After waiting in line for two long hours, it’s finally the Sneathen family’s turn to board the infamous ride at Harry Potter World. The ride attendant locks each of them into their seat by pulling a gate over their heads. When the attendant gets to Dwight Sneathen, the bar will not lock into place.
Dwight Sneathen, associate professor of accounting at Georgia Southern University, was approaching 300 pounds in the summer of 2012, when a seed was planted during his daughter’s high school graduation trip to Orlando. As of September 2017, he has competed in 18 triathlons, the majority of which ended with a spot on the podium.
During the ride home from Orlando, Sneathen said he listened to his wife and two children rave about how awesome the ride was. “He was his normal, jovial self,” said Dwight’s wife, Susan Sneathen. He didn’t let on that missing the ride bothered him at all.
“I spent the whole time standing on the side because I was too fat to get on the ride,” Dwight Sneathen said. “That drove me nuts.” Despite this humiliation, Sneathen continued to gain weight. “When you’re 300 pounds, you deal on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, with all kinds of little things that just drive you crazy,” Sneathen said.
More than a year had passed since the trip to Harry Potter World when Dwight Sneathen heard an advertisement for a health program on a radio show.
“For 20 years, I watched him try different programs and continue to gain weight,” Susan Sneathen said. That was until Dwight Sneathen came home to tell his wife about the new health program. “I was standing with my back to him and something in me said, ‘but what if this is the thing, and you shoot him down’?” Susan Sneathen said.
“Two weeks in, I was blown away,” she said. After five months, in May of 2014, he had lost 70 pounds.