Shawn Boice said she spent about 15 minutes telling her story.

“It almost seems comical,” said the Bothell resident.

That 15 minutes of writing and some effort put into losing 20 pounds won Boice, 46, a week-long Caribbean cruise.

A nurse now working as a clinical operations manager for Group Health in Seattle, Boice said she essentially entered an online contest on a whim, typing up an essay on her experience with beating cancer, but also her experience with the commercial ZoneDiet.

“Everybody makes New Year’s resolutions, right?” Boice said. “I thought I needed to give myself a little kick-start.”

Boice said she spent some time researching different ways to lose weight.

“I thought I could do something like this,” she said of the ZoneDiet method.

Boice said she noticed the ad for the contest and wrote about why she thought the diet might work. Then she basically forgot about the contest. Boice said about three weeks prior to the cruise, she got a message inquiring as to whether or not she was going to respond to previous messages about the contest, messages she apparently had missed. She sent in a picture of herself and then got a message telling her she had won.

“I just shrieked … I was really excited,” she said. Boice added she returned the phone call about the cruise around 5:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Boice said friends told her the whole thing was some kind of scam. When she entered the contest, husband Rick Boice told her he had no interest in going should she win, that cruises were for old people. Shawn Boice said the word “hideous” came up. She promised when she won, she would take her brother. And she did. Tim Ross actually has lost 50 pounds using the ZoneDiet. He no longer needs medication he was taking for high blood pressure and other health problems.

“My bother’s really kicking my hiene,” Boice said.

The two now plan to take part in the Beat the Bridge charity run, as well as a bike ride from Seattle to Portland. Boice said she’d been running and biking before starting her new diet, but it’s all new to her brother.

Perhaps Rick Boice should have know better than to think his talkative, friendly wife wouldn’t win the cruise contest. After beating cancer, she was invited to run with the Olympic torch in 2004. She previously had won a national contest that sent her to see the then-Seattle Supersonics in the NBA playoffs in an epic game against Houston.

“Every little thing was exciting,” Boice said of the cruise, which was her first and took her and Ross to Puerto Rico, St. Kitts and St. Martins. “It was fabulous.”

Naturally, Boice is a big proponent of the ZoneDiet, arguing it requires no special foods, no meetings and that everything you need is free on the company’s Web site. She adds the whole idea is balance and staying away from junk foods.

“I can feel a difference in my body if I start eating the (junk foods) again,” Boice said, adding that she is far from “Princess Perfect” when it comes to eating.

Boice doesn’t mention much about the cancer she beat a few years back and she doesn’t say directly that her attitude had to do with her losing weight. But she probably thinks it.

“The whole thing is positive thinking,” was her answer to a question on her battle with cancer. “That’s all there is to it.”