Porter Freeman

BACK FROM THE BRINK
By TOM SOTER
from MUSCLE MEDIA, JULY 1998Porter Freeman, before and after.

Addiction is a patient lover. It snuck up on Porter Freeman insidiously and soothingly. And with its help, he lost his health – and could easily have lost his life.

Never concerned much about gaining weight or eating right, the six-foot tall Southerner had lived life to its fullest. As a child, he had eaten whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. And as he grew older, he ate more and found excuses to exercise less.

Until one day he stood on a scale. And discovered that he was 40 pounds overweight. And miserable.

That was the first turning point for Porter Freeman, one of the signposts that led him on an amazing journey back to good health. It was a trip in which a 47-year-old nightclub manager, surrounded by temptation and physically handicapped, went from being depressed and overweight to becoming a 1997 Physique Transformation Co-Champion and the winner of a Corvette and a $50,000 contract with Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS). He lost 50 pounds and dramatically changed his physique in just 84 days. And he did it all at an age when most people don’t even think about starting an intense exercise regimen.

“We all have the character to change our lives,” he says. “I got into a rut because I was lying on the couch instead of going out and doing a light workout or hitting the speed bag or lifting weights. I was making all the wrong choices. But I was still who I was inside. I still had the character to change. I had just hidden it with layers and layers of fat.”

Freeman’s transformation was a long time coming. Born in North Carolina on October 21, 1949, and raised in both Georgia and South Carolina, he led an unexceptional existence with a single constant: food. One of two children (he has an older sister), Freeman’s parents were divorced when he was young. Consequently, he found himself moving a lot in his high school years and also spending a great deal of time at his grandmother’s, where, to paraphrase the song, it was always summertime, and the eating was easy.

“My grandparents had a farm up in North Carolina, and I know I got an awful lot of fresh food and vegetables,” he recalls. “I ate good and plenty. Every person who grew up in the South will recognize this: you show your grandmother how much you love her by how much of her dinner you eat. It’s directly equated to how many of her biscuits you can swallow at one sitting.

“My grandparents cooked fried food, barbecue, [using] a lot of butter,” he adds. “There was butter on everything. I don’t think you could eat anything that hadn’t been salted and buttered. When I look back I can’t believe I ate this. But to have a bacon-and-cheese sandwich with salted tomatoes and a lot of mayonnaise was just like an everyday occurrence. And, oh my goodness, with what I’ve learned in the last year or two about health and nutrition, it’s a wonder my heart doesn’t blow up in the middle of this conversation.”

Nonetheless, Freeman was neither fat nor thin – and was more interested in chasing girls than lifting weights. “I wasn’t really conscious of physical fitness. I think I played one year of high school football. But due to my moving, I never excelled in any sports. I was probably the average guy who just thought about girls. ”

Coincidentally or not, his career seemed to always involve food. When he was in seventh grade, he began working as a busboy in a Georgia restaurant. He was later a dishwasher in a pizza place, and when he relocated to Orlando, Florida, he began working in nightclubs as a part-time doorman, bouncer, relief manager, and finally manager. “I’ve had 22 years in various restaurants and nightclubs around Orlando,” he says. “I even owned a restaurant for a while.”

By the time he was 40, things had settled down into a routine. He still ate whatever he wanted, but his irregular routine and bar led to even worse behavior. He admits he drank too much and ate too much junk food.

Nonetheless, as many in middle-age do, Freeman had started to become aware of his health. He visited gyms and studied the martial arts, earning a black belt. He also “messed around” with weights but did not follow any particular regimen.

“I had been, I guess, in and out of gymnasiums on and off for 20 years. Just going in and moving the weights around,” Freeman notes. “And I never really got involved with it. I joined a health club, gosh, 20 years ago. I had just been in and out of gymnasiums and just, I think like any guy, you work out a little bit and then you don’t.”

But he continued poor health habits. Married for a year in the mid-1980s, he kept eating junk food, drinking beer, and even started smoking. (He quit after two years when “I got up one morning and felt like hell. I threw the cigarettes in the commode and flushed them and I’ve never picked up another one. I’d rather eat a bucket of cheese than smoke a cigarette.”)

Working at the bar, Freeman found he drank a great deal. “I don’t think I was ever an alcoholic,” he observes. “I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s just that being a single guy and living near my job and working day and night shifts, you have an awful lot of friends that come see you and say, ‘Hey, Porter, let’s have a beer.’ And, you know, by the end of the day I had had five or six beers and maybe two or three drinks of liquor or maybe even a half a bottle of champagne.”

