Weight Loss and Healthy Living

I used to dread when my son would ask me to play with him. Simply putting on my shoes and bending over to tie them was an enormous effort that would leave me out of breath. I would pop the buttons off my pants or rip the seat on a regular basis.


I kept buying baggier shirts and pants in an effort to hide the mass of fat that I was rapidly accumulating. As the fat grew thicker and clung heavier, my attitude grew more sour. I was burying myself in a pit of blubbery despair that I could not imagine digging myself out of. When I would wake in the morning, I would sneer at the reflection in the mirror and simply remind myself what a horrible person I had become. Then I would find consolation in food while aiming my misdirected anger towards friends and family.

Today, I still have trouble keeping up with my son on the basketball court, but I have no trouble putting on my shoes. He tries to keep up with me as we lift weights in the small gym I have built in our basement. The little number on the small tag on the inside of my jeans reads 32" instead of 44" and I've torn my pants only once, when I was wearing the wrong style to perform squats. I am a positive, happy person who loves to wake to see my daughter smiling and asking enthusiastically if I can prepare her breakfast. I like what I see in the mirror, but it is less my physique and more the smile and twinkle in my eyes that I notice. Instead of taking my anger out on my family and friends, I direct my energies toward helping them achieve and accomplish new goals in their lives.

Now it is time to help you. Before the year 2000, I knew less about weights than most of my friends who don't train today. I never had an interest. I had no clue what protein was as compared to carbohydrates or even that there were different types of fats. The only thing the word "cardio" meant to me was jogging. I made a change - a tremendous one - but that change is not because I know a magic secret or took a special pill that I am trying to sell to you. That change was the result of a total transformation that started somewhere unexpected - on the inside. It was about changing my mind and becoming a better person: to take responsibility and then empower myself to conquer my wildest dreams.

I thought that dropping weight would help me regain my confidence and self-esteem and build a greater self-image. I was wrong. Dead wrong. Instead, I had to build to my confidence, improve my self-esteem, and create a new self-image in order to take control of my weight and health. I know many people who go on a "diet" and try to do it the same way I did - backwards! This book is my attempt to help you learn from my own mistakes.

Over the past several years I have coached scores of people to better health, and have always had a distinct style for doing so. I teach others to take control, rather than telling them what to do. There is a saying that if you feed someone a fish, they have a meal for that day, but if you teach them how to fish, then they have meals for life. Physique transformation matters most in the mind. As my clients tell me time and time again, I am the one person who was not afraid to let them know that they had to resolve their job situation or a conflict with a friend or spouse before they could successfully lose weight and keep it off. No, I am not a psychologist. I am a health coach who wants results, and I have learned the many factors that impact those results. Although nutrition and training are important, all of your success starts in your mind and from the person you are and become.

In this book, I share with you the techniques I have developed over these years to coach people to success. I also share my own story with you. It is my hope that you may relate to many turning points in my life, and that this will empower you to make the breakthroughs necessary to achieve your goal of good health. But before we can become the journey, we must begin the journey. For me, that journey began in a small, dark garage apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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When I worked in St. Petersburg, my life was a skipping record, playing the same notes over and over. I would drag myself out of the luxury of my 10' x 12' garage apartment, the one with no ventilation except for an undersized air-conditioning unit stuffed into a hole twice as large as the unit (I plugged the gap with old slacks, jeans, socks, and underwear) and the small draft that managed to squeeze through the slats on the door or the small hole in one corner. Our house was in a high-crime section of town, so the windows were barred shut. Since the apartment had been used as a photography studio, the windows were also spray-painted black. The frame of my waterbed had busted a few months back and sat on the floor in the corner, next to a small throw rug that barely covered the terrazzo floors.

