Jim Leach was just a youngster, no older than eight, when he saw Bob Murray doing a radio broadcast in front of the K-Mart on Clear Lake. Murray had a portable deejay booth–turntables and microphone–and little Leach was instantly enthralled. He realized he now had the answer to every adult’s favorite question, “Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“That was a pivotal moment for me, it really was,” Leach says. “I thought–Man how cool is that! It stuck very vividly with me.”
And sure enough, Leach grew up to be a broadcaster just like Murray. These days, they both host news talk shows on WMAY, 97.9 AM–Murray from noon to 3 p.m., and Leach, the news director, from 3 to 6 p.m.
But Leach followed Murray’s footsteps in more ways than one. Murray has been obese most of his life, and was already close to 300 pounds when Leach first saw him. He eventually reached a peak weight of 420 pounds. Leach, meanwhile, grew up and went to college, where he double-majored in mass communications and pizza consumption. By the time he became news director at WMAY, Leach weighed more than 350pounds.
Then, about a year ago, something amazing happened. Murray, 55, signed up for a liquid fast program. A few months later, 38-year-old Leach joined a diet group. Now Leach has lost more than 100 pounds, and Murray has lost more than 200. Between them, they’ve lost 317 pounds–or, as Leach puts it, “Either a whole other talk show host, or two to three unpaid interns.”
So how’d they do it?
Leach is losing weight the same way he gained it: by making choices about the food he eats. Used to be, his choices were which toppings to put on his pizza. Pepperoni? Sausage? Oh heck, let’s get both.
Leach grew up as the chubby child of chubby parents. He married a chubby woman, and they lived happily on Hamburger Helper, pasta, and fried chicken–not fatally bad food choices, but Leach ate immense portions.
“And frankly, it probably got worse after we had kids,” Leach says, “just because that fast food is so easy, and you grab some for the kids on the way home, and, oh, we’ll get some for ourselves.”
Weekdays, he would be too busy to eat breakfast. So by lunchtime, he was ready for a couple of hamburgers, large fries, and a regular pop in the drive-through lane of some fast-food joint. An afternoon snack was a candy bar at a convenience store. Supper might be pizza–an entire medium size pie with two meat toppings. And throughout the day he would drain a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew–regular, not diet–which has 258 grams of sugar, 917 calories.
“That’s a lot of sugar and crud,” Leach admits. “And when I say crud, I mean heaven. Regular Mountain Dew–that’s like crack, almost, it’s so addictive.”
His lifestyle didn’t help.
“I’ll be honest: Although the food that I ate was bad, the biggest problem was that I was entirely sedentary,” Leach says. “Doing the job I do, I spend a lot of time sitting behind a computer, sitting behind a microphone, sitting in my car driving to various things that I’m covering. What I was eating was bad, but not moving was worse.”
Still, he couldn’t find a reason to change. Aside from being unable to ride most roller-coasters or fly on Southwest Airlines without buying an extra ticket (he seems a little bitter about the airline thing), he had no complaints. He was healthy, he was agile, and he didn’t much care what people thought. He wasn’t even embarrassed to go swimming in public.
“Maybe it’s the line of work I’m in, but I have a fairly high threshold for self-consciousness,” Leach says.
He tried dieting a time or two. Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a general assignment reporter at WICS Channel 20, a consultant told him he didn’t have much of a future in the biz due to his “look.” Leach knew he meant obesity. So he tried Weight Watchers.
“I felt like I was eating Styrofoam,” he says. “It’s like, why am I doing this to myself? I mean, yes, I’ll live longer, but you call this living?” He tried exercising, but broke his foot and got out of the habit. He never went back to the gym.
As his weight climbed to 360 pounds, Leach barely noticed. “It didn’t bother me nearly as much as it bothered other people,” he says.
Then one day his wife, Lisa, made a suggestion. The way Leach tells it, his wife said, “Hey, let’s try going on diet,” and he said OK.
The way Lisa Leach tells it is exactly the same, except she doesn’t leave out the part about this being the 100th time. “I think his reaction was probably–OK, here we go again,” she says. They had dieted together before–countless times in their 11-year marriage–and it was always the same: Diet, lose some weight, then start eating again. Neither of them thought this time would be any different.
