 My name is Stephanie Fitzpatrick. I'm a clinical health psychologist and I study health behavior change in weight management at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. I have struggled with obesity all of my life since I was a young girl. And so as I got older and started to experience the physical pains related to obesity, I started to realize that something wasn't quite right, but I wasn't quite ready yet. I mean you have to be ready, right? And so I wasn't quite ready to lose weight and engage in those behavior changes. But then I started doing some research with some great researchers on childhood obesity. And I was responsible for talking to African American mothers and their daughters about how to eat healthy and how to increase their physical activity and how to manage their weight. And I thought, well, how can I be teaching these mothers and their daughters this when I'm not practicing this myself? And so from that point on, I decided that making small changes was what I needed to do. We know that behavioral lifestyle interventions are effective in terms of helping people lose 8-10% of their initial weight, which is considered clinically significant weight loss, reduces risk for diabetes as well as cardiovascular disease and improves cardiovascular disease risk factors. However, what we've seen in our clinical trials is that these behavioral lifestyle interventions work for about 50% of the people who are participating. What happens to the other 50%? Well, they experience some weight loss too, but not to the degree of the clinically significant weight loss to 5% or more that we would like to see. So part of my research is trying to figure out what are the psychosocial barriers that may be getting in the way that is preventing everyone from reaching that 5% threshold, at least that clinically significant weight loss threshold, and how do we refine our behavioral lifestyle interventions to address those psychosocial barriers and make the intervention more effective for more people. We do have some idea about some strategies that work. One is continuing to eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet, staying physically active, particularly with moderate to vigorous physical activities, including walking, and also self-monitoring, weighing yourself at least once a week, and also keeping a food record just to have an idea about what your food intake is like and what changes you need to make. When I realized that I needed to start making my own lifestyle changes, I started making small changes very gradually, as simple as moving from whole milk to 2% milk to 1% to skim milk, to making sure that I got at least 20 to 30 minutes of physical activity in my day, 5 to 6 days a week, and eventually increased that up to an hour. When I fix my plate, making sure that I have a healthy plater, perfect plate, half-plate vegetables, a fistful of carbs, and a palm-size of meat, of protein. So, as I started to gradually adopt those behaviors to the point where they became my lifestyle, I was successful and lost 50 pounds over about a year and a half, and have been able to maintain that weight loss over 10 years.