Hey kids: Don't get fat
The Subway guy talks with Chocachatti Elementary students about living a healthy lifestyle.
By MATHEW WASSERMAN
Published November 3, 2005
It wasn't the anticipation of Halloween's ghostly masks and haunted houses that terrified kids at Chocachatti Elementary School a few weeks ago - it was a pair of pants with a 60-inch waist.
Jared Fogle (also known as "the Subway Guy") wore the pants years ago when he weighed in at a whopping 425 pounds. Now that he has cut that weight by more than half, he inspires and warns children all across the world about the dangers of being overweight.
"If there's one thing you take away from all of this, let it be this; I never ever want to have to wear Jared's old pair of 60-inch pants," said Fogle at the beginning of his presentation to Chocachatti students on a Tuesday in October.
Fogle, invited to Hernando County by the American Heart Association, then explained the genesis of his weight problem.
"When I was in third grade I opened up a present and it was a brand new Nintendo," Fogle said. "Now I didn't have to go to the arcade or get on my bike and ride to my friend's house to play video games. Soon I was playing video games for up to eight hours a day," he said.
"I wasn't getting any exercise and as I was sitting there I began eating a lot of junk food. I had one hand on the joystick and the other in a bag of chips."
Fogle then explained how four habits caused his weight gain to snowball.
"The big factors were video games, television, junk food and the Internet," he said.
As Fogle counted off his list, he asked students to raise their hands if maybe they did each thing a little too often - almost every kid raised his or her hand for each item on the list.
The American Heart Association says almost 17 percent of males between 6 and 11 are overweight. Almost 15 percent of females in the same age bracket are also overweight. What is more alarming is the increase over the past two decades.
Today, more than twice as many children and almost three times as many teens are overweight as in 1980.
Fogle said statistics like these are why he tours the world educating people on the consequences of being overweight.
"I've been down that road before," he said. "I know what it's like to be obese, so I understand people in the situation."
Fogle said that as a teenager he didn't smoke or do any drugs, but he rebelled by being addicted to food.
"It was so bad that sometimes I would sneak out of the house and go to a fast food place and scarf down the food then rush back home," he said.
When Fogle got to college at Indiana University, he realized his health was at stake when he developed sleep apnea because all the fat around his neck was preventing him from getting air as he slept.
"I knew I couldn't run from the problem anymore and I had to find a positive solution," he said. "The place where I lived in college happened to share a wall with a Subway restaurant."
That little happenstance and unification through a wall marked the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
"I decided that every day I would eat two Subway sandwiches and a bag of chips," Fogle said. "I slowly changed the soft drinks to diet coke and then to water. And every day I would make sure to get in some physical activity, even if it was just taking the stairs instead of the elevator. In the first three months, I lost 94 pounds. In one year I lost 245 pounds and got my life back in the process."
Now Fogle is a spokesperson for Subway and a motivational speaker. He has made presentations on about 240 days of the last year and spoken to more than 100,000 kids in the last year and a half. Still, it is elementary school students on whom he feels he has the most impact.
"If there's one group I can make the most difference with, it is kids this age," Fogle said. "It's amazing how much these kids really do understand. This is the age when I started developing my problem and it's the age when some kids start getting into bad habits."
As for the children, those pants really got to them.
"At first I thought it was kind of funny, but it's kind of sad," said fifth-grader Jordan Frantzis, 10. "I never knew anybody could be that unhealthy. I'm really glad he got fit."
Jessica Hollis, also 10 and in the fifth grade, agreed that the pants had a big impact.
"I thought the pants were amazing, but sad," she said. "It's a really good story and will help people realize what could happen to them."
Cari O'Rourke, the third-grade teacher who organized the event, said she has been hearing comments every day about Fogle's story and the impression it left on students.
"I think he must have really hit a nerve with many of the kids," O'Rourke said. "The kids are talking about it a lot and thinking about things they didn't think about before."
Frantzis said he was going to change some things about his lifestyle by cutting down on the video games and Internet.
Hollis said she would watch television and eat less and spend more time playing outside.
Brooke Mooney, another 10-year-old fifth-grader, said she's already physically active, but there are things she can improve on.
"I think I'm going to try to stop eating so much junk food and not watch so much television because every time I watch TV I want to eat," said Mooney.
The American Heart Association says the main causes of obesity are bigger portions, less nutrition, eating out and lack of physical activity. Top those off with schools offering less physical activity and technology's sedentary lifestyle and by the age of 20, some 65 percent of the American population is overweight or obese. Many of those people will be plagued by diabetes, gallstones, hypertension, arthritis, stroke and heart disease.
"Hopefully these kids will never be in the situation that I was in," Fogle said. "The greatest thing to come of it is that I can share my story so kids won't make the same mistakes I did."
Mathew Wasserman can be reached at Mat65432@aol.com