Brian Walter isn’t certain exactly when he decided to lose weight, but he knows the idea took root at Red Rocks. It took the 342-pound Rush fan three songs just to get up the stairs from the parking lot. He was mad to have missed the opening numbers by his favorite band.
“It was a lot of little things, and somewhere along the way, I put them all together,” says the 40-year-old chemist from Fort Collins.
Little things — like struggling to get up off the couch, not keeping up with the guys on his softball team or even his toddler and preschooler — added up.
The gain was gradual, 10 pounds one year, 15 the next. Always a big guy, Walter played center on the high school football team and competed in shot put and discus. “In college, I enjoyed playing the ‘big guy,’ the one who’s easy to get along with,” he says.
Sitting at a bar with a beer and a plate of hot wings, Walter felt smug when he saw runners out in the cold. “I thought I was living the life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I lost a lot of self-confidence. I’d really grown a lot more inward.”
A Weight Watchers flier made its way into the Walter house. “It sat around for quite a while,” he says. The thought of going to a meeting full of “mostly women” was a scary proposition. “I had been living the way I had for so long, I didn’t have any idea about portion size or any of that. I needed someone to teach me.”
After that first weigh-in — 342 pounds — Walter thought maybe he could get down to 250. “Then I’d just be a ‘normal’ fat guy,” he says.
Going to Weight Watchers was the first step. The second step was to take a few more steps.
Walter and his wife started walking, pushing their two daughters in a stroller. He started taking a walk during lunch hour at work. A group of co-workers invited him on a mountain hike.
Eventually, walking for an hour seemed time-consuming. He thought, “Running’s faster, but I’d never been a runner in my life. Running was punishment in football and basketball.” He took a tentative first jogging step on a business trip in Atlanta.
“I figured no one knew me there. I didn’t make it very far. It took eight or nine months after that before I really started running.” He said he didn’t know about the concept of taking a “break” in the middle of a walk to run a bit, but that’s what he did: walk, then run, then walk again.
By the time Walter got into regular running, he had lost 115 pounds. He decided to run The Colorado Half-Marathon down the Poudre Canyon into Fort Collins. “Until then, I thought of myself as doing what the healthy and fit people do. During that race, I realized I was a healthy and fit person.”
That was in May of 2007. In April last year, Walter reached his final Weight Watchers goal of 190 pounds, which he maintained for six weeks, earning free lifetime membership.
Last June, Walter completed the Steamboat Marathon in 4 hours, 58 minutes. This summer, Walter plans to enter the Lake-to-Lake Triathlon, a 1.5K swim, 30-mile bike ride and 10K run in Loveland. “It’s mid-January, and I still haven’t gotten in the pool,” he says, grimacing slightly, but leaving no doubt that he will take the plunge.
These days, Walter has the lean face of a runner. When asked how he has changed, his blue-green eyes look off into the distance and he takes a moment to answer. “I was a different guy then. I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
What does he think now when he sees an overweight person? “I give people the benefit of the doubt. I was only able to do this because I was ready and I wanted to. If you are there, you can lose weight.”
What he has learned: “The only part that’s hard is getting out of bed. When I’m done, I never regret it, but I do regret staying in bed.”
On eating: Walter does most of the cooking at home and makes soup almost every weekend. “Soup is a good filling food as long as you don’t fill it with cream. Or bacon.”
See him on TV: “I’m not a limelight kind of guy,” says Walter, who won first place in the 2008 Weight Watchers Inspiring Stories of the Year contest. He will appear on 9News, KUSA-Channel 9, at 6:20 a.m. Tuesday.
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
