This is an article to show you what healthy eating and determination can do.
I’m not into hand holding. I’m not going to coddle you. I wont tell you it’ll be okay and not to worry because shit wont be okay and you should worry. Life sucks, its an unfair fickle bitch and you have two options:
- Go facedown-assup and let life fuck you
- Work to become greater then fuck life back
Now I dont have the experience to help you get money and success (other people do though) but I do have the personal experience to help you improve your own image.
The picture below is one I hated for years. Its unedited (aside from blurring the faces of others in it) and its of me about two years ago. It represents me at the physically worst point in my life. I’m not even going to blur my own face to uphold my anonymity because I look so different now that you’d never connect me to this picture.
Up until about a year and a half ago this is how I looked most of my life really, I was derpressed pussy-less for 21 years. My weight gnawed at me everyday. I’d face myself in the mirror and want to cry or break the glass. Those were dark days for me and I’m so glad they’re in my past.
So how did I do it? How did I completely change myself? First I had to be pushed to a point where I said ENOUGH! I had to be broken. Once I was there, at rock bottom, completely derpressed, I had two choices, the two I mentioned already. Sit there and take it, or fight back.
I chose to fight.
The first 6 months I did a strict calorie counting diet. I googled “how many calories should I eat in a day” I found FIVE separate calculators, took all those numbers and averaged them out. I then stepped back and looked at what I was eating each day. It blew me away, I was way over the limit to lose weight.
I then threw out all the food I had at home because all of it was junk. I went to the store, dropped about $100 and stocked up on healthy alternatives. This step is important because one of the things you should have learned about yourself by now is that you are an asshole. You’ll sabotage yourself at every turn, because fuck you thats why.
I stocked up on low cal and sugar free sweets, to get me through the cravings. I bought baby carrots and other veggies to eat like chips and for snacks. I bought pounds of fresh apples and oranges. At work where I eat two of my three daily meals I replaced sausage and sweets with fruit and egg whites. I replaced pizza and soda with salads and whole wheat sandwiches. I literally ate the same thing 5 days a week, 3 meals a day for 6 months.
Everyone called me crazy. They said I was insane, that it was to much, and for a while I believed them because the weight didn’t drop off. I did that for 5 weeks and saw no changes in the mirror or the scale. I was losing hope and getting more derpressed then ever. But I stayed with it and eventually the weight started to come off.
All the while I researched and studied diligently, I found out that cardio wasn’t the answer, much to my joy because I fucking hate cardio.
I used the shitty little gym that was free at my apartment complex and three days a week for thirty minutes a day I would go in there, warm up on the elliptical and then do light strength training. The work I did then is laughable compared to the almost three hour lifting regiment I do twice weekly now, but at that point it didn’t have to be extreme. It was enough to burn some calories and add some muscle.
I did all this for six months. For six months I ate the same thing, went to the gym Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I dropped about thirty pounds, but then I hit a wall that most people who have lost weight are familiar with. Suddenly, despite what I did the weight didn’t come off. I hadn’t slacked off, if anything I had become more fervent because I was seeing the changes I wanted to which reinforced that I was doing the right thing.
I had slimmed down some, but I still had a long way to go.
It was at this point that I said enough was enough and began looking into alternative solutions. This was when I found Atkins and Low Carb dieting. I finally decided that there was no excuses and I hit the gym full tilt. I dropped the cheesy free gym and got a membership and now almost a year later Im looking to move on from that gym to a more suitable gym with more equipment and heavier shit to pick up.
From then I worked my ass off. I was in the gym 5+ hours a week, I was on a strict low carb diet and I was seeing changes. Atkins worked its magic and the weight just fell off. I had to reset a few times, going back onto a normal carb laden diet for a couple weeks then back onto Atkins again to keep from plateauing like I had before.
Now I’d like to discuss the term diet a little.
Its been branded a negative term because it breeds a bad mentality, but I think its a necessary evil. Diets, by nature, are extreme and usually hard to follow. Atkins is no different. Because of this diets get a bad rap. Many people say they dont work or they work but the weight comes back. I think diets are a necessary step on the trek to total lifestyle transformation, though.
The extreme nature of the diet helps rewire your brain. If you can sustain an extreme diet for more then two months then you’ll change the way you approach food. That extreme nature becomes habit and then when you finally go from dieting to a full lifestyle change you’ll be less tempted to fall into bad habits. Now where most people go wrong is the time frame. They want results and they want them now. They hold down a diet for a month, maybe six weeks, then say fuck it and go back to the way they were and even worse because the rewiring hasn’t happened yet and instead of looking at the shitty food they ate before as a problem, they look at it as a reward and binge.
Dieting is a trial by fire that prepares you to truly become a better person.
So now six months after my first plateau and a year into my journey I had achieved a body that was nicely average, maybe even a little better then average. I was ecstatic.
But I wasn’t done.
It was here that I decided it was time to truly rise up and take the next step. I could’ve stopped there and stayed comfortably at average, but time has taught me that you must always strive to become better and so I did.
I kept living the low carb lifestyle and I changed my approach in the gym from one that was designed to lose weight and get fit, to one that was designed to get strong. My weight bottomed out at 205 at the lowest, 80 pounds lost from my starting weight in the first picture of 285lbs. Thats a large dog, a 10 year old child, or a case and a half of potatoes. I look back at how big I was and its almost literally unbelievable to me.
I’ve been going strong into my strength training regiment for about 6 months now. I’ve actually begun to gain weight and I’m now up to 215lbs because of the muscle I’ve added on. While I’ve gained muscle weight I’ve still continued to slim down and losing fat. I now supplement my diet with natural remedies and shovel down as much protein as I can stand.
Whats interesting though, is my diet is more lax now then it has been over the last 18 months, but thats because it can be. I did the work then to reap the benefits now. I’ve become socially magnetic, drawing both men and women to me just by existing. I eat ice cream and pizza occasionally and even went on a three week sugar bender after a run in with the police and saw no ill effects. By losing weight and adding muscle I’ve made it so its almost impossible to fail and revert back to the way I was.
I did it which means anyone reading this can do it. If this site is the only one you read you have the tools you need to make the changes I did.
Here are some links to other great resources for strength gain and weight loss
I’m just getting started and with my lifts reaching the point of an amateur power lifter in under a year I know that if I keep at it I can achieve great things. I might not be the next Ronnie Coleman or Gregg Plitt but I sure as hell can be better then 99% of the world.
