People around the nation know him as Jared, the Subway guy, but people from Bloomington might know more about him, like that Jared actually lost his famous 245 pounds while attending IU.
Subway icon Jared Fogle returned to his home, coming to Bloomington on Saturday morning to speak to a crowd of about 100 community members about his Subway weight-loss experience. The Hilton Garden Inn hosted “A Healthier Generation,” welcoming Fogle to share the story of how he shed his hundreds on the Subway diet he created and others have followed.
Fogle, who graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 2000, weighed 425 pounds his junior year at IU. He proudly presented his pants, which were 60 inches around, to the audience, generating a series of “Oh wow’s.”
Fogle said his weight gain didn’t come out of nowhere. Though his father was a physician, he grew up eating junk food and playing video games. His weight took off at a young age and continued through college.
”The only person who wasn’t concerned yet was me,” Fogle said. “Food really started to consume my life.”
When Fogle enrolled at IU, his weight was “out of control,” he said. He began having to choose his classes based on whether or not they had seating accommodations for him because he often couldn’t fit in normal seats.
Fogle was already living in the apartment building at the intersection of Atwater and Woodlawn Avenues and eating Subway occasionally when he came across a brochure about the low-fat subs in 1998. He realized he could eat Subway sandwiches and take in about 1,500 calories per day. At the time, he had been consuming more than 10,000.
”I found something that I actually believed in,” he said.
He began nixing his Campus Bus habits and walking more. Every day he ate the 6-inch turkey sub for lunch and the 12-inch veggie sub for dinner, both without oil, condiments or cheese. In less than a year of eating Subway and only Subway every day, he lost more than 245 pounds, he said.
After losing the weight, the Indiana Daily Student ran a story Fogle said almost didn’t get printed because the editor-in-chief at the time didn’t believe it.
When he returned from class the day the story ran in the IDS, a line of people holding the story and heading into Subway wrapped around his apartment building, he said.
From there, Fogle’s story escalated, running in The Associated Press wires and in magazines. Eventually, Subway called and asked him to shoot a small test commercial, which a week later soared to national attention, he said.
”Seven years later, I don’t have a last name anymore,” Fogle said.
Now a resident of Carmel, Ind., Fogle travels around the country speaking about eating healthy, using his story as inspiration, he said.
Fogle hasn’t abandoned Subway completely but maintains his weight by eating a wider variety of healthy foods. When he does go to Subway, his pick is sweet onion chicken teriyaki, which wasn’t a choice while he was on the diet, he said.
Even though Fogle said he could have made a sandwich on his own, he stuck to the diet because it allowed him to actually go out to eat and feel normal in that way.
”Part of what was so fun is that I was eating out,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I was on a diet.”
Having a job of telling his life story is something Fogle never planned while he was on the diet, he said.
”I was only trying to do something for myself,” Fogle said.
”This is where it all began,” he said of Bloomington, “and now it’s become a national story”
