How I lost it: 5 Middle Georgians share strategies for triple-digit weight loss

Kathy Queen

Kathy Queen of Perry used to have to roll herself out of bed. At about 300 pounds, she could no longer tie her shoes.

The Perry woman’s life didn’t change until her mother was dying.

Emotionally incapable of keeping a constant vigil at the hospital bedside of the woman who was her best friend, Queen started going for walks on the campus of Emory University.

“I’d go back to the room and be there for about 15 minutes and go back out,” Queen remembers. “I was so angry.”

She started out not being able to take 10 steps, but gradually worked up to a walk/run regimen. In the five weeks before her mother died, she lost about 30 pounds.

That was enough to motivate her to do more. She began monitoring her portion sizes.

“I found out I was eating enough for four people and that didn’t include desserts, snacks and midnight cookies,” Queen said.

When her 25-year-marriage failed, anger and frustration further fueled her fitness routine.

“It might be two or three in the morning and I would run until I wasn’t mad anymore,” she said.

She started lifting hand weights and doing strength and toning exercises at home.

The 50-year-old Cracker Barrel clerk is now about 150 pounds — a loss of more than 140 pounds in a little more than a year.

She’s dropped from a size 24/26 to a 9. She had gotten down to a size 6 but said she looked like “walking death.”

“People do not believe me when I tell them I weigh 150,” Queen said. “They say I look more like 110 pounds. I am toned. I am hard muscle — my back, my arms, my legs.”

Now that the weight is gone, she still does her run/walk routine for about 5 miles at least three nights a week. But she no longer “diets.”

“The first three letters in that word are D-I-E,” she said.

The weight has been off for about three years as she continues to monitor what she eats and her portions.

Queen chooses healthy alternatives but does not forsake her favorites.

“I still use cream, I still eat cookies and I ate spaghetti last night,” she said recently.

She’s learned there is a fine line between living to eat and eating to live.

“When you live to eat, everything becomes about food. When you eat to live, you’re nourishing your body,” she said.

Although Queen is still self-conscious about her body image, she revels in a recent compliment from two younger men who told her she looked like she stepped off the pages of a magazine.

“I feel like I have done one amazing accomplishment,” she said. “I have people now who have known me forever and do not recognize me.”

Gin Poole

If Gin Poole of Jeffersonville has one regret about losing more than 125 pounds in the past year, it’s that she didn’t start sooner.

Poole turns 47 on Labor Day.

She was raised on corn bread, collard greens and biscuits oozing with syrup. She’s struggled with her weight since her teen years. Last September, she woke up one morning at 300 pounds and decided she had to do something. Poole had already tried about everything and began a yo-yo cycle of loss and gain.

“I tried different diets — the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the don’t-eat-anything-diet,” Poole said. “I’m on the Gin Poole diet now. A little Subway diet, a little Atkins diet. I’ve got a little-of-everything diet.”

Except the cabbage soup diet.

“That stuff is nasty. No wonder you don’t want to eat it,” she said.

As Poole began to choose baked over fried and water instead of sweet tea, the weight started melting away.

When she had lost 40 pounds she joined the Today’s Image Fitness Center in Twiggs County.

Gym owner Diane Mims has noticed a two-fold change in her client, who still comes in nearly every day although Poole holds down two jobs — one at the BP convenience store and the other at Subway.

“In addition to her body changing, her attitude has changed. She has more energy,” Mims said. “She makes exercise a priority and that’s important. She’s done great and we’re really proud of her.”

Poole does circuit weight training and walks nights when she’s not working.

Like the famed Jared Fogle, weight loss spokesman of the Subway restaurant chain, she chooses healthy ingredients on her sandwiches and skips mayonnaise and cheese.

She discovered she actually likes raw carrots and vegetables cooked in broth instead of fat. She opts for baked, broiled or boiled chicken. Her menu rounds out with salmon, tuna and ground turkey.

