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THE OAKVILLE BEAVER Wednesday June 20, 2001 A story of personal triumph * A lic ia S n e ll's w e ig h t lo ss ta le and her rise to m a rath o n ru n n e r in sp ira tio n a l By Nancy Alexander SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER Alicia Snell looks exactly the way you'd expect a marathon runner to look--lean, toned and very fit. That's why it conies as such a shock when she pulls out the "before" pictures to reveal a 328-pound woman who would have been challenged to tie her running shoes, much less run a gruelling marathon. Even more astonishing, that "other" woman was Snell less than three years ago, at the age of 42. The story of Snell's dra matic weight loss and subse quent transformation from sedentary lifestyle to dedi cated athlete was the subject of an article in the April issue of Runner's Times, a magazine produced by The Running Room chain. Snell, a resident of Oakville and married mother of one, says she didn't set out with Alicia Snell...the way she was the idea of being thin or run ning marathons. She simply wanted to look and feel better. Her personal weight loss journey began in October, 1998. Looking back, Snell says her decision to finally tackle her weight problem came the day she bought her son a piano. She was sitting on the piano stool and her son insisted on taking a picture of her to celebrate the occasion. When the snapshot came out of the Polaroid minutes later, Snell had her moment of truth. "I had always been the picture-taker. Never the one in the pic ture," she recalls. "My first thought was `who is this person?'. It wasn't the v>ay I saw myself. I was horrified and I decided that I didn't want to be that person anymore." Snell says she had always been a high-energy person. Her weight gain had been gradual, about 10 pounds a year, and she admits that she never weighed herself. "I always told myself that I would do something about my weight if it started getting in the way of doing the things I wanted to with my life. I realize now, looking back, that there were a lot of things I wasn't doing." When Snell finally decided to step on the scales, she learned that she was carrying 328 pounds on her five-foot, nine-inch frame. Amazingly, within a year, her weight had dropped by 173 pounds, taking her from a size 28 to a size 8. Snell says people always want to know what "her secret" is. The simple truth, she says, is that there is no secret and certainly no magic. "In the end, it's a matter of deciding how badly you want something. Every day is hard. I know that I can't eat the same way as a naturally thin person. Part of deciding to lose weight was accepting that. I always tell people that you can eat anything you want. You just have to be ready to pay the consequences." Having battled weight problems for a good part of her life, Snell says she had tried every diet in the book. This time, she decided to take a sensible approach--eating low fat "real" food and exercising. Apart from trying to eliminate most of the white, refined flour from her diet, Snell says she just tried to follow the Canada Food Guide, balancing at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day with moderate amount of protein and dairy products. She laughingly says she thinks she's the only person she knows--thin or not--who actually eats that way. As for exercise, the running was something she came to grad ually, but is now completely committed to. "Running makes you thin," she says matter of factly. "It really increases your metabolic rate." Obviously, at 328 pounds, running isn't the first form of exer cise that comes to mind. Snell says she started off doing lowimpact aerobics in her basement three times a week because she didn't want to be seen in public. After two months she approached an acquaintance who ran fit ness classes and asked her if she would design a weight training program for her. "That's when the pounds started to fly off," says Snell. "I was doing the workout three times a week and really starting to build muscle." When she thought about running, she charted her own path, knowing little about running other than that it wouldn't shake the house. At first it was torture just lacing up the shoes and running around the block. Snell says the only thing that kept her going was sheer stubborn determination. She had been running on her own for a while when she heard about The Running Room opening in Oakville and decided to try running with a group. "My only wish is that I'd found them sooner," she adds. "Runners are such a positive group of people." By September, 1999, less than a year after that photograph on the piano stool, Alicia Snell ran her first 10 km. run. She calls it a huge milestone. 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