Then came the operations. Constant stress on his bones from different physical activities had led to deterioration. A tendon had also torn loose and he had broken his right hand twice. Freeman’s first operation shaved off and reattached some of the bone. Then, he had his shoulder worked on, removing bone fragments and chips.

For some time afterwards, he says he used his injury as an excuse not to exercise. “I got in fairly good shape doing the martial arts. I was doing that four and five days a week for an hour at a time,” he notes. “I probably weighed 220 pounds.I could still run two miles and do the required push-ups and sit-ups. But when I got those injuries, it was an excuse and that’s being totally honest, it was an excuse to avoid the gym.

“When you’re sitting with your arm in a cast, you can have another beer or another donut or another whatever, you can say, ‘Well, just as soon as I get my arm of this cast I’m going to get back to the gym.’ And I've never denied that I like to have a cold beer. I completely got in a rut. I often say, the difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.”

Freeman went into denial. Clothes getting tighter? Get a bigger size. Feeling bad about the weight? Have another beer. It was a typical pattern that many have experienced. Except in Freeman’s case, he made a dramatic change.

The first step in that metamorphosis was when he weighed himself. “One day I got on the scale and it said 256 pounds. I just froze. I had put on in the neighborhood of 40 pounds. And a day or two later I weighed 260. And that’s a rude awakening.”

Freeman became depressed. Then Eric Shrieves, a friend who managed a local gym, The Steel Mill, gave him a copy of Muscle Media. In it was a story about the Physique Transformation Contest. It was time for Porter Freeman’s epiphany.

“When I read the article, I got to the end of it, and it said, ‘If you’re in bad shape, you ought to do something about it,’” he recalls. “This was Bill Phillips [executive editor of Muscle Media] talking, and it said, ‘I’ve given you every opportunity and every reason to get back in shape. If you don’t do it, you might as well go start an ant farm.’

“And I swear, I thought he was talking to me. It was like he was standing in the room saying, ‘Well, Porter, you fat ass, you’ve gotten so bad out of shape, I'm going to offer you a car and $50,000. Just go get back in shape.’ And I thought, ‘Who in the hell are you to tell me to go start an ant farm?’ You know, it was perfect timing. I had realized I was at 260 pounds. I knew that I couldn’t go on living like that. You’re not living at 260. You’re dying at 260.

“I must have read that article three or four times that night. And every time I read it, I got madder and madder. I got mad at him for telling me to start an ant farm, and I got madder at myself for being such a slob. I had sat down on the side of my bed with the night light, and I had a cold beer and a bag of potato chips or some pretzels or something. I was just going to much some pretzels and drink a beer and go to sleep. And I read that article. I don’t believe I finished the beer. I know I didn’t finish the potato chips. “

If Freeman got mad, he also decided to get even – not with Phillips, but with himself. He decided to prove that he could change. He went to see Shrieves at The Steel Mill. “I said to Eric, ‘Let’s do it. I’m going to show that guy I'm not an ant farmer.’ That’s exactly how I felt. So we looked at my shoulder, and I had lost some of the range of motion in that arm because of the operation. And also some of the strength in my grip, because I had just completely pulverized one of my fingers one time, and there’s less grip in that hand.”

Before even beginning the 12-week Physique Transformation Contest, however, Freeman needed to lose 20 pounds since Shrieves felt it would be too difficult to lose so much weight and build muscles at the same time. Freeman agreed. By jogging and eating right, he lost 20 pounds in just 14 days.

After accomplishing that, he began a systematic body-building program designed by Shrieves. “He worked around my shoulder,” Freeman explains. “I can’t do any flat-benching. I can’t do decline curls. There’s legitimately some damage in one arm. I also went to see a sports chiropractor here. He kept me straightened out the entire 12 weeks.”

His workouts may have been grueling but Freeman’s determination never wavered. “I was not afraid that I couldn’t do it,” he recalls. “I craved going the 12 weeks way more than I craved a piece of key lime pie or some barbecue or a beer. I made my mind up that night when I read that article that I was going to do 12 weeks or die.”

Freeman had to juggle work – 70 hours a week – with his exercise schedule. Initially, he was exercising once a day from 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes. “I changed my routine a lot, but at some point I was in the gym either doing aerobics or lifting weights, I would say almost every day,” he recalls. “In the 12-week period, I might have taken four days off where I just gave my joints a break.”

