Rondi Neuven in front of her Woman's World magazine cover. (Submitted Image)

By Chris Brown

Weight loss story

Redcliff woman on the cover of Woman’s World

Jan 24, 2021 | 9:36 AM

REDCLIFF, AB – Redcliff’s Rondi Neuven is a cover model, and she’s sharing the honour with someone she’s had a connection with for decades.

Neuven is on the cover of the Jan. 18 issue of Woman’s World with actor and singer Olivia Newton-John.

“I watched Grease a lot when I was a kid and I’ve been in musicals in town here so it was great to see,” Neuven says with a laugh.

She only found out she was on the cover when the magazine sent it to her. When she saw it she says it was pretty exciting.

“I was like ‘holy cow,’ because I don’t know how many times I’ve stood in line at the supermarket when I was a bigger woman and thought to myself ‘it’d be so cool to be on the cover of that magazine. I want to be one of those people who’s lost all that weight and ends up on the cover of the magazine.’”

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And now she is.

Neuven is a featured part of a story on Dr. Michael Greger, a physician, best-selling author and internationally recognized speaker on nutrition, food safety and public health issues. He’s also the founder of nutritionfacts.org, which is where Neuven’s road to Woman’s World started.

In October of 2014 Neuven got serious about eating better, losing weight and getting herself to an overall healthier lifestyle. By July 2016 she was in what she calls maintenance mode and about one year ago she discovered nutritionfacts.org. What she found was affirmation of what she learned on her own as she shed 213 lbs over the years. She wrote a testimonial to the website and from there became part of the magazine’s story on Greger.

For Neuven her weight loss came through a fair amount of trial and error when it came to what she was eating.

“When I focused on calories at the beginning what I figured out was there are certain things that can make me full that don’t have a lot of calories in them which ended up being fibrous vegetables and things like that,” she explains. “I instinctively moved away from the carb-y stuff like pasta and rice and that kind of stuff because it didn’t keep me full and I was hungry like two hours later.”

She learned about the science behind that on nutritionfacts.org but for her she’d simply noticed it wasn’t working for her body and shifted away from that kind of stuff.

Rondi neuven before and after losing 213 lbs. (Submitted Image)

When she was slimming down people began to ask her how she was doing it.

“People expect an answer like Ideal Protein or Nutrisystem or Weight Watchers or something and I didn’t have an answer. I’m just changing things, and eating differently and exercising. I didn’t quite realize how uncommon that was and that what I was achieving was inspirational, so I started a blog.”

She hopes to point other people toward nutritionfacts.org, saying it’s an excellent resource and the best part is it’s not funded by an interest group.

“I hope people realize that you can do it on your own. It is possible to do it without these diet plans and expensive equipment and all of that kind of stuff.”

She said learning to take small, incremental steps was one of her biggest challenges and that making a change overnight will rarely work for weight loss.

But there’s one step that must be taken before starting with any weight loss journey though, says Neuven.

“My biggest piece of advice is to love yourself first as you are. An important mental piece about learning to make a change is you’re making changes for the positivity of yourself. So you have to love yourself to want to make those changes.”