Amy Barnes from Woodbridge, Va., dropped 340 pounds all on her own. She didn’t have cameras following her to publicize her weight loss, nor did she have plastic surgeons, personal trainers or nutritionists. Barnes created her own weight-loss plan, set her own goals and succeeded.
Her success has given her new opportunities. She now owns her own fitness facility, Inside & O.U.T. Fitness, which was featured on the front cover of Oxygen magazine, she competed in a muscle-fitness competition, and she appeared on many major news shows such as the “Today Show.”
COLLEGIATE TIMES: If you don’t mind me asking, what was your starting weight before you lost 340 pounds?
AMY BARNES: 490 pounds.
CT: Again, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you get to this original weight and what was the cause?
BARNES: I’ve been overweight all my life, never morbidly obese, but I had my first child when I was 21, put on weight after that pregnancy and never really took it off. I don’t ever remember not being on a diet. As long as I can remember from 17 or 18 years old I have been dieting.
Then, I had my second child when I was 24, put on more baby weight and didn’t take it off. I really attribute all of my weight gain to a very abusive relationship I was in from 2000 to the end of 2004, so almost five years. I put on almost 200 pounds in that relationship.
CT: Why did that relationship cause your weight gain?
BARNES: It was both physically, emotionally, mentally and sexually abusing, and I used food as my comfort. I treated my addiction just like some peoples’ addictions to alcohol or drugs. During the course of that relationship, food was the only thing that I had control over. In hindsight and looking back, I realized that food really controlled me. But it was really at the time of my life when that was all I had.
CT: Have you tried to lose weight in the past and failed?
BARNES: Oh my God. I’ve tried every diet. I’ve tried every diet pill, both prescription and non-prescription diet pills, I have tried it. I didn’t care what it did to my insides. If somebody told me I was going to lose weight by taking a pill, I was going to do it. You really lose weight momentarily, but you don’t really get a long-term change. They lose weight, and then they tend to gain it all back again. And so, I did that all my life, and nothing ever really worked. And it just really got to the point where I would try everything, and everything continued to fail, and I just got to the point out of desperation.
CT: When did you truly realize that you needed to lose the weight?
BARNES: Really my wakeup call was about five years ago in 2004. I woke up in a battered women’s shelter with no home, with no car and no job. The state had taken my kids away from me because my abuser had abused my kids. The judge told me in order to get my children back, I needed to get mentally healthy for them. I figured that if I needed to be mentally healthy for my children, then I also needed to be physically healthy for them too.
CT: How did you go about losing weight this time if you had tried everything in the past? What did you do this time to lose the weight?
BARNES: I called it a toolbox. It wasn’t one diet. It wasn’t one specific thing. The first most important thing is to identify the root causes. I have my own company now, and I have what I call the four foundations of — I mean whether it’s losing weight, whether it’s battling some other form of addiction — it is first identifying the root causes to why you’re overeating. If you don’t identify what that is and why you’re doing it, you’re going to continue to fail over, and over, and over. For me it was abuse. For some people it’s stress, some people it’s a bad marriage, for some people it’s boredom. But it’s first identifying why I was overeating. And the second piece is I set realistic, attainable goals. So many people that do this are New Year’s resolution people. They start January first. They join a gym. They think they have to go 100 miles per hour; they have to go two hours a day, six days a week; they’ll never eat potato chips again.
So for me, it was just that small, realistic goal. I set one big goal, and my one big goal was to be able to compete as a body builder on stage. At 500 pounds that seems so completely impossible, but I wanted to make it a big goal. After that I worked at small weekly goals because once you have that sense of accomplishment of achieving that goal each week, then you reset additional goals because you feel some sense of accomplishment.
So, it was starting small. It was exercising three days a week. It would be one weekly goal for exercising and one weekly goal for nutrition. And, it could be as small as I’m going to drink 64 ounces of water each day this week. Or, I’m going to start eating breakfast. Or, I’m going to count my calories, and I’m only going to eat 1,800 calories. I think at the ending point of my struggle with obesity, I was eating anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day. That’s what most people eat in about a week. And for me it was the small realistic goals.
CT: How did you feel emotionally, as well as physically, during the entire process?
BARNES: You’re exhausted. I was almost 500 pounds. Honestly, in the beginning, all I could do was walk around the block. One block, that’s it. And a lot of people think that one block is really nothing. But for me, that was physically all I could do. So yes, there were times when I was completely exhausted. There were times when every muscle and joint in my body hurt. And mentally, my kids were my first motivation.
CT: What’s your weight right now? Do you plan on losing more weight in the future?
BARNES: I’m currently at about 154 pounds. ... I’ve actually just competed in my first competition this past weekend in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. For me, it wasn’t about winning. It was just really to be able to say that I got on stage.
CT: I understand that you were on the cover of Oxygen magazine. How did that come about?
BARNES: My girlfriend submitted my weight loss story to “Oxygen” ... and I got a call from them the first of July, and they said that they were so inspired by my story that they would love to have me come to Toronto and do a photo shoot.
The photo shoot was very overwhelming because I’ve never worn shorts in public. I have never worn a bikini in public. So, during the photo shoot I was not only in shorts, but also a bikini on stage, in front of 35 different people, with a camera. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had, very outside my box of comfort.
A couple weeks later the editor called me and said that I was going to be on the cover. Honestly, my initial response was what clothes did you put me in. We must have had 20 to 30 different clothing changes during the day. And she said the one with the pink top. And I realized the one with the pink top was the one that went with the little, tiny shorts. So, it was a phenomenal experience.