OnePhatMan

A couple of weeks later I had to visit my doctor because I was almost out of my diabetes medicine, and it was time to go through my humiliating quarterly blood tests. My doctor believed very strongly in the carrot and stick philosophy, and as a result, wrote my prescriptions such that I had to go back to see her regularly.

Normally, I argued with the head nurse about weighing, because it was pretty painful to slide the weights all the way to their heaviest setting only to find that it still wasn’t enough to accurately depict my weight. This time, I thought to myself, maybe my eating and treading water for these last two weeks has done some good. I stepped up onto the scales, holding my breath.

I weighed 347 pounds.

That day, in addition to performing the normal hemoglobin A1c test (which measures the average amount of glucose in your blood over a three-month period) the doctor also did a fructosamine test and checked my blood sugar. While my hemoglobin A1c showed me a little high—after all, it does measure three months’ worth of sugar effects, and I’d only started to change myself a couple of weeks earlier—the other two were already in the perfectly normal range.

I felt better those first days than I had in the last several years. I had more energy, and I didn’t have to take a nap every day after work just to recover from the hard job of sitting at a desk. Throughout that time, I ate less food than I’d previously consumed, I avoided sugar, and I treaded water. My blood sugar stayed between 90 and 100 (normal is considered to be anything between 70 and 110). Two weeks of doing something I should have been doing all along, coupled with the diabetes pills, brought my blood sugar into the normal range.

I went by my doctor’s office again a week later just to weigh. Talk about change—the man who used to hide from the scales or proclaim that he would just “skip this part” when asked to weigh was now making special trips to the doctor’s office just to be weighed. The result? 341 pounds. I was pumped.

I started this website, and a journal to document the path I took, to share my thoughts and ideas in hopes that it would reach others trapped in a world of fat like I was, and show them that a dramatic physical transformation is possible without diets, pills, or surgery.

I didn’t actually start writing in the journal until I weighed 341 pounds, thirty pounds below my highest weight. I began writing near the end of June 2000, and continued to write for over two years. During those two years as I transformed physically, I also transformed mentally.

For example, I was concerned in the beginning mostly with simply eating less food, while still eating many of the processed (i.e., junk) foods I once ate, sweets notwithstanding. As I learned more about nutrition, my opinions about food changed, and as a result, the foods I now eat are mostly unprocessed. Likewise, my opinions about working out changed, too. In the beginning, I was concerned with only cardio. Heck, I even thought I was too fat to lift weights! Over time, I realized that the best way to optimize your fitness is through a balance of both cardio and weight training.

Over the course of about 20 months, I became a new man. I dropped over 170 pounds, got in phenomenally good shape, and had the best time of my life. Jokingly, I changed my name from “the fat man” to “the phat man”, and I wrote the whole time I was transforming.

The journal became popular, drawing thousands of people daily. When my transformation was complete, I took the best of what I had to say and turned it into a self-published book with the tongue-in-cheek title From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. Over the course of about a year, the book sold out. I made it onto a couple of national TV shows, got written up in a national magazine, and had a handful of local media appearances.

I continued practicing what I preached, and continued to stay transformed into the man I’d visualized way back at the beginning when I weighed nearly 400 pounds. Life was good.      Setback »