The winter clothes she bought when she was starting to lose weight are now too big. She’d still like to lose another 25 pounds and plans to keep working on it. She understands she hits plateaus where the pounds won’t budge, but pushes on.

Poole’s only disappointment is the sagging skin her rapid weight loss has left behind. She knows she can have it surgically tightened, but said she can’t afford to foot the expense of an “elective surgery.”

“If I have to live with all this stuff hanging verses dying with it being filled out, I’ll take living with it hanging any day,” she said.

Once a couch potato television junkie, now she doesn’t care whether her TV is on or off. She doesn’t wear out on shopping trips and rarely has the headaches that once plagued her daily.

She gets plenty to eat, except fried chicken and french fries.

“Would I love to have them? Yes! But I know that I can’t. Because I know if I ever do, then I’ve lost it and I’ve fought too hard for this.”

Henry Koplin

Henry Koplin of Macon can still remember when the Church’s Chicken opened on Shurling Drive in Macon. At 16 years old, he would cruise in for a snack almost nightly.

Two years later, he had ballooned to 325 pounds. His waistline grew to 50 inches.

His doctor told him he’d be lucky to see 25.

As a young college student at Mercer University, Koplin shrugged off the warning to party with his buddies a while longer. Then he could no longer find pants that fit.

“It was kind of tough buying clothes,” Koplin said. “You go to the store and you put on a pair of pants and you say, ‘Uh-oh. this isn’t going to work.’ Then you go to the next size and that still doesn’t work.”

He gave up the fried food, milk shakes, dessert and Budweiser.

The weight starting coming off pretty quickly at first.

“Once that started happening, it gives you more of an incentive to continue what you’re doing and it made it easier,” he said.

The initial quest to get healthy dropped 75 pounds.

His diet evolved to focus on a bagel and coffee for breakfast. For lunch it’s a vegetable Subway sandwich. At supper, he gets more raw vegetables in a nightly salad or stir fry he mixes up with grilled chicken.

“You just know over a period of time what’s good for you and what’s not,” said Koplin, who works at the family-owned Macon Iron.

Instead of high-calorie salad dressing, he opts for fat-free mustard and a squirt of low-fat ranch. At restaurants, he knows he’s safe with marinara sauce instead of creamy alfredo.

He resists the urge to splurge on ice cream and chocolate sauce, Hershey’s kisses with almonds and Natalia’s bread pudding. It’s a constant battle he’s waged for nearly four decades. At age 56, he’s down to 192 pounds and wants to lose another 7 pounds for a total of 140 pounds lost.

Before dawn, he’s sitting in his truck waiting for The Wellness Center to open. He works out there about four days a week, then walks on his treadmill Friday morning while watching recordings of “The Daily Show” and “Colbert.” On the weekend, he’s on the riverwalk.

He joined the north Macon gym about 18 years ago and credits the fitness instructors with helping him continue to slim down and build strength.

“That’s been one of my life-saving ventures when I joined that place. I never thought I’d take it on but I guess I’m one of the fanatics, if you will,” Koplin said. “If I don’t really get some exercise in, seven days a week, I become a real grouch.”

Koplin’s knees and ankles won’t tolerate running but he walks and uses the elliptical machines regularly. He has no plans to stop.

“When you see people, they recognize the success you’ve had and the compliments also give you a good ego boost to let you know what you’re doing is paying off,” he said. “It’s a very good feeling.”

Saundra Giles

It wasn’t until Saundra Giles of Warner Robins looked back at photographs that she realized how big she was.

At 387 pounds, she was wearing size 6X and could only find clothes online. Carrying all that weight, she hurt too much to exercise.

About two and a half years ago, she got fed up with not having anything fashionable to wear. Giles, who is 48, was tired of waking up sore every morning and started researching how she could lose weight.

She decided to have gastric bypass surgery in December after learning her insurance would cover most of the cost.

In about eight months, she has lost 123 pounds and is still losing.

