Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Sharon Radtke expresses thanks and support at a Weight Watchers open house held in honor of her retirement Saturday in Soldotna.
By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter
To look at Sharon Radtke, of Soldotna, tall, thin and healthy, one wouldn’t expect she has been a devotee of Weight Watchers for more than 30 years.
That’s the whole point.
“People say, ‘Look at you, you don’t need to be on Weight Watchers.’ My response is, ‘I don’t need to be on the program because I am on the program.’ If I wasn’t on the program, I wouldn’t be at my weight range,” she said.
Radtke is in large part responsible for hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of weight loss on the Kenai Peninsula since she started a Weight Watchers program in Soldotna in 1999.
As she retired Saturday from being the Weight Watchers location coordinator on the peninsula, it wasn’t how much that’s been lost that impacted her the most, it was how much has been gained — better health, an understanding of nutrition, good eating and exercise habits, and a circle of good friends and support.
“Coming in and realizing that you’re not alone. The people sitting next to you and around you are going to support you because they’ve gone through the same thing,” Radtke said.
Mary Armstrong, a Weight Watchers group leader in Soldotna, said Radtke has been particularly effective in helping people find success in the program in part because she’s been so successful herself — losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it off for more than 30 years.
“She’s a mentor, she’s a model, she challenges us, she cajoles us, she supports us. It’s a multifaceted leadership post that she is just excellent at accomplishing,” Armstrong said. “She has touched, I don’t know how many hundreds and hundreds of people’s lives just in Weight Watchers. She lives it and she never gives up, which is, of course, a good model and good mentor because there’s no finish line in being healthy.”
Radtke said she was always a chubby kid, and continued to gain weight through adolescence, college and when she started working. She thinks it was primarily from simply not knowing any better.
“I just didn’t know enough about nutrition to make good decisions, and I find that with lots of us. People come in to Weight Watchers and say, ‘I’m not eating anything.’ And maybe they aren’t eating very much, but they’re eating foods that probably aren’t really good for them. It’s just learning,” Radtke said. “It’s amazing that we don’t need anything near the amount of food America tells us to eat with one hand, while it’s telling us we’re obese with the other hand.”
It took her a few false starts attempting Weight Watchers before she finally had success.
“When I first tried it I lost weight, and I said, ‘Oh, I can do this by myself.’ Then I didn’t do it by myself. I gained weight,” she said.
In 1973 she went back for her third time, this time determined to stick it out.
“I told myself, ‘I will do this for one year. I will make myself go for an entire year.’ And it was almost like, ‘I will show people this won’t work.’ And it did work,” she said.
She lost 86 pounds and has kept it off — and more, about 96 pounds in all — over the years, she said.
“I remember so well, when I lost a substantial part of the weight, thinking, ‘My knees look so thin. Look at these knees. These knees look great.’ Now I look back and I think I just didn’t realize how big I was, I’m sure. I look at my before pictures and think, ‘Oh my gosh, what was I thinking?’” Radtke said. “For me, there is nothing that tastes as good as going in my closet and I don’t have to fret over what I’m going to wear. Every single thing fits.”
Losing the weight was a catalyst in her life, boosting her confidence to try things she never would have before, including moving to Alaska in 1980.
“It really changed my life. I probably never would have had the confidence to strike out on my own, lease my house, sell my car and come to Alaska on an adventure. Once I did that, I just knew I could tackle anything,” she said.
She taught in Nome for two years, worked with the Alaska teacher placement program in Fairbanks for three years, where she met her husband, Bill, and the two moved to English Bay — now Nanwalek — on the Kenai Peninsula in 1985. They moved to the central peninsula in 1989, where Radtke worked as the human resources director for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District until retiring in 1999.
At that point, she decided to start a Weight Watchers group on the peninsula, as a way to give back to the program that had given her so much. She started with one meeting in Soldotna once a week, and the program now has grown to multiple meetings in Soldotna, as well as meetings in Kenai and Homer, and at-work meetings in Nikiski, with anywhere from 20 to 40 people at a meeting.
Radtke said there are other weight-loss programs that bring people success, but for her, she likes Weight Watchers’ built-in accountability, where people have to weigh in weekly while they’re working toward their goal, or monthly if they’ve met their goal and stayed at it for six weeks or more. Even group leaders have to weigh in, and need to be within two pounds of their goal weight.
“All of us involved in Weight Watchers are involved because we believe in the program and we want to stay at our goal weights, and we know being associated with Weight Watchers is a way to do it. It makes us accountable. There’s times that I look at it and say, ‘I have to weigh in tomorrow, I don’t want to be up a pound,’” she said.
Radtke also likes that Weight Watchers isn’t about dieting, it’s about learning about and living a healthy lifestyle.
“I’m never in a position where I have to say, ‘I can’t eat anything, I’m on a diet,’ because it’s not a diet. It’s a way of life. It’s making choices and learning to manage your eating. There’s nothing you can’t have, it’s making the decision how much and when you’re going to have it. I tell people, ‘You can’t have everything you want all the time, that’s what got us in the door,’” she said.
Weight Watchers is a one-way train, Radtke said. For people who have a weight problem, dieting doesn’t work, because once they stop the diet the weight comes back. It’s the same with Weight Watchers, if people stop the healthy habits they’ve cultivated, they’ll be back where they started.
“They do so well, then get away from it and don’t want to come back because they’re embarrassed, but nobody should embarrassed,” Radtke said. “We all understand how hard it is to walk up those stairs. It’s very difficult the first time. I think it’s even harder when you haven’t made a success of it the first time, you’re admitting to yourself ‘I’m a failure.’ Well, you’re really not a failure. You made the decision to come back. That is a positive move for success, and they should get a pat on the back for that.”
Radtke and her husband, who recently retired from his volunteer position with Habitat for Humanity, plan to spend much of the year traveling in celebration of their 25th wedding anniversary. In case anyone starts to forget her many words of wisdom while she’s away, Armstrong had two signs made for the Soldotna Weight Watchers office bearing Radtke’s top 10 tips — including, “Extra vigilance: the mantra for maintenance;” “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels;” and, “How you live each day is, of course, how you live your life.” And the top 10 excuses she commonly hears — “I’m going to start on Monday,” “It’s too hard during the summer,” and “I had to go to Anchorage.”
“She knows it, she lives it, she does it, she believes it. She’s the quintessential model in health and weight,” Armstrong said. “We’re going miss her and we’re going to continue because she taught us well.”
Radtke said she will be back for monthly weigh-ins after traveling. If she’s not, she expects her friends at Weight Watchers to call her up and hold her feet to the fire.
“They do a great job,” Radtke said. “I really feel good about the core of people involved in Weight Watchers. It’s just great to know if you leave an organization that it will go on, then you have done something right.”
