WHEN Jared Fogle walks the streets of midtown Manhattan, people turn and stare. It’s not that the 23-year-old is an up-and-coming Hollywood actor or a supermodel. Fogle’s claim to fame is his lost fat.
Svelte and dark-haired, Fogle is the “Subway Guy” who says he lost 245 pounds in a year by eating low-calorie subs from the fast-food chain. As a result, he’s starring in Subway’s national advertisements, proudly holding up a pair of pants he wore when he was extra plump. Now he’s quit his desk job at American Trans Air to make a small fortune selling his slimming story nationwide as the company’s “It boy.”
And people recognize him everywhere.
“It’s a little disconcerting,” the Indiana native admits as he sits down for lunch at Shelly’s New York. His slender, brunette fianceé, Elizabeth, sits adoringly at his side.
Surprisingly, Fogle is OK with not eating lunch at Subway’s.
“I eat normal food now, I just try to eat smaller portions,” he says somewhat defensively as he digs into a chicken club sans fries, bacon or tomato.
Fogle’s life reads like a fat man’s Cinderella story.
He began gaining weight as a child and really piled on the pounds in high school.
“As soon as I got my driver’s license I’d sneak out and eat my favorite fast foods, like McDonald’s, two or three times a day,” he recalls. “It wasn’t just a little hamburger, either, it was a double quarter-pounder with super-size fries.”
When college rolled around, he didn’t just gain the “Freshmen 15” – he gained the Freshman 150, growing so fat he could hardly move.
“I’d spend the day planning how I could avoid movement,” he recalls sadly. “I’d wait 45 minutes for a bus so I could avoid walking for five minutes.”
Before he enrolled in a class, he was forced to scout out the classroom to make sure it had seats big enough for his rear.
“If the room had chairs with no arm rests, I would sign up,” he recalls.
“If it was lecture-style theater seats, forget it. Even if I could squeeze in, I couldn’t bear the idea of everyone watching me and snickering at me behind my back.”
The few friends he had were too ashamed to invite him out to bars and parties. His dating life was non-existent.
“People were nice to my face, but I’d hear them cracking fat jokes behind my back,” he remembers. “It made me more anti-social and I stopped going out entirely.”
THE scale of Fogle’s weight problem didn’t register with him until he visited a doctor when he was 20 and weighed in at a whopping 425 pounds.
“I knew if I didn’t do something, I would be setting myself up for major health problems later on,” he explains.
Then a Subway opened up next to his campus apartment.
At first, Fogle ordered only high-fat, high-calorie steak and cheese subs. Then one day his eye fastened on the low-calorie menu.
“I did some quick calculations and realized if I only ate Subway low-fat subs, that would only be about 1,000 calories a day,” he explains.
So, starting in March 1998, Fogle went on his “Subway diet.” He skipped breakfast. For lunch, he had a six-inch turkey sub (minus the cheese, mayo, and oil) with Baked Lay’s potato chips and a Diet Coke, and, for dinner, a foot-long veggie sub with Diet Coke.
Did he ever get bored?
“I was on a mission,” he says. “I was so sick and fed up with myself, I knew I had to do something. Plus, it helped that I saw results really quickly. Within a few days, my clothes were looser.”
Fogle decided not to weigh himself for three months and, when he did, he was astounded: he’d lost almost one hundred pounds.
“It was incredible,” he recalls. “I actually had the stamina to walk to class.”
During the next eight months, he lost another 150 pounds and met Elizabeth. “She was my first girlfriend, so I was really nervous,” he says shyly. “No one had ever wanted to date me before.”
Fogle says he has since kept weight off by keeping to a normal diet of about 2,200 calories a day.
DESPITE Fogle’s success, nutrition experts say they’re skeptical about the lasting success of his “Subway” diet.
“It sounds like a classic case of someone who is compulsive about food transferring that compulsion to Subway,” says a prominent Manhattan diet doctor.
Other nutritionists are troubled that Fogle’s “Subway” diet cut out several crucial food groups.
“Where’s his fruit? Where’s his calcium? There are some major nutritional deficiencies here,” says Keith Ayoob of the American Dietetic Association.
Subway doesn’t directly endorse Fogle’s diet.