My commute to work was less than a mile, but I never thought of doing anything other than driving. I sat in a small cubicle and complained the same complaints day after day. I worked through my stack of assignments, spitting out computer code faster than any of my superiors but was rewarded with nothing more than another stack of work. Each workday, I left as soon as I could, drove back to my apartment, and stopped by the small convenience store at the end of the road. On days that I had plenty of cash, I would purchase a pint of Old English or Colt .45, some snacks, and a pack of cigarettes. On other days, I took advantage of a trick learned only when you live at the edge of poverty, buying cigarettes by the cigarette, rather than the pack. Sometimes I could afford only three, but if it was a question of food or smokes, the smokes almost always won.

At home, I would rouse my roommate from his nap. We would fire up a bowl of pot and get high, then play 3-D shooter games until we passed out. The next day the cycle would repeat. Sometimes we had a little fun: I would drag one of my speakers outside of the apartment and point it toward the sky. I would throw on Smashing Pumpkins, and we would play footbag (hacky sack) on the roof. One time we dropped acid and lay on the roof in the rain, wearing shades so we could watch the raindrops fall. I am not proud of my past, but it is something that will always be there.

The stereo and the computer were consistent. For some reason, I never pawned the sound system even when I hocked my class ring, class jacket, the keyboard my parents gave me, the set of pool cues I spent months saving for, and just about anything else I owned in order to make my car payment. Rent was always a secondary concern, because my landlord was also a close friend who I did not treat as a friend because I took advantage of him and never paid the rent on time. After I was down to nothing but the sound system, my parents bought me the personal computer. I assume they thought it would help me direct my mind toward more constructive goals. My mother also introduced me to the job at the insurance company that kept me just shy of being broke.

Every once in a while, a good friend of ours would stop by. We would hear an enthusiastic knock at the door, and there she would be, smiling. Sometimes she would have a handful of whippets, or nitrous oxide canisters. Other times, she would simply be holding Purple Haze, the huge, purple bong she had affixed a Jimi Hendrix sticker to. As I said, my life was monotonous and going nowhere. It was during one of those rare moments when I was not high, drunk, or working that I realized I should probably pursue something more than what I was doing. It was a beginning. I was 22 years old, and the year was 1996.

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What do a small refrigerator, a six-foot tall metal cart, a nine-year-old child, a softball-pitching machine, a large Labrador puppy, and an eight-foot dinghy all have in common? They all weigh about 65 pounds! Sixty-five pounds of fat contain about 227,500 calories - almost a quarter million! What is so special about 65 pounds? Sixty-five pounds was the difference between walking dead and truly living.

Sixty-five pounds ago, life was nothing more than a boring routine that I endured each day. A typical morning would begin with the ritual of standing in front of the mirror, looking at my body, and then literally sneering at the image that I saw. I would drag my feet from place to place, hidden in a cloud of depression and self-hatred. I could not even bend over to tie my shoes without losing my breath, and my size 42" slacks were getting difficult to button.

I had literally tried it all. I fasted. I went on crazy diets, such as eating nothing but one can of pears per day. I jogged until I could not feel my legs. I took special "herbal remedies" or went on no-carbohydrate diets that left me feeling dizzy and nauseated. Every attempt ended the same way: I was burned out, hated myself more, could not "stick with the program," and somehow managed to gain more weight than I had lost.

My wife, Doreen, is the one who made the difference. She had noticed some co-workers transforming their physiques, and asked them for their secret. When she told me about the book, Body for Life by Bill Phillips, I was very skeptical. After so many failures, I was not about to pay someone for the latest "fad." However, Doreen understood that the proceeds from the book purchase would go to charity and had no problem buying the book and passing it along to me. I let it sit for several weeks and finally decided that I would try it.

What I found amazed me. It was not a huge advertisement for a special product. It was not a crazy diet where you had to weigh everything you ate or run calories through complex equations to determine a "daily intake." Most important, the book focused on something many other programs did not - me! It taught me to look inside and discover the true reasons why I wanted to change, and to set goals and find inspiration to make that change happen. The change did happen - my entire life transformed.

