VALDOSTA — Moody Air Force Base Civil Service worker William J. Fowler walks five miles to and from work each day. He walks during his lunch break. In his free time, he jogs. He rides a bicycle, he does yoga and he takes cardio-fitness classes.

He doesn’t eat sugar. In anything. And he stays away from processed meat and vegetables, consuming only fresh ingredients.

Fowler is about five-foot-eight and weighs about 150. It’s hard to imagine that five years ago, he tipped the scales at 300 pounds and was fighting for his life.

Fowler served in the Air Force for 25 years, and managed to control his weight for most of his career in spite of his sedentary home life. He would come home, put away a big evening meal and settle down in front of the television, moving only to get another helping of ice cream or the remote control, he said.

But when he retired from the Air Force, he began to lose control.

“I started putting on a few pounds here and there, and then in 2007, it really just got out of control,” Fowler said. “I was at my largest, at my heaviest weight ever. I was between 295 and 298, depending on if I’d had the half-gallon of Blue Bell ice cream that night.”

It was not uncommon for Fowler to dip oatmeal cookies into his ice cream while he ate it.

“I constantly over-ate,” Fowler said, “particularly the sugary items. With those types of practices, not exercising that frequently and having a desk job, my weight just skyrocketed.”

The habit began to take its toll when one day Fowler came home from work to the couch and began to feel tightness in his torso.

“It felt like there was an elephant sitting on my chest,” Fowler said. “My heart started pounding, and my wife said, ‘Go to the doctor!’”

At the clinic, his health-care provider told him his heart was in trouble. The damage wasn’t enough to call for surgery, but his heart was enlarged due to high-blood pressure during a long period of time. Doctors measured his blood pressure at about 160/100.

“My blood pressure was so high. In previous visits to the dentist, the dentist couldn’t do dental work,” Fowler said. “The dentist won’t work on a person whose blood pressure was more than 100 on the bottom and 150 on top.”

Fowler returned to his routine, but he soon had another life-threatening situation.

“I was getting weakness in the left side of my body, in my arms and face,” Fowler said. “So I went to the doctor again, and they referred me to the Mayo Clinic, where they told me I had an ischemic stroke.”

Doctors told Fowler he had to control his blood pressure or his condition could become more severe, so he decided to take a hard look at his habits and focus on his weight loss.

The first step was cutting sugar and sugary foods out of his diet. He couldn’t do it all at once, he said, but managed to phase sugar out a few days at a time, and he was ultimately successful. The only sugar he now consumes is in fruits and vegetables.

His second step was exercise, which meant beginning a walking schedule, which was extremely difficult. At first, he could only make it around the Valdosta Middle School track once before he became winded and weak in the legs, he said. But he kept returning to the track to improve.

“I didn’t care if it rained, if it was blistering hot,” Fowler said. “The only thing that sent me in was lightning.”

His distance improved after a while, and he started to feel better. Then he noticed another desirable side effect — the weight started to come off. In 30 days, he lost 10 pounds as a result of combining a walking regimen with a zero-sugar diet.

So he stuck with it. He worked to a distance of about two miles, and he started walking to work.

“I developed a thing that I call eat-and-go,” Fowler said. “I would eat at my desk and then go walk for 30 minutes, eat dinner and then go and walk, and that really helped to accelerate my results.”

It was around this time that Fowler realized that in spite of the exercise, his diet was the true key. He researched health matters, diet and exercise online to try finding the best method for him.

“I’ve been a yo-yo dieter most of my life, so I had to re-think the way I ate,” Fowler said. “I was used to going hungry and then eating a big meal as a reward for starving myself. That’s not the way to go, and it actually adds more body fat and weight.”

Fowler decided to stick with a diet of lean chicken breast, fish, salads, fruits and vegetables, with healthy snacks between meals like almonds or protein shakes. But the diet was not limiting; he ate three full meals a day with two snacks in between, he said.

He also decided to pursue the opposite of his old habit — eat a good breakfast, a big lunch in the afternoon and then a small meal at night, before 6 or 7 p.m. — “so the calories wouldn’t turn into fat stores overnight.”

In the past, he’d eaten a small meal or no breakfast, went hungry throughout the day and had a large meal for dinner including dessert late at night.

Fowler said he learned that a person can be under-weight and still be over-fat. Ideal weight-loss strategies cut down on fat stores as well as overall body weight.

Realizing this, he weighed himself about once a week, paying attention more to how his clothes fit and how he looked in the mirror rather than what the number on the scale read.

Over a matter of time, he added more miles to his walking regimen totaling a maximum of about four hours of walking a day — about 16 miles on a “good day.” Then he decided to start running.

“I started to jog, and slowly but surely, I added in the yoga, which helps stretch me out and keeps me limber, then a cardio-kick aerobics class on base,” Fowler said. “When you’re around people that have the same (fitness) goals, you have the tendency to build camaraderie and it helps you stay on track.”

Fowler works out three times a day now: once for about an hour in the morning, for a half-hour at lunch and for about an hour and a half in the evening.

To this day, Fowler still has residual weakness from the stroke, he said. So he continues to live according to his self-designed fitness philosophy aimed at creating a permanent lifestyle, not a crash diet or 90-day flash workout program.

“My philosophy is this: the diet is absolutely the key,” Fowler said. “Even if you have minimal exercise, the diet should be the main focus (in losing weight).

“Second, I would say people should get away from the concept of a scale. The scale is an indication of everything, including blood, muscle, fat and oils. You can lose five pounds in a few days and it could all be fluid.”

Real body fat loss occurs the same way it was gained, Fowler said — over time as the result of lifestyle choices.

Third, it’s important to be realistic about dietary changes, Fowler said. Eliminate sugar and add fruits and vegetables, which provide healthy amounts of glucose in the blood rather than a burst of sugar. And be wary of fruit juice, which often contains a large amount of high fructose corn syrup, which is processed sugar.

“Your body is a beautiful machine; it will get what it needs to function and survive,” Fowler said.

“Another thing I tell everybody is you have to go to the physician before making big lifestyle changes, to make sure there aren’t any other issues, such as thyroid (disease), or other hindrances that would block people from their goal.”

Fowler said he is considering writing a book or a pamphlet on his struggle, detailing what he learned about health for use by the general public.

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