PARK HILLS — Teresa Skaggs has a head start on her New Year’s Resolutions. She’s already lost 5 pounds. It’s just the kind of “perk” she needs as she begins to turn her family’s health around in 2009. She got a “jump start” on her goals from winning a contest.

Teresa turned 40 in 2008. And as she did, she and her husband Phil started having some health problems she thought were related to some bad habits.

“We weren’t eating healthy and my husband found out his ‘good’ cholesterol was a 7 – that’s bad,” she explained. “I thought we both needed to work on some healthy habits. I thought my problems were related to stress and lack of exercise.”

Just as she started to fret about her troubles, she read a story in Shape magazine about a contest to help a reader get healthy. She entered around the first of September. She told the editors she wanted to turn things around in her life. She wrote how she and her husband  had been college athletes once and in great shape.

“Then, we had three kids in four years and both work,” she wrote in her entry. She told them about her busy life. She owns and runs six sleep disorder centers, including Skaggzzz Sleep Center in Farmington, and coaches her daughters’ AAU basketball and USAV volleyball teams.

She told the contest judges how her family ate “out” up to five nights a week for convenience. She told them how they did not make time to exercise. She told them how much she loved to eat sugary breakfasts. She told them how she kept herself energized with caffeine and sugar — drinking three sodas a day. She told them she didn’t want to pass on her bad habits to their children.

In October, Teresa found out she was one of two winners in the contest. The prize: a week at the exclusive Miravel Spa in Tuscon, Ariz.

“That’s the spa where Oprah and her friend Gail went and so I had seen it on TV,” said Teresa. “It’s known for catering to the rich and famous.”

Teresa made a list of what she wanted to get from her spa experience. She wanted help with her sugar and caffeine addiction. She wanted quick and easy breakfast ideas and she wanted to come up with some ways to relax and not be stressed.

Like many working moms, Teresa would make breakfast for her family and then race out the door, often eating nothing herself. The Miraval staff helped her come up with three healthy breakfasts she could eat on the run. One of them is toast with natural peanut butter that has no trans fat. Another is a fruit smoothie and still another is yogurt parfait. She’s learned to put powdered protein in them.

“They taught me about mindfulness — about living in the moment,” she said. “If you live in the moment, you won’t be stressed. That goes for eating, too. You could not make me sit down and eat a whole fast food meal, but in the car, I would eat it without thinking and it would be gone.”

She spent a week at Miravel in December. She told the counselors how sugar binges made her feel guilty, physically ill, gave her headaches and regret.

“When I wrote down my emotions and read them aloud, the counselor asked me what my advice would be if a friend told me that is how her boyfriend makes her feel,” Teresa explained. “That was very interesting to me because I wouldn’t put up with my husband or co-workers making me feel like that, so why was a relationship with a food source any different?”

For the holidays, she baked cookies and normally would have “mindlessly” eaten a dozen of them. This time, she ate only one. When the family ordered Krispy Kremes, she proudly says she made it all the way home without eating even one.

“Usually, I look in the box and one of them is gone,” said Phil. “When there was a full dozen in there, I said, ‘Where’s my wife?’”

Her counselors at Miravel told her to make one change at a time. She’s dropped one soda a day and added exercise to her routine. The sodas she drinks are smaller. She’s adding fruits and vegetables to her diet. She tries to include a carbohydrate, protein and a fat in every meal and snack. She’s cooking only with olive oil.

The exercise equipment is in her home. She tries to fit in 20 minutes three times a week. She is trying to do a 30-minute cardiovascular workout three times a week. To help relieve stress, she tries to enjoy what’s happening at the moment and try not to think about what she has to do next.

“They had me make a pyramid of the things I would never give up or have to do and go down from there to the things I like to do and then, the things I hate to do.”

When one of those things she hated was picking up around the house, she had a family meeting where the rest of the family agreed to be more helpful. That got rid of some of her stress.

“A friend’s sudden death reminded me if I don’t take care of myself, I won’t be here to take care of my family,” she said.

The spa gave her a chance to face her paralyzing fear of heights when they put her 30 feet in the air and she discovered she could walk a plank without making herself sick. It was a moment of triumph in a week she says was filled with “aha”  moments.

Then, there was the “horse experience” where Teresa said the clients at the spa are taught that with horses, like in life, if you don’t keep focused and ask for what you want with the right intentions, you will not get what you want or need out of the experience.

In her physical evaluation, her fitness evaluator asked, “Isn’t it time you reclaim your body and reclaim your health?”

Teresa decided it was.

“I’m keeping a journal of what I’m doing and I plan to send it to the people at Miraval so they can see how I’m doing,” she said.

Teresa’s whole experience, along with that of the other winner in the contest, will be featured in the June issue of Shape, due out in April.

“Everybody before I left kept telling me to come home and tell them the secret,” she said. “Well, there is no secret. It’s all in the little things. I did this for me. I want to set a good example for my family.”

Donna Hickman is a reporter for the Daily Journal. Contact her at 431-2010, ext. 138 or at dhickman@dailyjournalonline.com.

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