But Lisa Leach was inspired by a co-worker who had joined Weight Watchers. Aside from Jim’s casual fling with Weight Watchers in the 1980s, the Leaches had never tried a real weight-loss program together. They attended their first Weight Watchers meeting last June.
This time, Leach says, it was different, “more user-friendly” than he remembered from the 1980s. They got a nifty slide-rule device to help them calculate “points” for different foods, and discovered they’d been consuming about 50 points per meal. To get down to something more like 27 points per day, they began exploring the world of healthier eating.
Lisa Leach coaxed her husband into trying new foods, some of which were more successful than others. “The most amazing thing was veggie burgers,” she says. “Anyone that knows him knows he’s so picky. If it’s not pizza and pasta, well, he really didn’t eat much besides that. But I kept telling him how good veggie burgers are, and he finally tried a little bite of one. Now he loves them.”
Leach agrees: healthy food doesn’t necessarily taste like Styrofoam anymore. “One of the keys to this is that fat-free technology has come a long way,” Leach says. “Turkey pepperoni, I think, is better than the regular stuff, if you want to know the truth.”
He lost seven and a half pounds his first week on the program. By August, he had lost 50. By January, 50 more, including 6 pounds during Christmas week.
The reaction he gets in public has kept him going. People who remember what he looked like 100 pounds ago tend to say, “Oh my god! You’re so skinny!” which Leach finds a bit ironic. “If they were meeting me for the first time ever,” he says, “they would probably say oh my god, you’re sort of a blob.”
So he’s still on the program, and now exercising too, using a treadmill and a stair-step machine at home. He noticed that shoveling snow was much easier this winter than last.
“At 248 now, according to charts, at my height, I’d have to lose another 50. If I even got to 220, I’d feel better than I’ve felt my whole adult life,” Leach says. “I’ll take it further than that. I mean, I’ll take it as far as I can go.”
Lisa Leach has lost 74 pounds and gone from a dress size of 28 down to a 16. Both Leaches are relishing the adventure of buying clothes in regular department stores and are looking forward to riding roller coasters at Six Flags this summer.
Ask Bob Murray to describe the benefits of his 200-pound weight loss, and his answer is poignant in its simplicity: “I like being able to walk into a room and just be a guy walking into a room,” he says. “I’m no longer ‘the fat guy’ walking into a room.”
He has been “the fat guy” practically all his life. Even as a child growing up on his grandparents’ farm, Murray was obese. He was playing in his room one day when the family doctor dropped by to see someone else in the household. When the doctor noticed Murray, he told his grandparents to bring him in for an office visit.
“Supposedly he conducted some tests and decided I had a thyroid problem,” Murray recalls. “Never had one since!” The doctor prescribed diet pills, “which in those days were just pure speed,” Murray says. He was 120 pounds at the time, and only 6 years old.
The diet pills helped him drop 30 pounds within a couple of months, and the doctor switched him to a thyroid medication. Murray took that for a year. When he stopped, the weight returned.
He didn’t try dieting again until 8th grade, when he was preparing to try out for 9th grade football. He weighed, by this time, more than 200 pounds. His grandmother put him on a sensible diet, and he lost some 50 to 60 pounds and made the freshman football squad. But as soon as the season was over, he started eating again and by springtime had gained back almost 40 pounds. The next season the coach invited him to be the equipment manager. “I just resigned myself to being overweight,” Murray says.
Looking back, he knows why he was such a fat kid. He was using food for comfort. His parents had a stormy, abusive relationship, and divorced by the time he was 4. His mother wanted to be out on her own, and his father no longer wanted anything to do with him. So they sent him to live with his grandparents.
“I felt abandoned by my mother,” he says.
He found solace in his grandmother’s cooking. “Farm food,” as he calls it, consisted of lots of fried meats, mashed potatoes made with whole milk and real butter, gravy over everything, and fruit pie topped with ice cream for dessert.
“My grandmother could bake like nobody’s business!” Murray says. “She would make an apple pie that you swore–this is the best apple pie of all time.”
But he’s not exactly nostalgic for this pie. “She used lard in it!” he says.
