After recuperating from hernia surgery when he was in second grade, Gary Schneider “grew up heavy” — sedentary, with a weakness for fast food.
Even after making the cut for East High School’s basketball team, which required running and weightlifting along with hours of practice, his weight remained a steady 219, with 36 percent body fat. The teasing was merciless.
“Sumo,” teammates said. “Fatty Chinese.” They asked, “How’s the rice bowl treating you, son?”
Schneider absorbed the cutting comments, resigned to his girth.
“It was like that’s how I saw myself, as a big, fat, heavy kid, and it was never going to change,” he said.
Then on Jan. 19, 2010, a date burned in his memory, a girl poked his abdomen. “Someone’s got a little extra,” she said.
“I went home and checked myself out in the mirror, and I decided I needed to get myself in check,” he said.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It was about putting in the effort and making the changes.”
He lost 54 pounds.
Today, Schneider, 18, weighs 163. He is a captain on East High’s basketball team and a captain of the school’s legendary speech and debate team. His body-fat ratio is 10 percent — the same as an elite athlete’s. When he takes off his shirt, his abdominal muscles ripple.
What magic helped him shed that weight? The same kind that slimmed Ethan Loewi, another captain on the East High speech and debate team, and also a captain on the school’s cross country running team.
Loewi dropped 40 pounds during the same period, trimming his weight to a lean 175 on his 6-foot, 4-inch frame.
The secret? Exercise, cut the junk food, and read labels.
“Boring,” Schneider said, but it works.
He no longer stops by a McDonald’s on the way home from basketball practice, gobbling a double burger, large pack of fries and a three-pack of chocolate chip cookies before sitting down to dinner.
His new routine still involves a series of small meals — six or seven meals every day, every two to three hours. The three major meals include 8 ounces of protein (he likes chicken, turkey, bison and fish), a carbohydrate (he favors sweet potatoes) and a vegetable (usually a salad or mixed chopped veggies).
His “snack meals” involve a protein shake, a peanut butter sandwich or some fruit.
“I still do cheat meals once or twice a week now, both to keep my body guessing and to keep my sanity,” he says.
“I think the biggest downfall to any diet plan is not being able to stick with clean eating for too long, so breaking that every now and then ensures I stick to it in the long run.”
Loewi, who follows a similar regimen, still misses his one-time snacks — giant boxes of Skittles, large bottles of chocolate drinks and orders of Church’s fried chicken.
“So good, but so bad for you because they’re saturated with trans fats,” he said. Today, because he reads labels before he eats, Loewi knows knows how much fat and salt hides inside that glistening golden skin.
“There’s stuff I know now about food that I don’t even want to know,” he says.
The new routine has changed their lives in other ways, too.
How it’s changed their lives:
At his heaviest, Loewi was a loner who avoided other students and tried to blend into the woodwork.
“Ethan was shy beyond your wildest dreams, but with a witty, dry sense of humor and a voice like a god,” said East High speech and debate coach Matt Murphy, recalling when he first met Loewi.
“From the moment he stepped on stage, he could have the audience eat out of his hand, if he hadn’t been talking to his feet. It was like he didn’t understand how to navigate this gigantic presence. He had to work so hard to get every idiosyncrasy out of his body. As he shed the pounds, it was like the real Ethan was being revealed.”
Last year, Loewi won first place in sports broadcasting at a national speech competition — a sea change for the boy once paralyzed with stage fright. Schneider, once taunted for his size, now sports enviable six-pack abs.
“I gotta say, it feels so much better with all the weight problems behind me,” he says.
“Before, I never even wanted to take my shirt off at the pool and now I’m like the fitness guy at our school! Even in speech competitions, I feel so much more confident in my slim-cut suits than I did before.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
