From 415 pounds to a fitness motivator

On a cold Friday afternoon in January, Roman Grandy ever so lightly lobbed a question at the Norfolk probation officer across the desk from him.

"How much do you want to lose?"

"Fifty pounds," Jameka Patrick shot back. "But I want to lose 20 pounds pretty fast - in the first three months."

She paused, then added, "I want to be motivated. And have a fit lifestyle."

On her desk sat a several-page-long contract. If she signed, she would owe Grandy several hundred dollars.

"What do you expect from me?" Roman gently asked.

"I expect you to help me lose 50 pounds!" she said. "To be a motivator. To show me not only how to lose it, but how to maintain a weight loss."

Roman grinned a boyish grin and nodded. Check, check and check. They talked schedules, Roman sympathetic to the time constraints facing a 34-year-old single mother who works full time and also is in graduate school. He politely laid out a plan of attack - lots of cardio and lots of it outdoors.

"I'm a complainer," Jameka confessed.

"I'm a totally different person out there," Roman warned, a little more force in his tone. "If you have a medical issue that needs to be addressed, fine. But if you are out there saying, 'I don't like this' or, 'I don't like that,' there is no question, there are some things you will have to bite the bullet on.

"I'm going to be honest - it will take will, discipline and hard work."

Will. Discipline. Hard work.

Five years ago, at 415 pounds, Roman Grandy dwelled in a cavelike place where none of the above existed. It was a world of Oreos, fried pork chops, deep despair and self-loathing. Roman, now 35, had been headed that way for decades.

His mother, Gloria Grandy, recalls that as a boy, "He just liked to eat." His sisters often spoiled him - the youngest of five children and the only boy - with treats at the store.

Later, he never developed an affinity for sports, as so many of the boys in his Huntersville neighborhood did. Instead, he and his lone childhood friend, who was also overweight, favored snacks and video games.

"I'd always ask for no ice," Roman said, "so I could get more soda."

By junior high, his mother was buying his clothes in the men's department at J.C. Penney. At Norview High in Norfolk, his weight anchored him at the rank of loner. He never had a date, never had a close friend, never joined a club.

On a hot summer day a couple of years after graduation, Roman waited in a long, long line at Busch Gardens to ride the spider, only to be turned away by the attendant because the safety bar couldn't contain all of him. As Roman waddled from the ride to the gate, wiping his sweat with the washcloth he carried everywhere, he felt all the normal people's eyes upon him, and he knew that they were thinking he was a flabby freak, a loser.

Roman remembers it as the most humiliating moment of his life.

"I tried. I tried. I even went as far as eating and vomiting. I tried just water." He tried eating nothing at all.

And each time he failed, sinking deeper into his own abyss. He considered suicide.

He got a job with a paving contractor, light physical work. Mornings, he'd lie in bed trying to think of even the smallest good thing about the day ahead. Fridays were easy; they meant he wouldn't have to face the world for two whole days.

If someone asked him to, say, go to the mall, he'd mostly decline, dreading the prospect of squeezing in and out of a car and the stares from strangers. When he did buy clothes, he hovered at the XXXXXXL racks and then stretched the clothes out when he got home. Still they didn't fit.

On one of those shopping trips, he ran into his childhood snacking buddy. Equally overweight, his friend was trailing an oxygen tank. A few months later, Roman's mother said that his friend had died of a heart attack.

"I realized," Roman said, "that he had literally eaten himself to death."

It was cold that first day in 2003, but Roman, who lives in Norfolk, willed himself onto the Booker T. Washington High School track and started not walking, but trotting. He knew he must look ridiculous, the fat guy flopping around the track, but he shut it out, shut it out, shut it out of his head.

Other people on the track - athletes and exercisers - passed him. He forced himself to stay within himself.

"They lapped me many times. That's what I tell my clients now - don't compare yourself to no one else."

He kept going back to the track. He stopped the abusive ritual of eating an entire package of Oreos in a couple of hours. He gave up his beloved fried pork chops. He learned to love vegetables. He dropped 20 pounds, then 20 more. People started to notice, but he was oddly immune to his own progress.

Then, one day his collar bones emerged, framing his face like a stronghold of hope. He examined them in the mirror, firm curves of solid bone rising from once pudgy flesh. Soon afterward, he saw his wrist bone for the first time in his life.

"I knew I wanted it then."

Several sizes smaller, he joined the Norfolk YMCA. He read relentlessly about fitness, set out to attack specific muscles - biceps, quads, obliques - and surreptitiously studied other guys' movements, still too ashamed of his own body to request help.

Like his bone structure, other changes were coming into sharper focus as he neared 230 pounds.

"Women were taking a second look. When you're 400 pounds, no one is taking a second look, except to joke."

Somewhere along the way, Roman realized that he enjoyed lifting weights, running six miles, getting out of bed in the morning. He found a new job - with the Norfolk Department of Public Works. He's one of the guys who jump off the truck a million times a day to pick up bags of yard debris.

That job gives him enough flexibility in his schedule that he can keep working out his own body and do what he believes is his calling: spread the gospel of fitness, particularly to those who are obese.

He's certified by the International Sports Sciences Association as a personal trainer. He's started his own personal fitness company, Complete Body Concepts, and he zips from Norfolk to Chesapeake to Virginia Beach in his SUV to meet clients, his rice cakes, peanut butter and celery sticks in the seat beside him in case he gets hungry, size 62-inch-waist pants in the back seat, in case he gets weak.

Which he won't.

This fall, Roman hopes to have those pants framed and hanging in his own fitness studio. He plans to upgrade his certification to include training youth, and to get some formal nutritional training.

That, combined with his own odyssey, will have him leading others - particularly those who are extremely overweight - out of the cave of obesity. When he meets new clients and they don't think they can, he reaches back into the abyss. He shows them pictures. He knows they can.

"It's different for a thin person," he said. "They've never been where you've been. I know what it's like to squeeze into a car, to squeeze out of a car.

"I went through hell, I cried tears. But I made it."

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697 lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com