Over the next year, I tracked my macros diligently, and hit my target numbers consistently. I’ve lifted weights 3x/week and added in no aerobic exercise or “cardio.” With these 3 hours of strength training a week, and eating foods that I enjoy (like poptarts, pizza, doughnuts, pancakes, sour patch kids, bagels slathered in butter, fried chicken, ice cream, etc…) I lost weight. As of the time of this writing, I’ve lost 53lbs, with another 30ish to go to hit my “long term goal.” It’s important to note that despite eating all of these “junk foods” I almost always came within 10% of my target macros 

When I stripped down my training and my nutrition to the very basics, is when I saw success. I realized one thing i had been doing over the last few years, was complicating everything. Complicating my training program, complicating my nutrition, like so many others do with diets with strange and restrictive rules like Paleo, Keto, or Whole 30. Don’t misunderstand me, if you have any hopes of eating an adequate amount of protein, and a healthy but not overabundance of fats and carbs, you will have to eat a good amount of whole foods. Most of my meals consist of a meat, a starch, and a vegetable, but almost every single day, I eat some type of food the common public would consider “unhealthy” or “fattening.” In reality though, is it the occasional “treat” that is making us overweight, sick, and unhealthy? Or is it our long term and consistent decisions that determine our outcomes? Is 300 calories a day from poptarts worse than a 5,000 calorie blowout every weekend when you slip up on your restrictive diet with an unbridled binge? That question is rhetorical.

What Changed with the Weight Loss

A lot about my life has changed being 53lbs lighter. First and foremost, my feet and back hurt much less after a long day of work. That alone is probably worth it. In fact most of my “injuries” have seemed to evaporate. It’s a lot easier to tie my shoes. I can sit comfortably on an airplane. I’ve had to buy a lot of new clothes because everything is too big. I sleep better through the night. I have better sex. I can use the rower at the gym and not be uncomfortable. It takes me less time to walk my dog because I walk faster and with greater ease. Although I’ve never struggled much with confidence, I do feel more confident, energetic, and outgoing. People take my training and nutrition advice more seriously. I was able to go skiing for the first time ever, and do it for 3 hours straight without being totally wiped out.  My digestion has improved greatly. The hernia I had is gone. I’m less camera shy. I’ve also rediscovered my personal love of training. I could go on, but you get the point.

Me vs You

When we see other people that have accomplished something we want, it can be very easy to attribute it to factors that are beyond our control. Everything from steroids to genetics, to work schedules and family obligations. I’m not shy about the fact that I have some distinct advantages over other people. I’ve been in the training game a long time, and have a huge wealth of knowledge to draw upon. I live with a nutrition coach that loves to cook. I don’t have any kids. But for every factor that is an “advantage” unique to me, is a factor that is uniquely disadvantageous.

• For most people the gym is an escape. A place where they can go to shut their brain off for an hour and relieve some stress. Because I own the gym, the gym is my greatest source of stress. Can you imagine working an 8 hour shift at your job, and then needing to spend another hour and a half there to try to take some time for your own personal growth? Sometimes it’s not fun.
• I don’t have kids, but I do have a business and that’s almost the same. Imagine being dependent on your 3 year old to provide your income for you. That’s kind of what owning a business is like.
• I have a pacemaker, and I can’t train any horizontal pressing. That means push-ups, bench press, dips, and just about any other pec exercise you can think of is out. That takes a lot of options out of my repertoire. It also makes movements like front squats and cleans a bit scary. Update: I now have additional, much more severe exercise restrictions. I cannot do any exercise that places more than 30lbs of pressure on my shoulder. This includes even just holding a weight in my hand with my arm relaxed. I also cannot do anything that has me repetitively moving my arm in specific ways like jumping jax, indoor rower, etc…There are now only 5-6 exercises I am allowed to perform.
• My pacemaker is causing heart failure. To be fair to the team of doctors I have working on this, it’s not 100% known that the pacemaker is the source of my diminished heart function, but it is known that occasionally a pacemaker can cause heart failure…I have a pacemaker, and I’m experiencing heart failure. What this means is that most days after I train I feel absolutely exhausted for the rest of the day. Since I usually train in the morning, this makes my work days really challenging. Update: It was the pacemaker that was causing heart failure. I had another procedure to change my pacer from a “two lead” to a “three lead.” This reversed most of the damage done to my heart. Everything was going great until about 4 months after my procedure, I broke one of the leads. This required me to have another procedure to replace the leads which is extremely dangerous. The surgeon told me that 8 out of 1,000 lead extractions will cause internal bleeding in the heart, which will require emergency open heart surgery. 8 out of 1,000 are decent odds. The only was problem is, of those 8, half don’t survive.

The point is, we all have obstacles in front of us. We can’t change who we are, all we can do is work to overcome those obstacles, and it’s important to see them as that: Obstacles, not insurmountable challenges, because that point of view turns obstacles into excuses. In reality, 3 hours a week is not much time to dedicate to your health and fitness. In fact it’s only about 1.7% of my total week, and yet with just the tiniest bit of dedication, I was able to drastically change my life, my physique, and ultimately my health. But I was CONSISTENT. I trained 3x/week no matter what. I usually train on T/TH/S, but if something came up that prevented me from doing it on one of those days, I would switch Tuesday to a Wednesday instead, or I would stay late after work to do it then if I didn’t get it in the morning of. I tracked my macros every day. AND IT WAS EASY. When someone tells me that it’s too much of a hassle to put their food into an app like MyFitnessPal, and then turns around and spends 4 minutes scrolling social media in the middle of their workout, it makes me want to slap the phone out of their hand. You can literally track every thing you’re going to eat for the day in less than 5 minutes. Even if I wasn’t able to accurately reach my macro goals for the day, I still tracked everything, that way I stayed in the rhythm of tracking my food.