My change has been about total health, not just my waistline. I've learned to focus on having a healthy body, because health is something you must maintain forever; it doesn't fluctuate like scale weight or waistlines. Along with good physical health comes good mental and spiritual health. I cut my body fat in half; lost 65 pounds of fat over a year (30 pounds of fat in just three months), dropped 10" on my waist, and gained energy I never knew existed. However, these numbers mean nothing compared to the newfound sense of happiness and togetherness that I share with my family and God.

I encourage everyone to take the first step. Sure, you might be worried about the extra flab at first, with your mind focused on weight loss. However, as you progress, you will learn to focus on living. In the end, it is about control, and you can and will regain control of your life, through consistency and persistence. Always remember that living is giving . and when you do reach your goal, share your progress with someone else and spread the good health.

In my experience, many people know what it takes to achieve a balanced lifestyle and wellness. They understand eating "clean" foods (healthy choices) and learning about calories, and they recognize the importance of exercise for burning additional calories and improving overall health. How often have you heard someone say, "I don't have any problem getting down into the gym to exercise. It's the nutrition that I struggle with"? Why is nutrition such a daunting area to tackle? A personal trainer and friend of mine, Tony Wild, says that people should practice push-offs with their push-ups. A push-off simply means: when you've eaten enough, push off the rest! This requires a mental attitude, and sometimes it is not the easiest attitude to come by. For this reason, I believe the beginning to any successful transformation starts on the inside. We must first focus on the inner stuff.

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I remember sitting in the apartment, staring at the room for the last time. My friends had just thrown my going-away party. This one was less mellow than the one when I returned from dropping out of college. During that party, I had finished a fifth of Jack Daniels and woke up in bed, miserable and with my high-tops still on. This time, everyone else drank, but I abstained. I had to close the deal for my apartment in the morning, which meant driving straight through from St. Petersburg to Atlanta. The last person to say goodbye was my landlord and closest friend at that time. He smoked one last cigarette with me, and then wandered into the main house.

I packed the last item, my television set, into the back of my two-door Honda Civic. I was proud of that car. With my first raise at the insurance company, I went out and bought a car for myself, brand new. I received $200 for the 1980 Pontiac Bonneville that my parents had turned over to me. I asked the salvage department at my insurance company what my best investment would be, and then spent two months with a co-worker who had been a former car saleswoman, going from dealership to dealership to find the right price.

My first car, a four-door Civic LX, was totaled by another co-worker who ran a stop sign about two months after I bought it, and the insurance pay-off was higher than what it cost me to drive the car off the lot. I took the extra cash and used it to buy the next higher model, the two-door EX, but I had to leave out the automatic transmission in order to afford it. I had never driven stick shift before!

That was the first time I learned an important lesson in life: with a sense of urgency, when something needs to be done, you can master a new skill faster than you would believe. The police stopped me only one time when I stalled attempting a left turn at a busy intersection before I mastered the standard transmission. I had left myself with no other option than to learn it.

I set out for Atlanta at about 2 A.M. because I knew it took about eight hours to make the drive from St. Petersburg, and the apartment complex opened at 10 A.M. Halfway there, near Valdosta, with the sun breaking over the horizon, I stopped at a rest area and took my cat out on a leash to do her business. I smoked a cigarette, thought a little about how I was pursuing a new life, leaving old habits, and tossed the rest of my cigarette pack in the trash.

Right there, at that moment, I made a decision I could never seem to make before then. I used to joke that I would "cut back on quitting smoking," because so many times I swore I would stop but failed. I was smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds a day and had been doing so for two years when I made that decision to quit. To this day, with the exception of an occasional cigar, I have never smoked again nor had the urge. Ironically, it would be far more difficult for me to break my addiction to unhealthy food than it ever was to quit smoking on that cold day in 1996.

This article is an excerpt from Lose Fat, Not Faith by Jeremy Likness, ISBN 0976907941.

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