Losing it

The best time to get someone to do something is when his or her psyche has been completely shattered. 

As a former special investigator with counter intelligence, 58-year-old Lew Wagner knew this to be true, but he still wasn’t prepared when his own moment came. 

“Imagine being on the top of a very tall cliff and then pushing yourself off,” Wagner said. “That’s kind of what it felt like. Being told I was diabetic and being told I was going to die were the two final nails in the coffin that told me I better get my act together.” 

Wagner weighed more than 300 pounds when he was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. It was then that he finally decided, after many failed weight-loss campaigns, to lose 130 pounds and reach his goal of a 170-pound weight. 

After speaking with a nutritionist and researching online, Wagner created a set of spreadsheets to keep track of both his diet and his daily exercise. It started with eating smaller portions, eating less and eating more sensible foods, and then he began adding more and more exercise. 

“By recording all this information, I can see over time how I have progressed,” Wagner said. “Fortunately for me, my body was responding to it. It was starting to wake back up.” 

After a while, he could walk mile after mile in Greystone Farms where he lives, and he could even manage to do some push ups, something he hadn’t been able to do in years. He would average eating about 1,200 to 1,400 calories a day, walking 150 miles a month and losing two to three pounds a week. 

He eventually joined a Fitbit forum online and noticed there were many other people out there asking the same questions he had initially. 

“When I started sharing my tale, they said, ‘Wow, Lew, that’s inspiring,’” Wagner said. “I heard hundreds of people telling me,‘That’s inspiring Lew.’” 

Writing a book, he thought, would help him share his motivational story with a larger audience, and that idea became stronger on Aug. 22.

As he stepped onto his medical scale that morning, Wagner thought he would finally hit his weight-loss goal. He moved one bar over to the 150-pound mark, and he moved the other over to 20 pounds. He watched as the scale settled down to the bottom. He was lighter than 170 pounds. 

“It was 5 o’clock in the morning, and I wanted to scream and cry and run around like a banshee, but my wife was asleep in the next room,” Wagner said. “ I said, ‘I’ll hold off on my war whoop. My book is my war whoop, and so if any body else can lose weight because of this book, we can both have our war whoop together.” 

Now that Wagner has achieved his goal, he still plans to continue living the lifestyle that got him there. Over his almost-10-month weight loss journey, and he found he could shed pounds without eating like a rabbit. Today he is thinking about writing a second book on how to maintain a healthy weight. 

“There were a lot of lessons learned in that book that I’ve done that are going stay with me the rest of my life, and we’re going to live that way our whole time now,” Wagner said. 

Wagner’s book Losing it: My Weight-Loss Odyssey is available on Amazon.com.