“Life happened, I guess,” Randy Thomas, 41, says of trying to understand how a former high school athlete and U.S. soldier could get to this point. “I couldn’t overcome my obstacles.” Randy suffered a broken back in 2000. His leg and foot were left partially paralyzed. “I felt this was a huge failure. How do you let yourself get to 420 pounds? I didn’t know how to prevent it.”
He tried on his own to lose weight and get back in shape. There were times he lost weight and times it came right back on – the scale moving like a metronome as he swung between 420 and 360 pounds. “I came to the end of what I thought I could accomplish on my own,” he adds. He spent his days as an electrician fixing the wiring of houses, realizing the way his body was wired to lose weight needed to be fixed as well.
April of 2013, Randy knew The Center for Bariatrics at Bailey Medical Center was the answer he was looking for after researching his options. “I had to do this or I was going to die,” Randy says of the pivotal moment in his life. Riddled with complications from hypertension and diabetes, taking dozens of pills each day only slowed the deterioration of his health.
“The rest is history,” he says. “I’ve been given an opportunity that I am not going to blow. I feel like I’ve been in prison for 10 years and I’m never going back.”
Today Randy lives his second chance at better health as a personal trainer. Regardless of his client’s own goals, he says the path to reaching those goals is driven first by the mind. “I share with them that you can do what you think you can,” he explains. “Your mind will quit well before your body will.”
To that end, Randy is committed to a successful post-op experience. “Post op results are completely up to a person’s willingness to change old habits,” he shares. That willingness propels him through strenuous workouts every day and each dietary decision he makes. “I follow a strict diet regimented by Rene my dietician. You have to be sick and tired of that which has held you down by poor lifestyle choices.”
Randy’s mind is set on watching his children ages 11 and 15 graduate college one day, get married and established in life. “That’s why I did this – to live longer,” he says frankly. Without this dramatic shift in his health, he was on the same course as the men in his family who all suffered from heart disease. “Today my co-morbidities are gone.”
In addition to helping his clients, he wants to help others faced with the same decision he made in 2013. Randy recently joined the GEAR support group network to not only learn more and connect with other post-op patients, but also to talk to those at the beginning of the program. “I enjoy helping others understand how their health will be different. I take vitamins, that’s it!”