About

Hey there! Thanks for stopping by.

My name  is Tanya Isch Caylor, I live near Fort Wayne, Ind., and I started this blog on Jan. 18, 2011, three months after losing 90 pounds in nine months and exactly one year after I began my weight-loss quest.

In that time, I went from jogging 10 steps to running 10 miles at a time, rediscovering a love left behind nearly 30 years earlier.

My first mini-marathon, Sept. 3, 2011

My goal here is to pass on what I learned during my “Perfect Season” — 37 consecutive weeks of weight loss on the Weight Watchers program — and to share the joy of running and the mysterious powers of positivity, which I believe was an underlying factor in my success.

As I write this, in early October 2011, I’m coming up on the one-year anniversary of my weight loss. I like to think I’m finishing up the first year of my “master’s program,” using author and dietitian Anne Fletcher’s model that “masters of weight loss” are those who’ve demonstrated the ability to maintain at least a 20-pound loss for three years.

I’ve maintained my current weight of 135 pounds for nearly a year now, so I’ve got two to go to meet that criteria. Because I love to craft mental tools and imaginary games to accomplish goals, I like to think of this “master’s program” not just as another hurdle but as an actual field of study. And my thesis project the past several months has been the study of so-called “normal people”– those who don’t have to work so hard to control their eating and their weight.

I run interviews every Tuesday, and the vast majority of those fall under the category “How ‘Normal People’ Eat.” (Look on the right side of my home page under “categories.”

Horrific as it now seems, that's me in the 2XL blue T-shirt on the left, coaching T-ball with my sister, Traci, my running partner and fitness trainer during my weight loss quest.

I believe I’ve learned more from doing these interviews than from years of reading diet books. Lately I’ve been compiling patterns, insights and tools I’ve gleaned from these folks — many of whom, of course, are neither as “normal” nor as “lucky” as you might think — in my quest to see if I, too, can learn to eat like a “normal person.” Whatever that means.

As for my blogging schedule, I write about running on Mondays, do interviews on Tuesdays, family fitness on Fridays, food reviews/recipes on Saturdays, and lately I’ve been exploring positivity on Sundays. Wednesdays and Thursdays are more of a mix, whatever’s on my mind at the time.

Questions, comments, or ideas you‘d like to discuss? Shoot me an e-mail at tischcaylor@gmail.com. And thanks for reading.