He made another attempt to diet his senior year of high school and dropped from 320 to 230 existing on broiled chicken and salad. “I was back with my mother. She had remarried for the third or fourth time, and she liked me now that I was a teenager,” he recalls. But after he dropped the 90 pounds, he went back to eating his regular food, which was anything and everything he wanted. The weight returned.
He didn’t make another serious attempt at dieting until he was well into his 30s and working as a deejay at 1450 WCBS. As the “morning guy,” he was offered Nutrisystem weight loss products for free in return for talking about them on the air. He went from 335 to 225. “They supplied you with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I just stuck to it and lost the weight,” Murray says.” When I came off it, I said, ‘I’ve conquered my weight problem!’ and boom! right back to what I was. I yo-yo’d back up to 300 pounds.”
Whenever he wasn’t on a diet, Murray ate McDonald’s. Lots and lots and lots of McDonald’s. “There were days when I’d start out with a McMuffin and hashbrowns. Then late morning, a couple of burgers, fries, and a milkshake–that was to keep me going. When it came time for actual lunch, I’d get a Big Mac and a large order of fries.
“I’d come home and–before a large supper, because my wife’s an excellent cook–I would eat a bag of corn curls, or a big bag of Doritos with dip. This was to get my appetite going for supper. Then I’d sit down and have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, maybe some green beans, and then dessert–pie, cake, ice cream, whatever. Sometimes all three! I’m not exaggerating.”
In 1990, he tried another diet–the Optifast liquid diet–and lost 77 pounds in 11 weeks. “I couldn’t stuff food in my mouth fast enough when I got off that diet,” Murray says.
He quit smoking in 1993, at about the same time he started a brutal schedule that kept him on some form of airwaves or another from 5 in the morning (doing weather forecasts for 10 different radio stations) until 10:30 at night (doing weather for WAND-TV), with plenty of breaks in between for eating.
“I’d start the day off with a big breakfast,” he says. “My wife can fix a country breakfast like nobody can. I’m talking about a couple of fried eggs, bacon and sausage, pancakes on the side, four pieces of toast with peanut butter and jelly. I mean, I would have a gigantic breakfast.
“Then right before I left for the television station, I would have a big lunch–a couple of sandwiches, some Hostess Twinkies or cupcakes, a big glass of milk and maybe some ice cream,” he says. After the 6 o’clock news, he would return home for supper, which was like the meals his grandmother used to prepare on the farm. Back to the station for the 10 o’clock news, then finally home around 11 p.m.
“And some nights, I would come home and reward myself for working so hard with almost a full meal,” he says.
Between 1994 and 2000, Murray went from about 260 to off the scale. Literally. He couldn’t weigh himself, even at the doctor’s office, because the scales there stopped at 350 pounds. But there were plenty of signs he was overweight: He wore size 62 pants with size 4X shirts. His suit coat was size 60 “portly long.” His blood pressure was 170 over 110. He snored loudly and showed signs of sleep apnea. His right knee was aching constantly. He couldn’t fit into most armchairs. And his new La-Z-Boy reclliner, guaranteed to last a lifetime, was so crushed by his weight that it had to be fixed. Twice.
“I was miserable,” he says. “Scared and miserable.”
After speculating about his weight over the air, he got some bad news.
“Humphrey Market called and said they had a scale for weighing produce that went up to 1000 pounds,” Murray says. “So I went over there and weighed myself, and the scale said 420. It hit me just like a bolt of lightning.”
He finally realized that he was like an alcoholic, only instead of drinking alcohol he ate food. He calls himself a foodaholic. “I eat when I’m happy, I eat when I’m sad, and I eat when I just don’t have any emotions at all going on,” he says. “There were times when I’d wake up in the middle of the night and eat a bag of potato chips. There were times I don’t even remember eating.
“There were times when I wished I were an alcoholic. Because I could have corrected that, I thought. You can get away from alcohol–just don’t go where they serve alcohol. Don’t associate with people who drink alcohol. But food, you’re bombarded.”