The difference between me and you, isn’t much. I stopped believing my own BS. If you’re sitting here reading this and wishing you could lose weight, you can, the difference between me and you is you haven’t’ decided for yourself that you really want it. You want the result, but you don’t want to put in the work. Is it easy? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it’s certainly not complicated.

How to Get it Done

1. Start a really good strength program. Most people aren’t strong enough to work hard. Getting stronger makes you more capable. The more capable you are, the easier to change your body.
   1. If you’re local to us, come sign up. This part will be taken care of for you.
   2. If you’re not local to us, find yourself a really good strength coach. No I’m not talking about Joe-Blow personal trainer at your local globo gym. I’m talking about a legitimate coach that works with athletes.
   3. If there are no good coaches available to you, find a tried and true strength training program to follow like:
      1. Starting Strength
      2. LSUS (aka Kyle Pierce 10-5-3)
      3. Stronglifts 5×5
      4. Wendler’s 5/3/1
2. Do that program every week, consistently, without missing a workout for six months. Yes. Six months. If that seems like too much to ask, you are not ready to make change.
3. Start tracking your food. Don’t worry about how much just yet. Just build the skill of learning how to track. Do this after a month of hitting the gym consistently.
4. Get some good macros to follow
   1. If you are local to us, again we can help you out.
   2. If there isn’t a coach in your area you trust, use a reputable online service like
      1. Avatar Nutrition
      2. IIFYM.com
5. Be compliant with your macros (within 10%) every day for at least 30 days straight, and then 27 out of every 30 days after that.
6. If you “fall off the wagon” skip the pity party, and get right back on the wagon again. In the past 15 months I’ve had my share of “noncompliant” weeks. It happens. Don’t turn a mole hill into a mountain. Just acknowledge that you can do better, and get back to it.
7. Get family and/or friends to do it with you. This does make it a lot easier, especially if you’re doing it with people you’re in cohabitation with.
8. Try to identify any habits you have in your life, and eliminate them. Habits are unconscious actions. If you are shutting your mind off, you cannot make conscious choices about your health and well being.
   1. Look at your phone constantly? Put it on silent, or block off periods of the day where you purposely leave it in another room.
   2. Always stop at a certain coffee shop on the way to work? Take a different route.
   3. Hit your snooze button when your alarm goes off for the gym? Put your alarm out of arms reach so you have to physically get out of bed to shut it off.

All the Other Stuff

• Supplements: I do not take any supplements, with the exception of protein powder and a topical magnesium. Protein powder has no added benefit other than an easy way to get to your protein goal each day. If strength were my number one goal, I would take creatine. If you are the type of person that freaks out if they see a minor change in the scale from day to day, creatine is not for you, as it can make you hold a bit of water weight, which will make your daily weight fluctuate more frequently. If I didn’t have a heart condition, I’d also take a pre-workout, but only on days when I was tired, not every day. I truly believe everyone should use a topical magnesium. We carry some at the gym. It’s inexpensive, and a bottle will last you months.
• Sleep: Minimum of 8 hours. I make sleep a priority. I attribute a big part of my success thus far to making sleep a priority.
• Television: I don’t really watch it except when I’m folding laundry. It’s amazing how much more free time you have when you don’t watch TV.
• What about cardio? Nothing wrong with cardio, I just don’t have the extra time to do it. If I only have 3 sessions a week I can train, those will be dedicated to strength training, since strength training is more well rounded, has a greater effect on metabolism, and having a muscular body is more appealing to me then just being thin. I also think strength training is more intellectually stimulating. I don’t exercise to burn fat, I exercise to be capable. I eat at a minor caloric deficit to lose fat.

Choices

In the end, it all comes down to choices. Not motivation. Motivation is a unreliable. I’m just like you, I’d rather eat pizza than grilled chicken and asparagus. I’d rather sleep in and watch TV than go to the gym and then work a 10 hour day. But I simply choose to do the right thing, because right now, I’m looking back at the last year of my life, and I don’t remember any of those moments when I chose chicken over pizza, or the gym over sleeping in. Not one. I’m not sitting here with a single regret saying “damn, remember that time you really didn’t want to go to the gym, but you did anyway? You blew it.” But I vividly recall the feeling of wanting to make change, caving in to my cravings in the moment and then instantly regretting it afterwards. You have to choose to be stronger than your excuses. You have to decide, if you really want something, or you just want the outcome. You have to be stronger than your excuses. A lot of people sign up at gyms all over the world, hoping that the new training program, or the new coach, or the new nutrition system is going to be the answer to all their health and fitness dreams. And every year thousands of people give up on themselves and quit. As a coach and gym owner, it’s one of the worst feelings in the world, seeing someone give up on themselves. It’s not like their goals just evaporated, they just accepted defeat, and there isn’t much any coach or trainer can do about it, because truly, no one has the solution, except you. It’s the best feeling in the world to have the power to change your life, but some people let the fear of that responsibility scare them away.

I’ll see you in 30lbs for part II. Update: Since this original article was posted I’ve had to have two more procedures on my heart, and have much more severe exercise resrtictions. As someone that has spent their entire life building a career around exercise, this has been a difficult period for me. I’ve gained back 10-12lbs from my lowest (250lbs), and have been spending the last few months figuring out how to structure my training to continue with my goals. Moving into 2020 I have a solid gameplan and I am already back on track to reach my long term goal of 231lbs. No matter the obstacles, it can and will be done!