Past Healthy Heroes stick with lifestyle changes

As customers enter a busy gym in San Francisco, former Charlottesville resident Ron Harris greets them at the front desk.

In the background, there’s a picture of a 400-plus-pound man, and Harris asks the members if they have seen the man in the photo around the gym. He informs them that the guy in the snapshot has lost more than 245 pounds and that they’ve got to witness the transformation for themselves. After each such conversation, Harris reveals the true identity of the man in the photo.

“Well actually it’s me, I was just seeing if you knew,” Harris finally admits.

“To see their mouth hit the floor is pretty funny for me, because I’m like yeah, that’s me. That’s Big Ron,” chuckled Harris in a recent telephone interview. “They’re shocked and they’re encouraged. That’s been probably the thing that I take away from all of those experiences, that it’s a good boost for me to remember how inspirational I can be, and my story is.”

Such is the attitude of the past four winners of The Daily Progress and Ragged Mountain Running Shop’s Healthy Heroes Award, formerly known as the BeneFitness Award.

Now in its fifth year, the award (created by Ragged Mountain owner Mark Lorenzoni and Daily Progress sports editor Jerry Ratcliffe) continues to recognize those in Central Virginia who have changed their lives through exercise and have inspired others to do the same.

Harris won the award in 2007 and now resides in California, a move that was a lifelong dream. He is doing many other things he never thought would be possible just a few years ago. At one point, Harris weighed more than 460 pounds and knew that if he didn’t make a drastic change, he could potentially face health problems for the remainder of his life.

Five years ago, at age 27, Harris was contemplating gastric bypass surgery, and was all but signed up for the process, but his doctor, Kevin Sweeney, had a suggestion as Harris was leaving his office.

“He said, ‘If you began to eat today the way you would eat after having the surgery, you’d still lose the weight no matter what,’” said Harris. “And so after he told me that, I was like, well, I’m a pretty logical guy, I’m not going to do it. I have a sister and a niece that both had gastric bypass. It’s right for some people, but for me, I chose to go at it a different way.”

Fast forward to today. The 225-pound Harris admits he’s more active than he’s ever been in his life. He is close to fulfilling another goal, becoming a certified personal trainer, after gaining knowledge and experience while working at two gyms in California. He also hopes to compete in triathlons in the near future.

In fact, some of his old friends who hadn’t seen him in months referred to him as “buff.” Harris is a residential counselor working with people suffering from mental illness and substance abuse issues, as well as a volunteer HIV counselor.

He continues to inspire friends, clients, co-workers and others with his “30 Days to a Healthier You” program, a month-long contract he derived to help himself when he began the process of literally becoming half the man he was at one point. The idea is to take any area of one’s life that a person feels needs work, and find a way to correct it in the given time.

2006 winner Tom Phillips took up running and biking to shed nearly 100 pounds, and told The Daily Progress two years ago that twice a week he would ride his bike from Scottsville to Charlottesville and back, a 50-mile round trip. That was just the beginning for him.

“I try to bike back and forth to work probably three or four, maybe five days a week, depending on the week,” said Phillips, who maintains his weight of 152 pounds after tipping the scales at almost 240 at one point. “To me it’s a good stress relief because one, it’s been a long day, I know I’ve got an hour and change on my bicycle on my way home to kind of clear my head and get myself pulled together so I don’t take things home from work, and plus it gives me the added exercise.”

After being diagnosed with high cholesterol in 2005, Phillips was forced to make a change, as he said he felt as though he was setting a bad example for his family by not eating healthy and failing to exercise. To this day he continues his routine of getting up every morning around 5 a.m., and either runs or rides his bike.

Three years ago at his heaviest, he couldn’t even run to the end of his driveway without a struggle. After competing in his first marathon in April 2006, the soon-to-be 43-year-old has participated in numerous races, from marathons to duathlons, from North Carolina to West Virginia, and still has his sights set on plenty more challenges.

In the first week of September, Phillips will take part in the Ultra Endurance Challenge in Washington, D.C., a 50-mile trail run, and hopes to bike the Appalachian Parkway Trail from Afton to Asheville, N.C. A lot of times, Phillips will take his cell phone on a run in the morning, and because he doesn’t want to cover the same ground twice, he will call his wife Angie and tell her where he is so that she will come pick him up.

“They’ve been wonderful, my wife and children,” Phillips said. “I couldn’t be blessed with anybody better than them because they’ve been so supportive and so helpful with what I’ve done. I keep telling my wife, one day I’m just going to turn left when I leave the driveway and just tell her, ‘Guess where I am?’”

