Rickey's Retrofit Success Story

I was always large. I was always "big guy." I was also always a reader, someone who wanted to know everything about a topic of interest. So, I began reading a good deal about fat acceptance and obesity awareness. A lot of things written on these topics really speak to me. I hate the shame I felt at being so large. I hate that people shame others for their size and I empathize with the belief that we should respect and love others for who they are and who they choose to be. I know and believe that some people can be happy at 300 or 500 pounds. I envied them.

But, at least in my case, I didn't want to be that weight. And I knew that, try though I did for decades, I could never just accept myself at that weight. It seems silly to me that I couldn't, because I can do pretty much anything that I want to do. And yet I realized that if I didn't radically change my frame of mind, I would continue to grow.

Realizing that I couldn't be happy with myself at that weight seems, in hindsight, to have been the turning point for me. I decided that I was sick of trying and failing to be happy as a 300-plus pound person. I tried losing the weight on my own, and I had some success. But, immediately after losing it, I gained most of it back and saw 300 on the scale again. I freaked out.

So I started researching surgeries. I read about lap-bands; I looked at gastric bypass; I looked at horribly-named fat farms and pills and starvation and 8 million other options. And then someone forwarded me an article from The Atlantic about B.F. Skinner, cognitive behavioral therapy, and weight loss. The article spoke to me at just the right moment, when I had decided that I needed to completely change my relationship to food and my thoughts about "accepting" myself at that weight. I knew enough about weight loss to know that if I truly changed my mindset and my relationship to food, then I could lose weight. Even then, I knew that losing weight was very simple, it just wasn't easy. If I could learn how to make the simple become easy, I could avoid the need for surgery and the attendant risks and long-term health challenges it presented.

Retrofit was mentioned in that article as a company pioneering this type of change. I called that very day, and my life is permanently changed because of it. I began the Retrofit program in May of 2012, and I recently concluded a year of revelation and change. I began the Retrofit program at about 290 lbs. I lost 20% of my body weight in my first 15 weeks using the program. I am now down 90 pounds and I've lost over 31% of my body weight, while maintaining virtually all of the lean mass I had at the beginning. I reached this goal about three months ago, and I haven't gained a pound since then. Three years ago, when my scale read 340, I never allowed myself to dream that I could look down and see anything under 250, let alone 200. Everything is possible again.