Then a year ago in January he stumbled across a new program. He was interviewing school board member Gerald Goldblatt, and during a break Goldblatt mentioned that he was starting a new diet. It was offered through his doctor’s office, and it was a liquid fast. Instantly, Murray knew this was the program for him. “I knew the only way I could get going was to give up food. Pure and simple. I had to go cold turkey,” he says, “and I couldn’t do it on my own.”
The program Murray used is called Health Management Resources, and it is available locally through Dr. Norman Soler. There are different programs for different weight-loss goals. Murray chose the liquid fast. The only problem was that the classes are small, and they were already full. Murray spent five weeks on the waiting list.
He used that time to “power down” his eating habits. He gave up caffeine, which he says only excites his appetite, and started weaning himself off the junk food. He weighed in at HMR at 412.
His first week on the diet, he was allowed five supplement drinks per day. Using a powder mixed with water, he could make himself several flavors of shakes or a concoction that tastes like chicken soup. The only thing he was allowed to consume besides the supplements was water–three to four quarts per day–and sugarless gum. He attended a group meeting and saw the doctor once a week, and had his blood chemistry checked every other week.
By the end of the first week, he had lost 19 pounds. By the end of the third week, he was born again for HMR. “I told my wife, ‘I am never even going to consider going off this diet. It works.’ And she could see it,” Murray says.
Sandy Murray had never talked to her husband about his weight, never tried to influence his eating habits in any way. “So many people judge other people from the outside. I knew the inside of him,” she says.
She “won” Murray almost 20 years ago when he was auctioned off for charity as a celebrity date. Luckily for Sandy, he was not auctioned by the pound. “I would’ve had to borrow money,” she says. “He must’ve weighed around 325. But I would never try to change anybody around me, nor would I expect them to try to change me.”
She did change, though, when Murray began his liquid diet. She decided to stop cooking anything that would create an aroma in their house. Even at Thanksgiving, she didn’t make stuffing or pastries. She lived on vegetable soup. “I’m not going to sit there and eat a piece of cake in front of Bob,” she says. (She has dropped from a size 12 to a size 8).
Murray didn’t just diet; he also started exercising. He went to the Decatur Y, where he could use a treadmill that calculated the calories he burned. The first week he tried walking, he burned 300 calories. That was his total for the week.
But as he stuck with the diet and increased his exercise, the pounds started to disappear. Sharon Rudin, the business manager at the radio group that includes WMAY, says the transformation was amazing. “It was like somebody had an eraser and just kept erasing weight off him,” she says.
The fact that people noticed, especially his granddaughter, kept Murray motivated. “People were paying me compliments,” he says. “I was really looking good.”
After 35 weeks of the liquid diet, Murray achieved his weight goal of 215 pounds. He celebrated the HMR way–with a baked potato. It was his first real food in more than eight months, and it was so enjoyable his description is downright unprintable.
Over the next few weeks, he followed HMR’s rigid “re-feed” regimen, still drinking the supplements and introducing only healthy solid foods, a few at the time. Now he’s on a maintenance diet that requires him to have five servings of fruit plus five servings of vegetables every day. By his own choice, he still uses the supplement drinks in place of breakfast and a morning snack. He isn’t worried about relapsing into his old Twinkie-filled ways. “I don’t want to go off the diet,” he says. He has maintained his weight loss for three months now.
He hits the gym at least six days a week and burns 4,000 to 5,000 calories per week using the treadmill at its steepest incline. His blood pressure has dropped to 112 over 68, his knee no longer aches, he has stopped snoring, and he recently had his watchband shortened for the fourth time. Last weekend, he purchased a pair of Bermuda shorts.
The metamorphosis has astounded everyone around him.
“I gotta tell you, I’ve never seen a more positive human being in my life,” says T.J. Hart, WMAY’s morning talk show host. “His attitude toward everything is just one thousand percent brilliant now. Man, what a surge of forward momentum he has.”
Murray’s wife Sandy says she has noticed that her husband no longer sees himself as fat. “In the past, when he’s lost weight, he continued to see himself as a fat person, because there was always fat on his body somewhere. This is the first time in his life there’s no fat. He can stand to look in the mirror now.
“Before he might have had the appearance of being happy, but you knew he wasn’t happy with himself,” she says. “Now he’s happy inside and out.”
This article appears in May 1-7, 2003.
