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Losing weight. Finding yourself.
Charlayne Gray just wanted to fit into her clothes again. She never dreamed a Kmart contest would change her life.
By LANE DeGREGORY
Published January 8, 2006
TAMPA - In the Kmart parking lot, Charlayne Gray gathers her group. Her best friend is here, the one she's taking on that spa vacation she won. Her sister brought her four kids and their babies to see the signs. Her daughters came, of course, along with her 2-year-old grandson, Isaiah. Charlayne herds them through the aisles of cars, parks them outside the glass double doors.
"Are you all ready?" she asks. She's not sure she is.
As she opens the door, her daughter raises her new video camera. Charlayne walks a few steps down the wide aisle. Everyone is watching as she scoops her grandson into her arms and points at a billboard hanging from the ceiling.
"There it is!" she says, bouncing Isaiah on her hip. "That's me up there. You see me?"
The little boy's eyes grow big. He looks from the poster, where his grandmother is larger than life, to her real face smiling beside him; back and forth. "Yes," Charlayne coos. "That's me. Look at me!"
"Oh, Auntie," gasps one of her nieces, "you look so beautiful up there!"
"It doesn't even look like you," her sister says.
A woman approaches. "Charlayne Gray?" she asks, extending her hand. She is Elsie Rodriguez, the store manager. "We've been expecting you. Congratulations! You're all over here. In electronics our TVs are playing your video constantly." The woman turns to Isaiah. "You want to come see your grandmama on TV?"
Charlayne carries the boy past cash registers and Christmas items on sale, by jewelry and the customer service counter, where this all began.
She's wearing an orange Kmart blazer, black V-neck blouse and slacks she doesn't mind telling you are a size 10. She's 42 and hasn't worn that size since junior high.
As she walks through the store, Charlayne feels like she's floating. Everything has been happening so fast: the trip to New York, the makeover, new clothes - that Mariah Carey moment during the photo shoot.
Not to mention the money. She never thought she would be able to afford to spend $24 on a purse or take her whole family out to eat at Bennigan's.
And now this: The woman who never thought she was pretty, the pastor's wife who wouldn't let anyone take her picture, is strutting through Kmart, surrounded by her family, staring at herself beaming down from 100 signs and a wall of TVs.
Her photo is displayed in all 1,400 Kmarts across America this month. Today, she's on the cover of Kmart's advertising circular, which is being delivered in hundreds of newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times. An entire page of Kmart's new magazine, Your Way, is devoted to her success story. She's featured in Kmart's latest TV commercial, airing across the country.
"I just wanted to fit into my clothes again," Charlayne says. "I never dreamed of all this."
* * *
She grew up in Queens, N.Y., and moved to Florida when she was 13 - an awkward age for any kid to start at a new school. It's even harder when you're a shy, uncertain girl who looks older than she is, who doesn't have a dad or a Southern accent or know how to swim.
One day in seventh grade, a boy came up to Charlayne in the lunch room. "You know, you look pretty good," he told her. "Except your thighs touch."
After that, she always worried about her weight, about her thighs swishing together. She never wore a bikini.
"I was always tall, big-boned," says Charlayne, who's 5-9. "After my third daughter was born, I really held onto the weight. And in the last three years, I gained 30 pounds. Just becoming more sedentary, I guess, now that my kids are gone. I never exercised. Never dieted. I'd have grits, bacon, toast and 16 ounces of orange juice for breakfast. You know how many calories are in 16 ounces of orange juice? I'd eat cookies and chips before lunch. McDonald's nuggets and fries, then soda and carrot cake from the cafeteria in the afternoon."
On her desk at Tampa General Hospital, where she works in the office of pastoral care, Charlayne kept a jar of candy - usually chocolate. At home, she baked cookies; she and her husband, Lonnie, whose church is in Lakeland, never ate dinner before 8 p.m.; she had ice cream and popcorn, something sweet and salty, before bed.
Her clothes, even the size 14s, got tighter and tighter. "I was down to only four outfits I could wear," she says. "But I couldn't go shopping. I was too disgusted with myself."
By June, she had topped 193 pounds - the heaviest she had ever been. Two weeks later, she took a TV she bought back to Kmart. It didn't work, so she wanted to exchange it.
