A second chance at life: Student journeys from obesity to become fitness guru

By Katie Saltz

When Patrick Sims was 15 years old he was given a choice —lose weight or die.

Sims was obese, weighing 260 pounds. His doctor told him he had to make a change or his weight would be fatal. Now a certified kinesiology senior at UK, 21-year-old Sims is toned and lean in his 6-foot frame.

Sims brought the passion he found in exercise to UK four years ago and teaches spinning and yoga classes at the Johnson Center, two of the exercises that helped him drop more than 80 pounds in high school.

Sims said he teaches his classes because he wants to share his second chance at life with people and show them it is possible to lose weight and be healthy.

“I want to help people who think they can’t be helped realize that they don’t need medication, they don’t need surgery,” he said. “All they really need is maybe a pair of tennis shoes or a bike. All they need is the desire to do it.”

That desire is something Sims did not always have himself. A junior at North Oldham High School in Louisville, Sims had tried every type of diet and exercise he could, all to no avail. But after that fateful message from his doctor, Sims reluctantly tried a spinning class at his gym in Louisville.

“I remember thinking, ‘an hour in a room on a bike — how boring … ,’ ” he said. “But it was the hardest hour of my life.”

Almost immediately, Sims said he began to shed the weight and he became more and more motivated, upping his workouts from once a week, to five times a week, to eventually exercising twice a day.

Suffering from a binge-eating disorder, Sims said he would eat and eat no matter how full he felt. People with binge-eating disorders use food to try and fill an emotional void, he said.
Now in control of his eating habits, Sims tries to use his story to relate to people in his classes and show them he knows how it feels to be apprehensive about working out.

“I try to share my history with my students as much as possible so they know I’m accessible and I’m approachable, because when you’re the overweight person or the unhealthy person, you don’t approach an athlete and ask them for help because most of them turn their nose up at you,” he said. “But I want them to know that I’ve been there and I know what it’s like.”

One of Sims’ goals is to be the physical education instructor he never had. He said his PE teacher in high school would just roll him a basketball and tell him to go burn off some fat. He is currently working toward becoming certified to teach physical education so he can reach out to unhealthy kids who are intimidated by physical activity.

“The only people who knew your (high school) gym teacher well were athletes and the ones who called him coach,” Sims said. “What about the fat kid who can’t approach the coach and say ‘I’m overweight, I’m unhealthy and I have no money, I can’t go join a gym’ ? … They would never think to go to their PE teacher and say ‘Help me,’ but I want to be that.”

Time and money are precious commodities for college students, and many think they don’t have an hour a day to spend on exercise, Sims said. But he has a response to that attitude.

“I always say to people, you spend 23 hours a day working for somebody else, this is your hour to work for yourself,” he said. “Most people say ‘I don’t have an hour,’ and I want to say ‘You’re right, you don’t have an hour — you have six hours but you waste it on Facebook or Farmville or in front of the television.”

Although Sims said he will probably always have body image issues, he tries to stay positive and teach other people how to use exercise as a stabilizing part of life.

“I’ll always be that fat kid on the inside,” he said. “Exercise is my escape. It’s something to focus my energy towards. It’s constant, it’s dependable and the only person I have to count on is myself. I think it would bring a lot of stability to people’s lives.”

Sims teaches spinning and yoga classes five days a week at the Johnson Center. Any student interested can drop in. A complete list of classes can be found on the Johnson Center Web site, (http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/CampusRec/groupFitness.html).