By Associated Press
Montgomery AL – Scale Back Alabama, the state's comprehensive weight loss campaign, is returning for a second year with new rewards, rules and organizers hope results.
Weigh-ins for the 10-week program begin Saturday as the project tries to help Alabama shed its weighty reputation as one of the country's heaviest states.
More than 20,000 Alabamians participated last year and lost 78,472 pounds. The hope in 2008 is that the program will double or triple in size while waistlines are whittled, Rosemary Blackmon, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Hospital Association, said Thursday.
The association is again joining with the state health department to offer Scale Back, which ends with the winners being unveiled on April 1.
"There's a lot of excitement this year," Blackmon said, adding that organizers decided against setting goals for total weightloss like last year's lofty mark of 10 million lost pounds from 1 million Alabamians.
"Last year we set a large goal and we decided to focus on just getting healthier this year instead of focusing on a numerical goal, so that's where we are," she said.
Alabama was ranked third with 29.4 percent of its residents regarded as obese in a Trust for America's Health study last August.
Teams of four will weigh in Jan. 5-11 and weigh out March 8-14 at designated sites across the state. The goal is for each person to lose 10 pounds and all teams who meet that goal will be eligible for the grand prize drawing of $1,000 for each team member.
There are online lesson plans and classes with healthy eating tips and other tools to help teams accomplish the 10-week goal.
Last year the program ran for eight weeks with participants in groups of three to five members vying to be the team that lost the highest percentage of weight.
All members of the winning team won $1,000 each, but that was the extent of the prize money.
This year there are 20 individual prizes of $250 that will be given in a raffle open to anyone who loses at least 10 pounds.
The additional prize money was welcome news to Kim Wakefield, who lost 32 pounds in last year's competition, but the added incentive isn't enough to lure her and other members of her second-place 2007 team to try again.
She's gained back some of the weight, but is still 20 pounds lighter than before the first Scale Back.
"It just kind of stinks because we barely missed it (last year) and then we got nothing (for 2nd place) and that stunk, too," said Wakefield, whose husband Brett was on the team and developed a special diet that helped them drop the pounds.
"When it was over we were proud of how we looked, but that $1,000 would have been awesome," she said.
The winning team in 2007 Alabama Clam Chowder had four members who lost a total of 110 pounds or 16.1 percent of their starting weight. Their dramatic weight loss over the eight weeks had members cutting down to 1,000 calories a day.
Miriam Gaines, nutrition and physical activity director for the health department, said the new changes are designed to help people make healthy lifestyle changes that are safe and can be maintained for the long run.
"We were thrilled that they were able to (lose so much weight) they were young and physically active," she said of last year's top finishers. "But as a dietitian I would be very hesitant to put everybody on a 1,000 calorie diet. This year we really want people to change their ... patterns. It's a slight change, a subtle change, but it could really have a big impact."
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