A Hunger for Life: Man Loses 300 Pounds with Diet, Exercise, Behavioral Therapy

A hunger for life

Former fat man is feasting on the simple pleasures of a healthy life and relishing the chance to share his story.

BY KAY HARVEY

Pioneer Press

Larry Peterson thought he’d rather die than go on a diet.

It was no joke.

At 603 pounds, he refused stomach-stapling surgery. Dying was the only option he had left, doctors said. They gave him six months to live.

Less than three years later, he’s half the man he once was. He weighs 300 pounds — almost trim for a stocky guy who stands 6-foot-5. He celebrates his return to simple joys his size took away — walking, tying his shoes, climbing into a hot bath or onto a boat on the lake outside his front door.

“Now, I can take the grandkids to a movie and fit in a seat,” he exclaims, breaking into his ready smile.

His days as a couch potato, he says, are history. “I have too much energy to burn.”

And too much work to do. The former Iowa real-estate salesman has reinvented himself as a plain-talking, passion-driven, weight-loss guru. Now, he’s the guy telling folks to ditch the super-size portions and get off the couch.

His transformation began in an in-patient treatment program at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center that shows what standard care for obesity will likely be in the future. Its program that combines diet, exercise and behavioral therapy is ahead of its time, matching new guidelines from a national task force known for shaping medical care in America.

At 57, Peterson shares the details of his success in a self-help video and seminars across Minnesota, Iowa and the rest of the country.

The treatment program was the last place he wanted to be. He landed there because of a twist of fate and two women. One is his wife, Pamela, who knew when to practice tough love. The other is a dietitian, Heidi Hoover, whose sincerity shamed him into showing up.

Still, Peterson arrived “with his hackles raised,” Hoover recalls. The first day, he balked loudly at an 800-calorie-a-day meal plan he considered homicidal. By the second day, “I found out I wasn’t all that hungry,” he says.

He came in a wheelchair, certain the exercise part of the program couldn’t work for him. Twelve days later, he was walking a block-long hallway using two canes.

In the program’s psychology component, he faced up to the negativity, low self-esteem and guilt he says often led him to gorge on food. The program jump-started his weight loss, he says, and turned his thinking around.

“He talks from the gut,” Hoover says about Peterson’s expanding mission to help others lose weight. “He says what a lot of people face every day but aren’t willing to talk about. He had all the excuses everybody has always used.”

His story — and the way overweight people in his audiences relate — bring some folks to tears. His obesity, he says, drove friends and business clients away.

He’s lucky it didn’t kill him. At 603 pounds, his body’s struggle to circulate fluids was leading to kidney failure. Pressure on his heart created dangerous blood clots. His legs were splitting open because fat stretched his skin to its limit. The wounds often became infected, probably because it was so difficult to keep his body clean. He had quit taking baths or showers for fear he’d get stuck.

“You can get real about fat,” he tells his audiences. “Or you can get real fat.”

HEAVY HISTORY

Larry Peterson has been there.

He was fat in grade school, where kids called him “Pig” and “Fatty, Fatty, Two-by-Four.” They laughed about his size. “It hurt,” he says.

In high school, he learned girls didn’t go out with boys who were heavy. He was football-lineman size but lacked the muscle and coordination for sports. As a senior, he weighed 270 or 280, he guesses. For most of his life, he didn’t know his weight.

“Most scales only went to 250,” he points out.

After high school graduation, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and persuaded his best friend to go along. First, the Marines shipped Peterson to a “fat farm” and then to Vietnam.

He was wounded and came home with a Purple Heart. An old snapshot in his collection captures the image of a 20-something Peterson, fresh out of military service. He weighed 236 pounds, the lightest he has been as an adult.

He also returned without his friend, who died in the war. “It was a guilt I couldn’t face” until the treatment program, Peterson says.

Good people skills and a gift of gab helped Larry Peterson carve out a successful career selling real estate on and around Iowa’s Lake Okoboji and training other salespeople. And he became an expert darts player on Iowa’s championship team.

He was good, too, at putting on weight, lots of it.

His brother once gave him a teddy-bearlike stuffed couch potato. “I’m sure that’s the way they saw me, as a stuffed couch potato. I liked to sit and watch TV all day,” Peterson recalls.

Two marriages ended in divorce. He helped raise two stepsons, who remain part of his life, along with five grandchildren. He regrets never having a biological child, a possibility he believes he lost to obesity. Fathering a child can be “too physical,” he says, for someone so large.

Peterson keeps no secrets about what obesity stole from him. His father died of a heart attack — obesity-related — at age 50. His mother’s legs were amputated before she died of Type 2 diabetes — obesity-related. A sister died in her 50s of chronic asthma — obesity-related. Peterson nearly died four times. All obesity-related.

A room in his Arnolds Park, Iowa, home is filled with machines and gadgets that kept him going: His wheelchair, canes, leg bandages and custom-made shoes. A sleep apnea machine that helped him breathe at night through an airway smothered in fat. A metal gripper to reach objects he couldn’t bend over to pick up. An extendable self-examining mirror to see parts of his body hidden by rolls of flesh.