While she was standing in line at the customer service counter, she saw a flier. Bold letters asked, "Do you want to lose weight?"
Must be a scam, she thought. Or a sign from God. She pocketed the card.
That night, over a bowl of butter pecan ice cream, she read the fine print. Kmart and Slim-Fast were teaming up to sponsor a national weight-loss contest. They were looking for people in five major market areas - Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, New Jersey and Tampa - to sign up for a 16-week program. Contestants would get Slim-Fast coupons and recipes, a gym membership and a personal trainer twice a week. They would have to log their daily activities and everything they ate. Once a month, they would have to weigh in at a Kmart pharmacy. Final judging would be based on total weight loss, success in meeting goals, dramatic before and after photos and an inspirational essay. To enter, you just had to log on to a Web site and explain in 50 words or fewer why you wanted to lose weight.
"My kids are grown. This is my time," Charlayne typed. "I want more energy to play with my 2-year-old grandson."
She didn't mention the motorcycle or the motivational sessions or the book. She didn't know, then, that weight loss had anything to do with those wishes.
* * *
By the time the contest organizers called, two weeks later, Charlayne had decided maybe she didn't want to do this diet thing. She loved food, loved to bake sweets and eat junk. Hated exercise of any kind.
Why had they chosen her as one of Florida's 20 contestants anyway?, she asked her sister. "I'm a grandmom now, for goodness' sake. I get winded climbing stairs."
Her sister Deirdre, who's a size 6, studied the perks and prize list. "You are too going to do this," Deirdre said. "And you're taking me to New York with you when you win."
Charlayne prayed that night, not to win, or even lose weight. Just for strength, to know what to do. Did God put that flier in Kmart as a challenge? If he did, could she do it?
A few days later, she pulled on a white T-shirt (too tight, of course), black gym shorts, black socks and canvas shoes. She didn't own any sneakers. She called her sister, who brought her camera, and Charlayne stood against her bedroom wall. She looked upset - angry, or maybe sad. She e-mailed that "before" photo to the judges, officially entering the contest.
"When I first met my trainer, he told me we were going to run up five flights of stairs. I asked, "Are you kidding?' and he laughed," she says. "After three flights, I thought I was going to pass out. But he made me finish, then took me into the gym for the real workout."
After the first week, she was walking like the Tin Man. By the second one, she was looking forward to the workouts - almost. She started getting up at 5 a.m. instead of 8 so she'd have more time to sweat, started taking the stairs at work, even to the seventh floor. She traded grits and bacon for Slim-Fast breakfast bars, mixed whole milk with 2 percent until she got used to the watery taste. She wouldn't go near the hospital snack machines or into the dessert section in the cafeteria. Before bed, she indulged in a handful of grapes. In the first month, she lost 6 pounds.
"I found out that losing weight isn't about will power or denying yourself. It's about making choices and tradeoffs," she says. "If you really want that triple chocolate sundae, go ahead - but just eat half and don't have fries with dinner, or go exercise for two hours afterward."
She had wanted to lose weight for so long. Finally, maybe, she could check something off her Before I Die . . . list.
Right after her grandson was born two years ago, Charlayne wrote out 20 wishes, things she wanted to accomplish: Publish a book, that was one. Teach motivational sessions, that was another. Train people on computers. Fit into a size 10. Ride a motorcycle. For just one Christmas, be able to give my family extravagant gifts.
All summer, she set her sights on that size 10. By fall, she found, losing weight was helping her find herself. So many other things now seemed possible.
That sounds sappy, she knows. But it's true. She's got the check marks to prove it.
* * *
Charlayne shed 24 pounds in four months - more than her goal.
Plus, she told her daughters at the final weigh-in in October, "I look good."
She had never said that before, never felt it. But she did look good. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with pink sunsets and black palm trees and a straight skirt that barely brushed the top of her knees. She had bought it years ago but never fit into it. And she had this new way of walking now, a taller carriage, stronger stride.
All her life, Charlayne had been reserved. In four decades, she agreed to go to only three parties. She has never been to a nightclub or bar. She never wanted to be the center of attention.
But now that she was so much smaller, she felt bigger, more powerful. She started going out to lunch with friends, enjoying the attention, speaking up in group situations. "Look what we did!" she said at that last weigh-in, addressing the other 19 contestants from Florida. "Whatever happens, we're all winners. Just look at us!"
