Many of you heard the sad story of Jared Fogle last week. This turned from an inspiring feel-good story to an odious and nauseating story in a hurry.
For those of you who don’t know, Jared Fogle was a pretty ordinary guy who lost a lot of weight eating subway sandwiches. In fact, he claims to have lost 245 pounds. Fogle was pretty unknown until he was the subject of an article in Men’s Health Magazine entitled “Stupid Diets . . . that Work!” After that article, a local Subway franchise used him in a commercial in the Chicago area, and that went well enough that the Subway chain itself rolled out a few spots that were very successful.
As part of an advertising tour in 2008, a Subway campaign called “Tour de Pants,” which celebrated Fogle maintaining his weight loss for a decade, Fogle donated his pair of 62-inch pants to a museum. The Subway chain attributed as much as one-third of their overall growth to the Fogle advertisements. Subway is purportedly now the largest single-brand restaurant chain and the largest restaurant operator in the world, with 44,105 restaurants in 110 countries.
That’s a lot of growth.
And then it all came tumbling down when it turned out that Fogle was involved with child pornography.
Yech!
His friends from college say that we shouldn’t be surprised because he apparently had a huge pornography collection and would rent out or sell from his collection to other students.
It figures.
At least he wasn’t a big spokesman for some megachurch, thereby completing the circle of hypocrisy. But it ain’t much better this way. Enjoy your time in prison, my friend, and don’t gain too much weight while you’re there.