The 2005 winner of the award, Lisa Eorio, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1976 at the age of 21. A University of Virginia graduate, Eorio continues to be a beacon for those stricken with the disease, as she has been running a local support group for MS sufferers for nearly 18 years. The group exists to share ideas, gain knowledge and inspiration from guest speakers, as well as help find outlets for its members to be able to work out and be fit.

Eorio maintains her own routine of exercise through such things as water therapy, and knows that if she hadn’t, she would be miserable.

“What I have really learned from my own experience, as well as my friends, is how important exercise, movement, not gaining weight, all of those things are, to function,” said Eorio. “If you have MS, chances are your muscles are impaired due to the course of the disease, where maybe they’re weaker or you’re fatigued, or all of your symptoms get worse when you get overheated, that’s just true for many people with MS.”

Eorio has worked closely with Joe Gieck, former UVa head athletic trainer, since 1990 and credits him with her turn-around to want to live a healthy lifestyle. She does the majority of her exercise in an eight-foot therapy pool and runs into a water jet, allowing her to reduce the weight on her legs. At times, Eorio noticed the difference when circumstances prevented her from keeping up with her program.

When asked how her life would be different if she failed to be as active and determined as she is and has been, Eorio thought back to those times when she was unable to exercise.

“I’ve already shown it to myself, the first thing I’d do is gain weight,” admitted Eorio. “That’s a huge problem because with weak muscles, now try to move around with five more pounds, let alone 20 more pounds, 50 more pounds, 100 more pounds. I don’t like to be hungry, so I’d have to watch my diet, and I wouldn’t be able to do everything I do. So, I think there’s a really good chance that I would be so sedentary that I would gain weight and would’ve lost a great deal of muscle power.”

The inaugural winner in 2004, Richard Bogan, still has a copy of the article that honored him hanging on his wall. He uses it as a reminder of how far he came in his journey to shed pounds and be healthy. In 2003, Bogan weighed more than 300 pounds and had a hard time breathing and just getting from one place to another. He had unbearable knee pain and was given high blood pressure medicine by his doctor to combat his high cholesterol and poor diet. All of that changed during a walk with his family on a vacation at Virginia Beach.

“I think we ended up walking two or three miles that day on the boardwalk, and it felt really good,” Bogan said. “The next day I felt like I had really done something, and that was quite a feat with that much weight on my body. That kind of prompted me, looking back on it, to do something. That got me motivated and I guess it was a year later when the award came around. That’s when I dropped 133 pounds and was walking like a fiend.”

Bogan admits that having three young children, along with his demanding job as district director for the Boy Scouts of America, has limited his walking time over the years. But he says he’s not giving up, and that he’s determined to get back on track and better his situation again.

“I’ve actually put weight back on, lost it again, put it back on, and right now I’m back going in the right direction, but the battle continues all the time,” he said. “The temptations to not get up and go walking as much as I would hope to will always make it a tough battle.”

Even though 42-year-old Bogan does not attend Weight Watchers meetings anymore, he still uses the knowledge that he gained at the meetings and applies it when there’s a temptation to slip. Bogan said he wished he had a magical formula to convince people how to think that way, but unfortunately it’s different with each individual and they have to find it within themselves.

“There I was out today having lunch and I kind of knew what my points were, I’m always kind of counting points in my head,” said Bogan. “You have to want to make the change, you really do. I think that goes for weight loss or any other kind of health, whether it’s to stop smoking or anything else, you’ve got to want it from the inside. You can’t argue somebody into it — you can’t convince them to do it if they don’t want to. There’s a lot of other things pulling the other way, there’s always the temptations or what have you, so you just have to kind of find it in yourself to do it.”

Phillips agreed that the ability to turn one’s life around lies within each of us, and making such a change can surely rub off on others.

“If you lose a lot of weight or if you go out and run a marathon, and then you don’t do anything to follow that up, others are kind of not as motivated. If they continually see you going out and running and biking and that you keep the weight off, then they say, ‘Well if he can do it and he can keep doing it, then I can do it too,’” he said. “If you’re comfortable with the way you feel and the way you are, then that’s how you should be. If you’re uncomfortable in the way you feel then you should do what you can to take care of that.”

Harris believes that if someone is thinking about making a change of any kind, that they should not be overwhelmed — taking things a day at a time is the way to go about it.

“It only takes a moment to make a change that could last a lifetime,” Harris said. “Often times people get caught in the moment of ‘I’ve got to make all of these drastic changes,’ and that’s not the case. You can start small and end up with something huge. I would encourage them to take that first small step and to not think about the end, but think about what can I do today that might help me tomorrow. How can I live today better so that tomorrow I can make an even better choice?”