Sharron Exercised everyday for 500 days and lost more than just 16 dress sizes!

Meet Sharron Rogers. Sharron is a 64 year old woman from Titusville, Florida who has been sick 45 years of her life suffering from Sarcoidosis, Diabetes, Pulmonary, and Cardiovascular issues and decided one day she would help herself to become well. And she did. There are so many incredible people in this world who have ​overcome almost impossible situations in order to live a better quality life. For Sharron Rogers, her life story was nothing short of a miracle.
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Her Motivation to Change

At age 26, Sharron was the picture of perfect health. She was a size 5 with 2 children and a husband. She had been training for a marathon when she injured herself at the mine where she worked. She fell and bruised her right rib cage. On her visit to the doctor they discovered spots on her lungs after routine chest x-rays. They originally thought it was lung cancer, but after many tests, on April 23, 1984 her doctors diagnosed her with pulmonary sarcoidosis, and at this time this illness was new, so there was not much information available on how to treat it. She was immediately placed on Prednisone which began her battle with weight. She joined weight watchers then lost her goal weight and maintained it for 4-5 months, then the weight came back.  She then started to develop other illnesses like fibromyalgia. 

Her heart issues did not start until about 8-9 years later. She started having pulmonary hypertension and was placed on Oxygen. The doctors thought she was developing blockages in her arteries. The pressure in her heart would drop. Then she started to develop diabetes. She's had doctors who would not treat her because she had so many illnesses. Another doctor would always have her crying when she left the office. He would tell her to get her final affairs together because she would never live to see her children grow up.

In addition to the negative treatment from her doctors, her home life began to deteriorate. Now that she was fully disabled and unable to work, her husband became violently abusive mentally, verbally, and physically. He would beat her in their home in front of the children. Her daughters told her to leave him or he was going to kill her.

In 1993 she made an attempt on her life with suicide. When her daughter came home she told her daughter she overdosed with prescription drugs, drunk some alcohol, and made a recording. She was admitted to a mental hospital that night after they pumped her stomach. To everyone's surprise, the pills did not begin to digest. She believed this was her miracle and sign to keep fighting. She was released and went back home to the abuse.

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Her turning point came in 2000 when her husband beat her with a belt while she was naked and left her in the closet while her best friend was visiting her. At this time her daughter left the military to come help her. She did not have an income and her credit was poor. In January 2001, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. While in the hospital, she made up her mind to leave. In March she started packing her belongings. The beatings got worse until she finally left him in May 2001. 
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I'm coming out!

Sharron's health and overall wellness became increasingly better once she was able to leave her toxic home environment. She found her new voice when she enrolled into the local community college and became the Vice President of student government. Her GPA went from a 1.2 to a 3.86 now that she was in a safe and productive environment  She thought of herself as the old lady hanging out with the young college students. She was able to lose weight and ditch the wheelchair. 
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Her gains started to stagnate once she moved to a new city and started taking classes at the University. She remarried and had to stop taking classes to care for her sick mother and husband. For the next ten years all of her gains were reversed. She had to start taking oxygen again. The doctor visits and surgeries for her pre existing conditions started to multiply. She was now taking a daily cocktail of new prescriptions. She thought she would not see great health again. ​

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The final comeback!

Her final turn came in 2016 when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. On March 23, 2016, she weighed 383 pounds. Her new dietitian recommended counting carbs. As she started following the advice, she started losing weight slowly. She would think of her grandchildren and how much more active she wanted to be in their lives. She made up in her mind that she deserved to have a better quality of life. 
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Now that Sharron's weight was slowly dropping, she was able to have her morphine pump removed. Right after the surgery she told her daughter she wanted to start going to the gym. She wanted to stop taking all the medicine she'd been prescribed by her doctors. Since she was still on oxygen, she was not allowed to workout without a doctor's note. Once she convinced her doctor's that she was ready, she took her note to Youfit and began working out on the treadmill. She would only go 2 or 3 times a week. Her motivation again was her grandchildren while she took her steps. Her body became stronger. Her doctor's started taking note of how her body was responding and started reducing her insulin doses. 

In 2018, she joined Shapes with a new motivation and a gym partner for accountability. She was so determined to getting off of the oxygen machine that she made the decision to stop using her oxygen machine. She noticed in her workouts she became winded easily. But she was determined to become stronger. Shortly after she started at Shapes, her gym partner stopped going, so she stopped as well. 

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Now that Sharron had come such a long way, she felt she could not give up. She started praying to God for the strength to keep her weight loss journey moving forward. She wanted most to see her grandchildren live and again that motivated her to keep going. On June 23, 2018 Sharron made a personal commitment to herself after watching another woman on social media commit to a 100 day challenge to workout everyday. She then got a new gym partner to go to Planet Fitness with her one time. Once she got there she asked for a personal trainer.

What excited Sharron most about Planet Fitness was their vibe. As she met with her new trainer she explained that she needed to get her cardio together. She was still short winded as she exercised, but she did not go back to using oxygen. So he set her up on the treadmill with a new plan. At first she was intimidated about being in that open floor space with everyone else. She even admitted that the skinny women distracted her. But she kept saying she had to do this for her grandchildren. After she started coming regularly, people would start to reach out to her and tell her what a great job she was doing.

After she announced her 100 day exercise commitment, most people around her became skeptical. Because of her medical complications, there were people (including doctors) who doubted that her body would be able to adapt to the demands on her body for fitness. So she switched doctors and found physicians would would encourage her and give her medical advice that would support her vision for her lifestyle. And this became the best decision she ever made.

Her energy levels started going up. As her blood pressure levels dropped her doctors took her off of blood pressure medicine. Since she was no longer swelling up so they took her off all water pills including Furosemide and Hydrochlorothiazide. A few months later in 2019 they pulled her off of Spironolactone. 

Since Sharron started losing weight in 2016, she has never gained any of it back. It may have slowed down, but it has never come back. As of today, Sharron is on her 494th consecutive day of working out. She is on day 42 of a squat challenge and is up to 355 squats daily. She went from a size 30 to a size 14. Today she weighed in at 170.0 pounds. She says she is not finished yet and  is currently working on her next fitness goal. You can find her on Facebook where she posts daily about her fitness journey.