For her "after" photo, Charlayne pulled on a new white tank top and new black bike shorts that hugged her new body. A triangle of light showed between her legs: Her thighs didn't touch.
"They told us the winner would get a call by the end of the week. So I carried my phone everywhere, to the laundry room and kitchen," she says. She was in the bathroom that afternoon when the Kmart man called. "You're kidding!" she shouted, her voice echoing over the tub. "Me? You're kidding!"
The judges said she had more than met her goal. Her essay was inspirational. And her before and after photos were, by far, the most dramatic. We want you to fly to New York, they told her, along with the four other state winners. There, we'll take photos for the ad campaign and distribute your prizes.
For three days in November, Charlayne and her sister rode around New York in limousines. Stylists at the Serge Nivelle Studio bobbed her hair, painted on brown highlights, added shimmering shadow and dark mascara to accent her eyes. During the photo shoot, they posed her behind a chair, stood her on a table. When her bare legs felt itchy, she asked for a break to get some lotion from her purse. Instead, an assistant brought some expensive brand and knelt to rub it on her legs. "They did everything for me," Charlayne marveled. "I felt like Mariah Carey!"
That night, at the swanky Hotel Gansevoort in Manhattan, contest officials gave Charlayne and the other winners each a treadmill, a four-day trip to an Arizona spa, a $500 gift card from Kmart and all the Kmart clothes they could carry home. Plus the grand prize, more money than Charlayne had ever had at once: $10,000.
Enough to self-publish the book she's writing, set up the motivational seminars she's outlining, train people on computers. Enough to pay off her credit card and buy her sister a dryer and her daughters new clothes. And there would still be enough left over, just barely, to buy her grandson that $269 driveable kiddie Corvette he'd been drooling over at Wal-Mart. This Christmas, for the first time, she could afford a few extravagant gifts.
By New Year's, by the time she saw herself on those posters in Kmart, Charlayne had checked off six of her life goals. Now that she felt stronger, more sure of herself, she had gotten up the guts to do other things: start her manuscript, plan the classes she wants to teach, even ride on the back of her husband's motorcycle. "Hallelujah!" she wrote in the margin of Before I Die ...
* * *
She weaves toward Kmart's exercise aisle, where a full-body shot of her hangs above the Easy Shapers. "Charlayne lost 24 pounds!" the sign brags.
"I am now in the best shape of my life, physically, mentally and emotionally," says a quote below her photo.
Charlayne picks up Isaiah, who is getting tired. She sees herself above the stationary bikes, the hand weights. "I didn't think there would be so many signs," she tells her daughters. "I thought maybe one or two, you know, small ones."
For 2006, Charlayne added two resolutions to her goals (they're no longer wishes): Get on Oprah - for doing something good. (See? She no longer shies from the spotlight.) And buy a bikini for her spring spa trip.
But right now, she's through seeing herself succeed. "I'm ready to go, if you all are," she calls to her family. "I'm hungry. I only had a banana for breakfast. Let's go to Perkins."
She's thinking pancakes. Now that she's a size 10, now that the whole country can see the pictures that prove it, she'll let herself indulge just this morning. It'll be a celebration.
With butter and syrup and bacon and grits and hash browns smothered in cheese ...
- Lane DeGregory can be reached at 727 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com
CHARLAYNE GRAY'S WEIGHT-LOSS TIPS:
1. Slow is better. One to 2 pounds a week is a reasonable goal.
2. Tackle one thing at a time. If you drink sodas, eat sweets or don't exercise, pick one thing and focus on getting that under control for a couple of weeks. Then add another.
3. Don't discount Slim-Fast and other diet products. They taste good, have vitamins and make you feel full.
4. Try to eat dinner by 7 p.m. Then have your favorite fruit if you need a before-bed snack.
5. Exercise for at least 15 minutes every day, even if it's just walking in front of your TV.
6. Weight training two or three times a week really helps melt the pounds.
7. Eat every two to three hours. Not a lot. Just a handful of grapes, some nuts, or half a sandwich to keep your metabolism going.
[Last modified January 5, 2006, 14:46:52]
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