He eventually “earned” his own key to the gym. “I was having such a difficult time trying to get in there sometimes twice a day that I said, ‘You know, it would be great if I could have a key and come in here and train late at night when I get off work.’ And they said, ‘Absolutely.’ They gave me the key, and so when I closed up at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning, I’d go work out. I couldn’t wait to get in there. No matter how exhausted I was, I knew that 12 weeks would end. So no matter how tired I was or no matter what my schedule was, I went to the gym.”

Such determination was learned from his father, Galen Freeman. “He had two children and was a single father, and he worked every day. We never did without anything and he has always been there,” Porter says. “And I know he worked two jobs the whole time I was in high school. If you ask who my role model was it’s my father.”

After five weeks of intense exercise, a woman at work walked up to Freeman and out of the blue said, “Porter, your pants are falling off you.”

He was shocked. “What?” he said, thinking he hadn’t fastened them. But it wasn’t an accident. He had dropped 35 pounds and hadn’t even noticed.

“When you look at yourself every day, it’s the same thing with gaining weight,” he explains. “You look at yourself and you don’t realize there’s another two or three pounds. Or, you know, you just unbutton a button or whatever. And then somebody that hasn’t seen you in a year comes up and says, ‘My God, that guy’s put on a lot of weight.’ It was the same thing here in reverse. I was in the gym every day. I really didn’t notice the change.”

He found it a remarkable mental as well as physical inspiration. In Freeman’s view, losing weight and having people notice was like “asking a pretty girl on a date and having her say ‘yes.’ When I worked out, I wasn’t thinking about how do I look. I was thinking about 12 weeks – ‘I'm going to do this and I’m going to show him.’ I was doing 800 sit-ups a day in the gym. Four hundred in the morning and four hundred at night. And I was doing them in sets of 25. I would do four sets of 25, wait a few minutes, do four sets of 25, wait a few minutes. But I tell you what. When that weight starts falling off, it is one of the best feelings in this world. The muscle’s coming and the fat’s going. And you tell me what’s better than that? Unless it’s your bank account going up and the bills going down. It’s the same theory.”

Freeman supplemented the exercise regimen by eating right and adding vitamin supplements to his diet. He traded in beer, pizza, and junk food for chicken breasts, potatoes, oatmeal, and fish. He would eat 200 grams of protein regularly, 60 to 110 grams of carbohydrates, 20 to 35 grams of fat, and drink 80 to 90 ounces of water daily. He would also take BetaGen three to four times a day and between meals.

“I ate 1,400 eggs in that 12-week period,” he says with a laugh. “ I mean, some days, I was eating eight or nine egg whites for breakfast, and then I’d go back and eat another eight or nine egg whites for lunch. And maybe as I snack I would eat two deviled eggs. I can’t remember how many chicken breasts it was; something like 200 chicken breasts. But I was eating high-quality protein. I was taking the EAS supplements every day without fail.”

He also switched from three large to five small meals daily. “I would eat before I went to bed and take Cytovol and Vetagen. And my metabolism would be running, while I was asleep,” he notes, adding: “We also cut out all the junk and the alcohol and soda pop. We cut out everything but water and coffee. I’m just glad it never got down to a choice between coffee or the contest, because then I might have quit.”

His friends were still there and some tried, albeit unconsciously, to reinforce his bad habits. Freeman’s buddies would come to the bar and say, “Let’s have a couple of beers.” And he would say, “I’m not going to do that for a while.”

“I told somebody once that addiction is a patient lover,” he says. “It will be waiting on you at the grave. If you’re addicted to food or alcohol or cigarettes or even the wrong person in your life, if you’ve got a bad habit or an addiction, if you came back out of the grave that addiction would be patiently waiting right there. And, yes, sir, all those old habits were right there.”

Some acquaintances even expressed concern. “One of my good friends came to me and said, ‘Porter, you want to talk to me about what’s going on with you? Are you all right?’ I didn’t know if he thought I had some disease or if I was dying. He was legitimately concerned because I didn’t go out and tell a lot of people, ‘I’m going to get in this contest and I’m going to win.’ I don’t believe that you go out and rant and rave and tell everybody you know you’re going to do something because you don’t know what’s coming. You might not make it.”

Nonetheless, throughout it he stuck to what he dubs “Freeman’s Four Rules to Get Healthy,” which he wrote down as a reminder to himself at the beginning of his 12 weeks:

Want It. Ask yourself, do you want this? And if the answer comes back, no, then it’s over.

Make It a Priority. When the guys are all going to go to the football game, you may want to go. But you have a date at the gym. That’s the priority.

Quit Doing Bad Things to Yourself. If you’re eating badly or at the wrong times, or not sleeping right, or not exercising, it’s time for a change.

