Pictured are half of the bank’s current “At Work” Weight Watchers group: Commercial Loan Servicing Team Leader Cheryl Lang, Corporate Receptionist Nancy Hanson, Marketing Communications Manager Kate Knox, Loss Mitigation Specialist Kerry Carrasco, Staff Auditor Monika Ulatt and Branch Operations Support Specialist Ashley Coleman. “Just these six people have lost a total of 174 pounds!” Nancy writes. “That’s one whole person!”

Loss Mitigation Specialist Kerry Carrasco was skeptical when she signed on for the bank’s “At Work” Weight Watchers program in May.

Now she’s a lifetime member.

“You’re thinking, Oh, this diet thing, it’s gonna be really hard, because everyone’s done a million diets,” she says. “But that’s definitely what it’s not. They teach you how to change your lifestyle. They always tell you, you can eat whatever you want — you just have to account for it. Once you start looking at the nutritional value of everything you put in your body, you’re just amazed that you would ever eat certain things. And after a while, your body just starts craving the good stuff.”

Kerry lost 20 pounds and now enjoys the perks of being a Weight Watchers “lifetime member,” as long as she keeps it off.

“You meet with a representative from Weight Watchers who helps you come up with a goal weight,” she says. “Once you meet that goal weight, you enter a maintenance period for six weeks, and they help you maintain it.” If you maintain your goal weight successfully for six weeks, you become a lifetime member.

“What that means is, basically, you can go to meetings for free,” Kerry says. So long as she weighs in once a month and is within a pound or two of her goal weight, Kerry can go to meetings — when she needs support, or to encourage other members — and use Weight Watchers’ website and other e-tools at no charge.

Though she doesn’t have a smartphone, the online tools were a big help to her, she says, making it easy to track her eating habits, activity and weight loss. “For me, the recipe builders were really useful. You can just go on there and say, ‘OK, I have chicken in my house. Tell me what I can make.'”

Kerry also found the automatic payroll deduction through the At Work program convenient: “You don’t even really miss it.” Most of all, she says, she would likely not have even joined if the program hadn’t been offered through the bank.

“The convenience was the big thing for me,” she says “I probably wouldn’t have gone to an outside Weight Watchers place and joined. But it was here at work, and I was kinda getting to that age where you start to worry about your health.”

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If you’re interested in joining Weight Watchers, our North Shore Shape Up Wellness Program is looking for 15 people from our Corporate office and our branches to sign up for the next At Work series.

The At Work series includes:

• 12 weeks of the Weight Watchers program
• 2 extra weeks FREE
• Free e-tools to help you track your progress
• Payroll deduction to make payments simple

The group at Corporate will meet weekly on Fridays from Nov. 1 to approximately Feb. 14. (That’s 12 weeks, plus the two free weeks, plus two additional weeks to allow for holiday breaks, when the group will not meet.)

We need a total of 15 people to get the special rate and benefits. If you are at a branch, you may join under the Corporate At Work program and attend any Weight Watchers meeting in your neighborhood and get the same low rate and great benefits. Sign up with other co-workers in your branch for more fun and support!

We still need at least one or two people to sign up! To participate in the next session, you must sign up by TOMORROW, FRIDAY, NOV. 1. Contact Wellness Coordinator Lynn Jack (262-797-3346, ljack@northshorebank.com) or Corporate Receptionist Nancy Hanson (262-785-1600, nhanson@northshorebank.com) to sign up or for more information.