“I was morbidly obese,” he says in his self-help video, explaining a medical diagnosis for people with a body mass index of 40 or higher — about 5 percent of the U.S. population. “You could call it gross near death. What it means is I was almost in a state of dying.”

DEATH WISH

Peterson met his third wife, Pamela, on the Internet seven years ago. They got on the phone and talked long-distance for 24 hours. “To show you how good he is at sales — he sold Iowa to me,” says Pamela Peterson, who then lived in Arizona.

When they married, he was 50 years old and weighed 500 pounds. She never saw him as a fat man. “I fell in love with his insides. I didn’t care what he looked like on the outside.” She became the office manager for his real-estate agency. At home, she managed the kitchen.

“When he was hungry, I would fix him something,” she says. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Peterson calls her “a loving, caring wife put in an impossible situation.”

By 2001, he had gained an additional 100 pounds.

Peterson’s heft was crushing his real-estate business. “It was difficult to get in and out of a car,” he says, a big handicap for someone who shows houses.

He turned to helping other agents and their clients close complicated deals, which he could do in his office. He began to see his business — which he has since closed — drying up.

He asked a friend why agents weren’t bringing people to him. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth. You turn ‘em off,’ “ Peterson recalls.

He became less active and used a wheelchair. “My exercise consisted of walking from the kitchen to the dining-room table,” he recalls.

He kept up his hobby of playing darts competitively. “I could shoot three darts,” he says. “Then, I had to sit down.”

He was competing in a darts tournament in Minneapolis when severe chills signaled something was wrong. Doctors at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center told him his kidneys were shutting down and a badly infected leg wound could force amputation.

While he was recovering, a doctor suggested stomach-stapling surgery. Peterson had another agenda. “I decided my life insurance was worth more to my wife than I was,” he says. “Deep inside, I felt I was no good to anybody.”

Dietitian Heidi Hoover stopped in his hospital room, urging him to sign up for the VA’s in-patient weight-loss program.

“I told her diets don’t work for me,” Peterson recalls.

She persisted and mentioned there was a six-month waiting list.

“I figured I’d be dead by then, anyway,” he says. “I said yes just to get her out of the room.”

On her way out the door, she stuck her head back in and asked, “You promise?”

That gesture froze in Peterson’s memory.

Three months later, Hoover called to say the treatment program had an unexpected opening. Peterson wasn’t interested. That’s when his wife intervened. She asked his brother and a friend to help persuade her husband to go.

Peterson found himself in a jam. He couldn’t tell Pam about his death plan. And he didn’t relish the idea of breaking a promise to Hoover, who impressed him with her caring approach.

“I thought ‘I can’t even die right,’ “ he says. “Now, I’ve got to go to this Mickey Mouse program.”

MIND OVER MATTER

The program he was dead-set against worked.

Larry Peterson lost 60 pounds in two weeks, 10 percent of his total weight. He looked deep inside himself to see traits he didn’t like, such as “a failure-istic attitude” he has worked hard to shake.

He learned to identify and shut out an inner voice he calls “Slick,” who tempts him to overeat. “I’ve learned he’s a guy I can’t trust.”

The treatment worked, he says, because it opened his mind.

Then, he returned to the real world. “That’s where the problem lies,” Peterson says. But he continued to lose weight and seek inspiration and support.

“I started taking things in from outside sources. A big one was Dr. Phil,” the CBS-TV talk-show host and author of a best-selling weight-loss book. “He made me realize I had to look inside myself for answers.”

Peterson ignores America’s diet du jour. “Diets still don’t work for me,” he says. “Diet has to be a way of life.”

He stops short of meticulously counting calories but tries to stay under 2,000 a day. He joined a TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) club and tailors mindful eating and exercise to his likes and lifestyle. Add to that daily planning and portion control.

“I used to order a porterhouse steak for two,” he says, “and my wife would order what she wanted.”

“There are no forbidden foods,” he maintains. He still visits the all-you-can-eat buffets that helped him grow into his size XXXXXXXXL pants. The lure for him now isn’t to load up but to sample a smorgasbord of tastes. That’s what he wanted all along, he says. The difference now is he stops to think about it.

His goal is to lose more weight and learn better exercise techniques.

He continues with his motivational speaking engagements. Last summer, his audiences included the U.S. Army, the American Diabetes Association and the Center for Obesity Research and Education.

The road to a near-normal weight hasn’t been easy. He lost 300 pounds in 18 months — too fast, he acknowledges. He drank too little water, which led to severe dehydration. It all resulted in a heart attack and another close call with death.

Overstretched skin on his legs and abdomen sagged so badly it required surgical removal and hundreds of stitches. Medical costs that exceeded a health-insurance cap drove home the high cost of obesity and drove Peterson into debt.

He isn’t complaining. Larry Peterson is savoring the simple pleasures of being alive.

He walks every day. “At quite a pace,” his wife adds. Last month, he broke into a run and kept going for a city block.

He cuts and moves firewood, shovels snow off his deck and chips away at a “honey-do list.” He loves his life on the lake with Pamela, sledding and fishing with the grandkids and the work his obesity — and the medical care he received — led him to do.

“I enjoy life, seeing the sun every morning and wanting to help people,” he says.

Source: http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/7940271.htm