Start Doing Good Things to Yourself. Eat right, exercise right. And if you buy a cake, don’t eat three slices.

“If I broke any one of the four rules, then I just felt like I wasn’t in the contest any longer,” he recalls. “During that 12 weeks, I never cheated one time. And once it was over, I had completely changed my eating habits. I don’t go eat three pancakes in the morning, and I don’t drink six beers in an eight-hour period, and I don’t sit down [and accept] every time somebody wants to buy a drink.”

After the 12 weeks, Freeman got his call from EAS: he had won in his category (“Men, Age 40 to 54”). When he heard the news, he “started screaming and people at work came running into the office. I was jumping up and down.”

He says now that he didn’t see the contest as a competition with other people. “I wasn’t in a competition,” he says. “By the time I got to Denver [the site of the finalists’ contest], my competition was over. There were 54,000 people in it and the only person that I competed with in that whole thing was Porter Freeman. That was it. Arriving in Denver and being part of that [finalist] weekend was the reward. The journey was the reward, not the gold. It was that ten people in America were going to get to do that. Now, that’s a pretty damned exclusive club. And I was the best of the people that did it. And my group was the best group that did it.”

In fact, Freeman says he sees exercise in general – and his success in particular – as more of a group effort than anything else. “I’m going to tell you who won. Me, and Eric, and the Steel Mill gym, and my boss, a guy named Gene Dupont, and EAS. This would have never happened without everybody kicking in. They gave me the place to do it, they showed me how to do it. My boss was very lenient with my schedule, and EAS gave me the challenge. So I never did anything. We did it all.”

These days, he follows a “maintenance” regimen that is laudable in its simplicity. He does aerobics, probably five times a week (jogging, shadow-boxing, running the treadmill, riding the stationary bike). He runs “hard for two minutes and then I jog for five minutes. And then I’ll run hard again for three minutes and then I’ll jog for two minutes. And I'm doing, the days I do two a day, I do them 20 minutes, 25 minutes both times. And I do them once a day, I try to go maybe 30 minutes, 35 minutes.” Some days he goes through the routine twice.

He now visits the gym three days in a row, then takes a day off, and returns for another three days, working each body part twice a week with weights. “Right now, I’m maintaining,” he explains. “In the past year, I’ve put on about six pounds and everybody says it’s muscle. I’m still wearing size 34 pants. I have increased some of my muscularity.” He has also added Myoplex to his protein/muscle supplements.

Freeman’s advice to others is simple: “If it’s bad for you don’t eat it. That’s number one. Everything you put in your mouth, eat it today, wear it tomorrow. Eat fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, low-fat protein sources, water. I drink water like it’s the fountain of youth. I drink eight, ten, twelve ten-ounce glasses a day. Then, surround yourself with people that are positive and want to help you. Just do it. I don’t know how much more plain you could make it.”

In his spare time, Freeman finds time to read – everything from Stephen King to Billy Graham – and he may also have a new career as a movie star. The actor Don Wilson has asked him to appear in a film, “but he said it’s going to be a short career because he might have to kill me off.”

Currently supervisor at Dancers Royale, a topless bar in Orlando, he also acts as a notary, performing marriages much as his grandfather once did. “My granddaddy was a Baptist minister,” he notes. “Years ago I entertained the idea of becoming one myself. Now, that all seems kind of strange, me being in the adult business. But I think that you can do a lot of good in the adult business if you set good examples and if you are there to counsel people and help them. I grew up around the church. And I guess maybe the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

In fact, he sounds almost like a minister himself when he starts preaching about his new religion: health. “The end is rushing toward us,” he observes. “When I go to Heaven, I want the Lord to look at me and say, ‘Gosh, Porter, you’re in good shape. You know, you’re here, but you lost weight, didn’t you? You look good.’

“The biggest myth is that you’re too overweight to get in the gym,” he adds, more seriously. “You’re never too thin and you’re never too fat to change. People like to believe that everybody in the gym looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s not true. He had to start one day like everybody else. You’ve got a flight of steps? Do them instead of the elevator. You say, ‘Well, I'm want to take the elevator. It will save me time.’ All you’re doing is rushing to your grave by not taking the steps.

“You can do it. It’s a myth that you can’t. Bodybuilding doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a finalist in the Mr. Olympia contest. It just means not saying no. There are people in my gym that are blind. One of the girls who was a top runner-up in the contest was in a wheelchair. One of the winners had AIDS. And every reason – broken hands, broken fingers, surgery, all of that stuff for me – can be an excuse to stop. Don’t accept that. Just get off the couch and start. It’s that simple.”