones said. If moving day had arrived before Jones started getting in shape, “I would not have been able to help her as much,’’ Jones said.
Somewhere amid all the leg lifts, side steps and treadmill marches, Jones’s body has been building strength and endurance for everyday activities.
Flexibility has been important for Jones this past month in the exercise department - and not just for the literal limbering reasons.
Cyrus started attending preschool three mornings a week, so Jones had to tinker with her workout schedule, switching to some evening classes. She has attended a new cycling class - finding amusement in its name, “Maximum Overdrive.’’
“Saturday mornings are the only times that work for me,’’ she said.
As Jones gets more fit, she finds that she has to push herself a little harder or vary her routines to keep her body challenged.
“On the treadmill, I have to say, ‘You’re going to have to kick it up a notch, girlfriend,’ ’’ she said.
Jones refreshed her step aerobics routine by trying a new class offered for regular attendees that added new tunes, equipment and mad moves.
The hardest part of her journey has been keeping her accomplishments so far a secret from her husband, who is serving in Iraq. She’s reminding friends and relatives who speak or exchange e-mails with him not to spill the beans - no matter how much fiber they may have.
He’s aware that his wife wants to lose weight and get in shape, and he tries to encourage her. She did mention that she’d bought a gym membership, so occasionally he asks if she is using it.
“My husband will not stop badgering me about going to the gym,’’ Jones said. “He knows how important it is to me to lose weight.
“He loved me when I was small and when I was big. He’s doing his best to be supportive.”
So far, she’s able to deflect his gym questions and change the subject. But in person, it’s impossible to hide her success.
Since Jones started her quest, more folks have been following her progress and cheering her on. Sometimes people will approach her at Gold’s and say she has inspired them to try to change their own lives with fitness and weight-loss plans.
“It’s exciting to see people come up at the gym,’’ Jones said. “I’m just a mom. I’m just me. But a couple of people have come up and said, ‘I’m here because of you.’ ’’
Still, it can be uncomfortable - just like the compliments, especially from folks who haven’t seen her in a while.
“It’s hard,’’ Jones said of getting compliments. “It hasn’t caught up inside with how I look on the outside.’’
Also, Jones said, “I’m not done yet.’’ She doesn’t want flattery to nest in her brain and start feathering it with excuses to slack off. She’d rather think, “Just think of how you’re going to look later,’’ she said.
She can borrow some ideas from sports psychology to help, said Laura Jones, who is certified as a health/fitness instructor by the American College of Sports Medicine and is a research associate for the University of Virginia Psychology Department. She writes a fitness column for The Daily Progress. (Nilou Jones and Laura Jones aren’t related.)
Many athletes keep journals, writing down how they train and what they eat so they can track their progress over time and mull over what works and what needs help, Laura Jones said.
“You might have to approach the inner change the same way,’’ she said. “You might want to keep a journal about how you feel inside.’’
Receiving compliments can be awkward, particularly for women, Laura Jones said. The temptation is strong, after years of conditioning to be polite and not appear conceited, to answer with a self-deprecating remark - but that comes at the risk of belittling one’s accomplishment to seem modest.
“You don’t have to hate yourself to keep striving,’’ Laura Jones said. “We all want proof before we’re confident. Maybe positive visualization will help. Close your eyes and visualize yourself as a powerful, strong, beautiful person, graciously accepting compliments.’’