McFit

BY REED WILLIAMS
Media General News Service
Published: June 11, 2008

Chris Coleson was a surfer, a hiker and a two-time most valuable player on his high school soccer team. He weighed about 185 pounds when he got married in 1998.  “After the kids came, she lost her pregnancy weight and I kept mine,” said the 42-year-old New Kent County businessman.

Over the next decade or so, the 5-foot-8-inch Coleson ballooned to about 300 pounds, gaining 45 pounds from last August to November.
Frustrated by a number of false starts with losing weight, Coleson made a bold prediction to his wife, Tricia Sumner — that he could lose weight and do it by eating only at McDonald’s. He chose the fast-food chain partially because its locations are convenient for his busy schedule.
“There was a level of fear after I said that,” said Coleson, who has no affiliation with McDonald’s other than eating every meal there during his diet. “At that point I had to stick with it.”
He eats mostly salads, wraps and fruit, and the occasional cheeseburger without the bun. Coleson dropped from 278 pounds when he started the diet on Dec. 3 to 203 pounds as of Wednesday.

Coleson is a partner for NEIE Inc., a provider of environmental, industrial and engineering clean-up services. The company is based in Massachusetts but has offices in Henrico County. He and his family live in Quinton.

Coleson says that the stress of a busy work schedule and raising a son and daughter left him with no time to exercise. After someone stole a large amount of money from his company last year, his gorging spun out of control.

“I was a stress eater,” he said.

He would eat straight from the refrigerator, sometimes consuming enough for a family meal in one evening. And sometimes, his wife said, she would make school lunches for their children and their father would scarf them down.

“I’d do a lot of grazing,” he said.

Coleson said he got to where he couldn’t fit into a booth at restaurants, could barely tie his shoes and had to sleep sitting up to be comfortable. His children, James and Meghan, would call him old and fat and pound on his belly as a joke. Their dad finally put “OLD-NFAT” on the license plates of his red Porsche Cayman.

Coleson said he was inspired to change his life after hearing about a blind war veteran who rode cross country on a tandem bicycle. He also wanted to improve his health so he’d be around for his kids.

Sometimes it was tough. One of his hardest days was when he was grilling hot dogs at a concession stand. Another time, he had only black coffee while business associates ate dinner at an upscale restaurant downtown.

He kept his receipts from his nearly daily visits to McDonald’s and taped them on the pages of four journals that also include regular entries.

At his request, the Chickahominy Family YMCA started a program called Mission Possible that’s modeled after the TV show “The Biggest Loser.”

For his wife’s 40th birthday in April, Coleson spent $274.18 on McDonald’s food, which he brought to the YMCA for about 35 people (the receipt’s in one of his journals). But the big present for his wife came when he put on his wedding ring, which he had removed from a painful swollen finger seven years ago.

The license plates on Coleson’s white Land Rover now say “MCFIT.” His waist size has dropped from 50 to 36.

He became something of a small-town celebrity in New Kent after a local paper profiled him this year. His wife, with some embarrassment, recalls someone yelling “Mrs. McFit” across a softball field at their daughter’s game.

Sandra Hillquist, who works at NEIE, joined Coleson’s Mission Possible team.

“It kind of inspired me to kind of get a grip on my own weight issues,” Hillquist said, although she added that there was no way she could eat only McDonald’s.

Coleson said he plans to quit the McDonald’s diet on June 19 — Day 200 of his diet — but continue to eat healthier and keep portion sizes under control.
Day 200 comes two days before his 10th wedding anniversary. He’s hoping to weigh 185 by then, his weight when he walked down the aisle. He’s got his work cut out between now and then.

“I’ve got a lot of running to do,” he said.