According to Kelly (Steele) Strigenz ‘99’, “Eating healthy and nutritious foods, watching portion sizes and exercising” are the keys to permanent weight loss. That’s the message in You Forever Slim a step-by-step workbook she co-authored with David Olsen, an engineer long frustrated by classic diets that concentrate on eating and not eating certain foods to lose weight. “I tried to lose weight too quickly and my body and brain couldn’t adjust to it, so I decided to make small, simple changes,” says David. He did just that and has kept his weight off for ten years. After writing the initial draft of the interactive long-term diet plan, he looked for a dietitian to assist him with the more complex nutritional aspects of the book and found Kelly who says that she and David plan to gather feedback from readers and update the book in the future.
Kelly (Steele) Strigenz '99
Forever Slim explains that one of the functions of the brain is to maintain an internal stability known as homeostasis, which tries to keep your body fat and body weight constant. The brain regulates weight with what might be called a homeostat and resists rapid changes; therefore, losing weight quickly doesn’t result in permanent changes in your homeostat. On the contrary, it directs the body to return to a heavier weight. This is why most diets ultimately fail and why people gain back the weight they’ve lost.
Kelly grew up in Philomath and her childhood memories include packing healthy snacks to go to “OSU hoop games when Danny Ainge and Gary Payton played.” Then she came to OSU and majored in nutrition and food management. Associate Professor Mary Cluskey remembers Kelly as a “mature, bright, intuitive student…a well-rounded young woman.” After graduating from OSU in 1999, Kelly worked at a hospital in Dallas, Oregon, then did an internship and became a registered dietitian, and worked for Albany General Hospital. Today, she and her husband Tim are living in Madison, Wisconsin where Tim is doing his residency in anesthesiology. They like to run, hike, camp, fish, spend time with family and travel. Kelly wrote that she recently finished her second Chicago marathon a few years ago, she and Tim “did our first adventure race…a five hour combination of running, mountain biking, canoeing and random physical and/or mental challenges scattered throughout the race.” After visits to numerous foreign countries, they hope to start exploring our national parks.