While her friends and family have been supportive, others say she’s taking the easy way out.

“I don’t care,” Giles said of the remarks. “They’re not going to steal my joy.”

The first time she could zip up a pair of jeans, she screamed with excitement in the dressing room.

Her 6X lime green blouse now hangs off her as a sleep shirt.

But unlike her critics, she knows it has not been easy.

There was the time she had a bite of sausage, and immediately got sick. She’s had to give up white flour, fats and sugar. Protein starts every meal for maximum absorption in a tiny pouch about the size of an egg. That’s all that remains of her stomach.

It will stretch to about the size of a lemon and maybe an orange, she said. If she eats too much, she could further stretch the pouch and defeat the purpose of the surgery.

“I’m scared to eat rice, so I stay away from rice,” she said for fear of her stomach swelling.

Her daily food intake is packed in tiny portions in a cooler so she can be sure she has what she needs. For lunch recently, she doled out three ounces of ground turkey, three Brussel sprouts and a tablespoon of macaroni and cheese. Each morsel is chewed and chewed to aid in digestion and prevent blockages.

Like any dieter, she hits plateaus and has frustrations, but attends a gastric bypass support group each month at Macon’s Harvest Cathedral.

“I’m not the only one hitting plateaus or craving things,” she said. “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one.”

Giles has no specific goal weight in mind. She plans to keep losing as long as she can.

The program support specialist at Robins Air Force Base already has overcome two of her hurdles: buying clothes in the store and walking for an hour, something she accomplished for the first time last weekend.

“My thighs were killing me Monday but it was worth it,” she said.

She dons her headphones and hits the track on base three days during the work week and every weekend.

Surgery may not be for everyone, but it’s working for her.

Now she’s ready for her next accomplishment — to wear a red sundress on a cruise ship.

“I feel like I’m on a high all the time.”

Claudia Robinson

If anyone has an excuse not to exercise, it’s Claudia Robinson of Warner Robins.

The 40-year-old suffers from multiple sclerosis that has numbed her legs and arms. Rheumatoid arthritis makes her body ache all over. She has lupus. Fibromyalgia gives her fatigue and she battles depression. Double scoliosis affects her spine and neck.

But it was her doctor’s diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome that reduced her to tears in his office.

“He said that this wasn’t all my fault (that I was overweight),” Robinson said.

The medication he prescribed resulted in a 10-pound weight loss in four weeks in January 2002.

“I figured if I could lose 10 pounds without even trying, what would happen if I really tried,” Robinson said.

She put on her size 5X muumuu and walked on the treadmill for a minute one morning then went back to bed. Later that night, she did it again.

After working up to about five minutes, she ventured outside in her Warner Robins neighborhood. Her slow gait took her from mailbox to mailbox, going a little farther as soon as she was able.

Her progress was slow. After seven months she was only up to a quarter of a mile.

“But to me it could have been 4,000 miles,” Giles said.

After two years, she built up to 5 miles on her good days. One very good day she even did it twice. She was ecstatic and immediately fired off a note to her doctor about her accomplishment.

Over eight years, she’s lost 180 pounds. One hundred pounds came off in the first year, then she lost nothing the next. She has been steadily but slowly losing ever since. She tries to walk every day, but some days it’s too hard to overcome the pain and her health challenges.

In April, she entered her first 5k race. She knew she couldn’t run, but was determined to go the distance. The loud noise of the starting pistol startled her, then thunder rattled her nerves. The other racers left her in the dust and she started to cry. Race officials offered her a ride in a golf cart, but she refused.

She was taking every step in memory of her nephew, who was her walking partner until he died of a brain tumor last year. With tears streaming down her face, she was the last one to cross the finish line. It didn’t matter how long it took. She did it.

Robinson encourages others to do the same.

“If I can do it, you can do it,” she said. “Do it for yourself. If you do it for anyone other than yourself, it’s not going to work.”

To contact writer Liz Fabian, call 744-4303.