Walking the Weight Loss Talk

Walking the weight loss talk
To fight fat, he’ll travel 1,200 miles
By Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff, 3/18/2004

The low point came on a flight back from Maui in January 2000. Gary Marino was sitting next to an 11-year-old from East Boston, an Italian-American version of himself at that age, complete with rolls and rolls of baby fat that would someday turn into teenage fat and then man fat.

At the time, Marino weighed 397 pounds, a tailgate party away from 400, as he liked to say. His 5--foot-8-inch frame was so bloated, the weight of the flesh around his neck nearly suffocated him while he slept. ‘’Sleep apnea,” the doctors called it; they gave him an oxygen mask to wear at night.

The weight had become such a load on Marino’s body that excess spinal fluid would occasionally build up behind his eyes and dark clouds would pass across his field of vision. If he was driving, he would pray that the white lines of the road would still be there when the clouds finally passed.

Marino was 34 at the time and had become acclimated to the constant jerking up and down on the dieter’s yo-yo. To the stares, the humiliation, the judgment.

But the 11-year-old kid from Eastie hadn’t passed through that fire yet, Marino kept thinking. All that misery, all those insults he would hear, and all those chairs he wouldn’t fit into were still ahead of him. Marino felt a tremendous urge to grab that fat kid by the shirt and warn him, stop him, give him a chance.

‘’It was like I was looking at a little version of me, and I wanted to reach back through time and change it,” Marino said recently at a table at the Boston Sports Club in Lexington. ‘’I was transfixed by him through the whole 14-hour flight.”

Fast-forward four years and Marino, a Woburn resident, is more than halfway home. He has been following a sensible diet for three years, exercises every day for an hour and a half, and has been to counseling to address the root causes of his food addiction.

He’s now a relatively svelte 268 pounds. He smiles easily, flirts constantly, and talks with the easy energy of an optimist who knows tomorrow is going to be better than today. He has lost 40 pounds a year for three years, and he’s planning on dropping another 70. This time, he vows, he’s going to make it count.

On April 5, Marino will begin a 3-month, 1,200-mile walk from Jacksonville, Fla., to Boston. An RV with his three-person crew will support the endeavor.

A longtime event promoter and former radio producer, he intends to speak to thousands of people on the way. His hope: to become a sort of pied piper of weight loss. He wants fat people to walk with him; he wants to inspire, to challenge, and to force a conversation with any overweight person on the East Coast who thinks genetics is destiny and french fries are a friend.

Along the way he intends to raise a million dollars, which will be funneled into an education and awareness campaign through his new foundation—Generation Excel. The foundation will cover the $100,000 cost of the trip, but Marino said he will not draw a salary.

‘’Obesity is a disease,” Marino said. ‘’I know, I have it, and I want to do something about it.”

Marino has lined up radio spots for every day of the trip. The schedule is to walk 5 miles in morning, do an interview, walk 5 more, speak to a group, walk a final 5 before dark, do another event.

Every other day will be devoted to public engagements—80 days of walking, 80 days of talking. He has dubbed the journey ‘’The Million Calorie March.”

The easy part will be the walk, he said. It’s the barbs and the jokes from radio DJs and critics he’s girding for. He knows they’re coming because fat jokes are never far behind fat people. And while Marino has a wicked sense of humor, he is adamant that he disease is too serious to be relegated to a punch line.

‘’I know how to handle myself around those guys,” Marino said of the wiseacres. ‘’Part of this is just going to be to kill them with kindness.”

As a side benefit, Marino hopes to lose the final 70 pounds, but that’s just a bonus, he insists.

‘’I’ve achieved health,” he said. ‘’I don’t need to look like a male model.”

The real point, he said, is to get people talking. Not in the way Jared of Subway fame did it—to sell sandwiches—but to prompt overweight Americans to confront their problems. Especially the men.

‘’For women there is more support out there,” he said. ‘’For the men there is next to nothing.”

And as one fat guy reaching out to another, Marino just may be the inspiration men need.

Source: http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...ght_loss_talk/