People are stopping Ronnie Hicks in the grocery store and on the road, asking, “Aren’t you on that show? The guy who lost 200 pounds?”

The Dallas resident, 45, appeared in February on “Heavy,” a reality TV series on the A&E cable network that was filmed last year at the Hilton Head Health Institute in South Carolina. All 12 participants spent six months at the spa studying nutrition, exercising and counting calories while A&E tracked their weight loss.

“I was embarrassed doing it,” said Hicks, a long-haul truck driver. “But the response I’m getting is overwhelming. Just yesterday I was picking a load up when a man … went inside and got his wife and said, ‘Since your show’s been on, she got me on a diet and running on a treadmill. I’ve lost 20 pounds.’”

The 6-foot-2 Hicks himself weighs 258 pounds, down from a high of 458 a few weeks before he joined the show in May 2010.

A Cobb County native, he played football at the University of West Georgia, transferred to Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn., and won a national championship. Later he coached kids.

“I was Coach of the Year for North Georgia Youth Football for three years,” Hicks said.

But he had been putting on pounds since a college football injury, a failed marriage and his late mother’s cancer weighed on him. His obesity caused a stomach hernia, sleep apnea and nightly nausea and vomiting, which made him lose sleep.

He quit coaching.

“I could hardly walk a mile,” he said. “I couldn’t tie my shoes. I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a good husband, I wasn’t a good father, I wasn’t a good employee.”

In response to his mother asking him to get healthy, he joined a gym where he met an instructor who also had gone to South Cobb High School. They fell in love and moved in together, with six kids between them, but he said he would not set a wedding date until he regained good health. Cara McQuillen, an exercise instructor, is engaged to marry Hicks in June.

“I have no health problems whatsoever,” Hicks said. “I feel like I did in my college football days now.”

At Hilton Head, he ran a marathon in three and a half hours. He is training for a half-Ironman triathlon this summer.

“His determination and perseverance are second to none,” said Adam Martin, fitness director at Hilton Head Health. “His experience in college athletics gave him a necessary drive and competitive edge. When Ronnie set his mind to running for 180 continuous minutes, there was nothing that was going to stop him.”

And Hicks is leaving his 20-year truck-driving career. With his fiancée, he has started a fitness business.

“I’m specializing in people like me, 100 to 150 pounds overweight,” he said. “That’s my passion right now. I got a new lease on life. I feel like A&E saved my life.”

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