SC man loses almost 500 pounds. Here’s how he did it
Jared Burger once weighed more than 675 pounds.
Now he’s 200. It’s taken five years.
No fad diet or weight-loss pills for the Greenville floor sander and musician. One step at a time on a treadmill turned into jogging and then running and now riding a street or mountain bike at least 30 miles every day. He’s even taken up gravel racing. He doesn’t eat meat and doesn’t drink the case of PBR he used to every weekend.
He says the key to his success was not thinking of how far the journey, but in splitting it up into smaller goals and celebrating each one.
And he never once doubted he could do it.
Burger lived his preschool years in Greenville, but the family moved to the country, a place called Slabtown, South Carolina.
“I was always a big kid,” he said.
He went to Wren High School and played the drums in some bands, gigging around the community, the life of the party.
His weight had always been up and down. And then snacking, drinking and denial caused it to only go up. He wasn’t that big, he told himself.
He went for a few years of college at TriCounty Tech, hoping to be a history teacher, but money was tight.
Burger went to work for his grandfather’s floor sanding business as his father had done before him. Weekends were for performing and partying.
Then he got to where he didn’t want to go out.
“I was ashamed,” he said.
A friend would ask him to dinner in downtown Greenville and his first thought was he probably couldn’t walk the distance between a parking lot and the restaurant. He played the drums around his stomach that laid on his legs and raised his heavy calf to press the bass pedal with difficulty.
Anytime we went to the doctor, he didn’t know his true weight. The scale topped out at 400.
“I thought I probably weighed 410,” he said.
He couldn’t sleep.
His doctor sent him to a sleep apnea clinic and that’s when he saw he weighed 675 pounds. The doctor said he needed gastric bypass surgery but first he had to lose 150 to 250 pounds.
He knew he wouldn’t have the surgery.
A month passed. He gained more weight. He wore a size 78 pants.
And then at 31 he joined a gym. That first day he felt self conscious. He found a place in a corner and stepped on the treadmill. He managed a quarter-mile. Maybe less.
But he went back the next day and the next and before long he had dropped 50 pounds. Then 100. Once he was sanding a floor with his cousin. Kneeling, he said he had lost 235 pounds. His cousin jumped on his back and said, “Stand up.”
He did.
That was how much weight he used to carry around. He’s down to about 200, wears size 36 pants.
His life is fuller now. He’s going to marry the woman he considers his best friend, opera singer Lindsey Brakhage, in the fall.
He wants to ride in long-distance bike races. And climb mountains. He wants to play in the park with his niece.
“I can do anything I want,” he said.
But now he faces an unexpected consequence of the weight loss. His skin sags. He estimates it weighs 40 to 60 pounds. It causes him to have hernias — he’s had two surgeries in the past two years — and he has to wear compression clothing to ride and add special pedals to his bike.
Village Wrench, a nonprofit bike shop in Greenville, is sponsoring Drop the Rash Bash, a ride and concert, Thursday to raise money for the $19,000 surgery Burger needs.
“It’s all about baby steps,” he said. “Thirty minutes a day can change your life forever.”
