Last week: 392 lbs.

Start (12/17/13): 470 lbs.

Total lost: 80 lbs.

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Think of it as giving yourself a Christmas present for next year. Take care of yourself for 12 months, and you’ll undergo a transformation that will amaze you and others.

Merry Barney is living proof that you can do it.

In December 2013, Barney was a shy, 220-pound Lake Placid mother who had spent years trying to change her life for the better. Working at a Sunmount home in Saranac Lake for the developmentally disabled, she spent a lot of her free time watching her teenage daughter play hockey, soccer and softball. Working out in the Fitness Revolution gym was nowhere close to her to-do list.

“I’d go to Emily’s sports games, and other than sports games, all we were doing was going out to eat,” Barney said. “And I was doing a lot of sleeping. I’d come home from work at 3 o’clock, stop at the Corner Store and get a snack, come home and eat it and fall asleep until it was dinner time, eat dinner and go to bed. I was exhausted because I was so unhealthy.”

It’s no miracle that Barney was the only person to finish three rounds of Fitness Revolution’s Take It Off weight-loss challenge a few weeks ago. While others came and went — for a variety of reasons — she was able to stick with it. She discovered an inner strength that you can physically see when she works out. I call her a little firecracker, but you could easily call her the Energizer Bunny.

With about 70 pounds lost, she is one of the undisputed leaders of the Take It Off group. She may not think so, but she’s an inspiration to many others, including me.

“I’m a completely different person,” Barney said. “I’m happy. I’m not in pain. I was in a lot of pain before. … I’m much more outgoing. I’m not shy at all. This group has helped me on so many different levels that there are too many to count.”

I found a kindred spirit in Merry Barney. Like me, she was in a lot of pain before embarking on her weight-loss journey. She’s stronger today, lost a lot of weight, has more confidence and won’t give up. Between the two of us, we’ve lost as much as she weighs now — 150 pounds — in one year.

Hindsight is 20-20. We both could have been healthier years ago. In fact, it took less time to transform ourselves into healthier human beings than it took to make the decision to finally take this journey and stick with it. For decades, I’ve lost weight and gained it back, and when I thought I’d I hit rock bottom, I’d find a new bottom. Like Barney, however, I never gave up hope that someday I’d finally leave the old me behind.

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First step

“I had been to the gym before and had Janis (Atkinson) as a trainer, and I quit. I gave up on it,” she said. “That was years ago, but I always kept her business card on my dresser, like, ‘This is going to happen someday.'”

That someday happened in the fall of 2013 when one of Barney’s friends posted on Facebook that she was joining a new weight-loss program, the Take It Off challenge at Fitness Revolution. It was 12 weeks long and required participants to work out for two hours, two nights a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Group members received nutrition information, a structured exercise program, guidance from instructors Jason McComber, Janis Atkinson, Seth Lang and 24-hour access to the gym for the length of the course. Excited about the prospect of losing weight, even just 20 pounds, Barney grabbed the trainer’s card on her dresser.

“I texted her that ‘I want to be in this group, and don’t give up on me,'” she said. “I was very stern. ‘Do not give up on me.’ That was how it started.”

The weight-loss program is an investment of time and money, but it was one Barney was ready to make, even though she wasn’t comfortable around strangers.

“I’m not shy with people that I know,” she said. “But going into new circumstances, especially exercise, it was a huge deal coming here for the first time. I looked around the group, and I thought, ‘These people aren’t even overweight. They’re just a little out of shape.'”

Barney’s first night was memorable, mainly because she was outside her comfort zone and had physical limitations.

“At first I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work out,'” she said. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move.”

Barney couldn’t even walk onto a stair during the aerobics exercises. She was discouraged and had doubts about returning.

“It took a lot to come back the next night,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt myself. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. But I kept coming.”

The trainers are adept at working with people of all abilities. They offer alternatives to the exercises in the structured programs. The idea is to keep working, and eventually you’ll be able to do the exercise on the list. Barney was no exception. When she walked in the door, she couldn’t do squats, jumping jacks or jump ropes.

“Now I can do 70 jump ropes without missing,” she said. “But that took a lot of practice.”

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Perseverance

It also took a lot of time and patience. Barney tracks her calories and weight on the MyFitnessPal app and noticed that her weight fluctuated more than she thought it would.

“You expect the chart to go directly down, and it doesn’t,” she said. “It goes down and up, down and up. And then you finally make progress.”

Barney attributes her success to a philosophy that this weight-loss journey is based on lifestyle changes, not prepackaged gimmicks found in a book, the pharmacy or the grocery store.

“I’m not on a diet. I’m just choosing to eat better,” she said. “I have days I fall off the wagon, but I’m not mad at myself. There’s tomorrow. And when I eat wrong, afterward I don’t feel good. You don’t feel good when you screw up, so eventually you stop doing it.”

Barney stopped drinking a lot of juice and soda and cut down on high-salt food. She was hooked on the exercise program and is now making plans to join a fourth Take It Off round when it starts in mid-January.

“I made a decision that it had to happen,” Barney said. “It wasn’t a choice for me. I explained to my family that it’s not something that I want to do and try. It’s something I have to do, and this is my new life. I thought of it as ‘I want to live’ because I wasn’t living much before I started.”

When she’s not in the gym, she spends time outdoors, hiking the Peninsula Trails and Henry’s Woods during the warm-weather months.

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Support network

For more than a year, the Fitness Revolution trainers have turned down requests to change their Take It Off program, where the focus is on improving your health and sustaining it for a lifetime, into a Biggest Loser contest, where the focus is on how much weight you lose in a relatively short period of time.

For Barney, Take It Off is not just an exercise group. It’s a support group, and she enjoys the personal connection with other members.

“When we’re on Facebook, and somebody’s going through a had time … everybody wrote about what they were going through and how difficult it was,” she said. “We’re all kind of going through the same basic thing. Everybody has different problems in their lives, but you still have to get up and come here and work out.”

Barney’s not alone on this journey, and she knows there are others in the region who need to lose weight but are too shy to take that first step. She has a message for these people.

“Don’t give up on yourself,” Barney said. “I had completely given up until I found this place. Do it for yourself. Don’t do it for anybody else. See what would happen if you took a year and took care of yourself. Because that what we did, take care of ourselves. How different would you feel? And this is what happened.”

Barney turned 49 years old on Dec. 11, and she’s a new woman.

“I felt very old, but not anymore,” she said.

For more information about the upcoming Take It Off weight-loss challenge, call Jason McComber at Fitness Revolution at 518-523-4127 or stop by the gym at 1991 Saranac Ave. in Lake Placid. Learn more about the gym online at www.placidhealth.com.