On October 19, Brian Flemming of Canton, Michigan finished the Detroit-Windsor International Half-Marathon. For Flemming, it was a milestone. Since he began his journey to lose weight two years ago, he has lost almost 400 pounds, stopped drinking, and run numerous other races.

It started with the mobile app Draw Something. Flemming was paired up with Jackie Eastham, a woman living outside of London, England. Through playing the game together, the two became friends and eventually chatted more and more, but Flemming never really revealed his weight. He was over 600 pounds, with a serious drinking problem and a serious case of depression. Things weren’t looking good for Flemming. “I didn’t tell her how big I was at first, only bits and pieces, she only saw photos from the neck up.” Eventually, at a low point, he opened up to Jackie and expected sympathy.

Instead, she got angry. “You’re pissing your life up a wall,” she said. She told him he had wasted his life, and stopped talking to him. Eastham has myotonic dystrophy, and in order to keep her symptoms at bay, she has to stay active and healthy—there was no sympathy coming his way from across the Atlantic. Flemming had been overweight since he was young, and attributes some of this to the readily-available junk food in schools. He had spend a good part of a decade on a couch with pizza and vodka, and finally someone came along that made him want to change that.

Flemming didn’t want to lose Eastham, so on October 13, 2012, he quit drinking completely. It was a huge change from the regular fifth of vodka he was drinking a night. It was a struggle, and Flemming didn’t know just how big of a struggle it would be. He suffered cold sweats, couldn’t sleep, and was shaky. Still, he received no sympathy from Eastham, who began to talk to him again. “Jackie was like, ‘Suck it up and deal with it, you’re complaining about shaky hands, there are people with terminal illnesses,’” said Flemming. “She really puts things in perspective for me.”

Cutting out alcohol was just the beginning for Flemming, he then began to eat differently, with the help and encouragement from Eastham. He started making healthier choices when eating out and cut out red meat, a tip he got from Eastham. He did a year without any processed sugar, and cut back his sodium intake. He was starting to feel better, and ordered a scale online that he could get on without breaking. For the first three months of his drastic nutritional change, he lost 100 pounds, almost a pound a day. Everyday he wrote the date, and his weight, and was starting to get motivated. “Watching my weight go down was motivation to keep going,” said Flemming.

Then he started walking. First, just five minutes at home in front of the television. Then he added minutes once he was comfortable, eventually reaching an hour. Flemming could hardly walk up a flight of stairs before he started walking in place. He then began running, using the Couch-to-5K app, which helped him get in shape to start running races. He was still over 300 pounds when he began.

Flemming had to set goals to keep moving. “I’m not big on just going out of my way to exercise,” he said. “I like to exercise for a purpose and for a goal.” So he put races on his radar, and began planning a trip to London, to finally meet Eastham. “I needed to get down to certain weight to fly over the meet Jackie,” he said. He set the goal of 270 pounds for his weight, and got busy. He even ran a race while in London. Having Eastham was a crucial part of his weight loss, “I compare it to winning the lottery,” he explained about how much she has helped. “She saved my life honestly.”

The support he got from Eastham kept him going, and without her he may he still be on the couch, booze in hand. He got cycling tips from her as well, and began biking to work. Flemming lived 22 miles from his work, and Monday through Thursday he would drive halfway and bike the rest, making for a 22-mile ride everyday. On Fridays, he biked the whole way. His other trainings were purely trial-and-error when Eastham wasn’t helping. He learned to take it slow, and training for the half marathon was similar.

He kept adding the miles to his running routines. He would go for longer runs maybe once a week, and give himself time to rest in between runs. He was ready to go, until about two weeks before the race when he had to get stitches in his ankle, which he got out two days before the half marathon. Even though his time was a bit longer than he was expecting, and he had to walk a few times during due to his ankle, it was a wonderful experience for Flemming. “It felt great to finish it and to be out there with 20,000 people,” he said. “I had a blast.”

Flemming now has two years of work under his belt, and has no plans of stopping. He’s organized a group called Team 383, which acts as “other people’s Jackie,” explained Flemming. It’s a group of people supporting and encouraging each other through their own weight loss journeys, and they’ve already had huge success, with 8,000 members and counting, local meetups, and hopes to organize meetups in England in the future. This is Flemming’s way of giving back, and showing how possible it is to lose weight.

“The biggest thing is knowing that it’s possible,” explains Flemming. “When I was overweight, I was depressed, and I was done. I was suicidal. I was drinking myself to death there were no goals or ambitions. Just understand that it’s possible to lose that weight without surgery.”

Flemming never quit, there were points where it was hard, where he plateaued with his weight, and where he wasn’t quite prepared for what was coming his way, but he never quit. It’s worth it to him because it’s life. “I went from suicidal, about to die, to running a half marathon,” he said. “It comes down to being alive, and Jackie puts it into perspective for me and says, ‘There are millions of people out there suffering illnesses that have to be healthy, never take it for granted.’”

Images courtesy Brian Flemming