When Wendy McConkey decided it was time to lose weight, the idea of appearing on national TV and in magazines and newspapers didn’t cross her mind.
The Fircrest resident was just upset about the bruise on her side.
It was 2006, and McConkey weighed 449.6 pounds. She wedged herself into an airplane seat for a 4.5-hour flight and spent the entire trip in agony as she pressed against the armrests. The bruises lasted for a week, but the memory still hasn’t faded.
Today, McConkey is 302 pounds lighter and is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame.
She will be featured in next week’s edition of People magazine and will also appear on the Jan. 6 episode of NBC’s “Today” show.
In May, when she was last featured in The News Tribune, McConkey was one of 100 people invited to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
All the attention has made McConkey a bit of a celebrity at her Weight Watchers classes, where friends are already asking her for signed copies of the magazine.
“It’s great to hear when somebody says I’m an inspiration,” McConkey said. “But, really, I’m still me. I’m no different than anybody else.”
Except that most people don’t get messages requesting them to do magazine photo shoots while they are at work.
McConkey, a 38-year-old teacher at Tacoma’s DeLong Elementary School, was in a training meeting when she got a text message that read, “People magazine wants to talk.” On Dec. 20, the last day before Christmas break, she got the request to be on “Today.”
“It is pretty hard to concentrate after news like that,” she said.
McConkey said the People article will focus on people who lost half their body weight naturally.
There was a point when McConkey almost took a different approach to losing weight: surgery. She even attended a seminar on the procedure.
“I definitely considered it,” she said. “But there are too many unknowns. You are basically changing your internal workings. I was really scared about that.”
So McConkey decided she was going to shed pounds the natural way, even if it took considerably more time. She limited her food consumption, joined Weight Watchers and started exercising.
She started taking Zumba, a Latin dance exercise program, and the pounds slowly melted away. Today, at 147 pounds, McConkey teaches Zumba at the Morgan Family YMCA and the Fircrest Recreation and Community Center.
Since reaching her weight-loss goal in April, McConkey has been thinking a lot about how she managed to get so out of shape in the first place.
“I think I just shut down,” she said. “I was in a huge state of denial. I would come home from work and sit and watch TV for the rest of the night because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else. Then I would get up and repeat the same thing the next day. Maybe I was in some kind of depression, although I was never diagnosed.”
As she’s presented with a national audience to share her story, she hopes to pass along a simple message: “Don’t stop. Whatever your goal is, it’s going to be a struggle at times. But keep going until you get there.
“I think that’s a good message for anything in your life that’s worthwhile.”
Craig Hill: 253-597-8497
craig.hill@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/adventure
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