John is a big guy, nice looking, carrying 290-some pounds on his 6'4" frame -- about the same as when he was playing high school football. He has trim brown hair and mustache and the direct, thoughtful gaze of someone who thinks about what he says before he says it. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about him--until you hear what he's been doing for the last 14 months: Since enrolling in the Rice Diet Program on January 11, 2000, John has lost over 360 pounds.

He is amazingly matter-of-fact about his feat. "A lot of people ask me for secrets. Well, there is no secret," he says. "It's just a matter of doing it. I've worked hard all my life. This is just another hard job to get done. There's not any other choice. If you're not going to do it, you might as well go home."

John was born on July 14, 1950 in a small, tight farming community of four or five hundred, centered around the co-op grain elevator. It’s a stone's throw from where he and his brothers now run the family farms. Hog farming is hardly an armchair job; surely it was hard to meet the physical demands, carrying so much weight? John considers this for a moment, then shakes his head.

"My weight was always up and down. Most of the time I never let it bother me. I played a lot of basketball a few years ago, softball for about 15 years, really very successfully. I was about 350 pounds and accustomed to carrying weight around. But the last two or three years it got progressively worse. I was able to haul grain, but the actual physical work, feeding the hogs and things like that, became very, very difficult. Jobs that shouldn't have been that tough turned into major challenges."

Then about a year and a half ago, John injured his knee, which further restricted his mobility, and the weight began piling on. He tried different kinds of diets, with mixed success.

"About two months before I came here, I'd lost probably 30-40 pounds on my own. I thought my brothers and sisters would say something, but nobody even noticed. I was really disappointed." He laughs ruefully. "I guess when you're that big, losing a little weight is kind of like throwing a deck chair off an ocean liner."

John's increasing immobility began to affect his social and work life. He quit going to the coffeehouse and tavern in town where the farmers gather to talk and keep in touch. Sitting at the tables made his knee hurt, and even walking across the parking lot from the truck had become a challenge. Then there was the end-of-harvest turkey barbecue, he recalls, when he found himself unable to get up from the picnic table without help from bystanders. A wince of pain crosses his face at the memory.

"You get to the point where you just don't want to fight it any more," he says. "You decide it's a hopeless case."

So what changed his mind, and how did he end up at the Rice House?

"I think what set things in motion was when I fell off my bed. All of a sudden I woke up and was falling to the floor, and I thought I'd broken my foot. I lay there and thought, if I have to get a cast on, I won’t even be able to care for myself."

He was so scared of the possibility that he put off going to the doctor for several days, just sitting around the house hurting and feeling sorry for himself. Finally his brothers came to the house and confronted him.

They said, 'Do you want to go on, the way this is?' I said no, so we started looking around."

John’s sister-in-law, who is a Duke alumna, knew about the Rice Diet Program and its successes. The family had brought it up several times over the past few years, but John was doubtful about going so far away from the farm. He was holding out for something closer to home.

"But there’s really nothing else that claims to do what this program does," he says, "So I looked it up on the Internet. It still seemed like a long way away—it’s about a 26-hour drive—but I said, yep, maybe so. We’ll try it. I think I first thought that I was going to come out for 30 days or so."

Continues on page 2

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