Brett is not a client of mine, but actually a family member. Brett amazes me with all of his talents and abilities, so it did not surprise me at all that he is achieving what he set out to do! A true go-getter and role model! Thanks for sharing Brett.
       
         I’ve always had problems with my weight, and I’ve probably been classified as at least overweight as far back as I can remember. It never really bothered me though. I’ve had great friends and family that didn’t care what I looked like and who only wanted me to be happy. I never really drew my self confidence from my physical appearance – I’m short (5’4”) and stocky guy and it was obvious from early on that I wasn’t going to be Adonis. I’ve always put much more stock into my other traits and abilities and I’ve derived my self confidence from those. That started unravelling about 3 years ago.

          I weighed 175lbs when I went away to university. Engineering was a tough discipline that didn’t leave a lot of time for exercising or eating healthy. Engineering students drink a lot, and I also have an insatiable love for pizza. I gained 25lbs in my first semester of university, putting me at 200 pounds. Over the next 4 years of school I packed on another 15-20 pounds, bringing my total weight up to 215-220 when I graduated. That weight held pretty steady, oscillating between 215 and 225 pounds until about 3 years ago. A little more than 3 years ago my wife and I decided to start a family, and in October 2012 she told me she was pregnant. We had our son in June 2013, and at that point I was 235 pounds – having decided that I also needed to eat for two. The year and a half of my son’s life involved a lot of fast food and eating out because we didn’t have the energy (he still rarely sleeps past 6AM) or desire to cook ourselves. I peaked at 262.5 pounds around the beginning January 2015 when my son was 1.5 years old. At the same time, a couple of events really hit me hard and got me to rethink my life choices.
            The first of those events happened when I was travelling to Seattle for work. I was a big guy at around 260lbs. Despite my 5’4” height, I have relatively wide shoulders that are wider than some of the seats on airplanes. I usually try to get a window or aisle seat so I can squish against the window or lean over the aisle so I’m not making anyone around me uncomfortable, but on this particular flight I got stuck in a middle seat. I crossed my arms and prepared for an uncomfortable flight, bumping shoulder to shoulder with the guys beside me. The guy on the window seat saw me sitting down and was nice enough to lean towards the window a bit so I had a bit of shoulder room on that side. After I sat down, the guy on the aisle seat sat down beside me. He was probably around 50 years old, about my height, but skinny. He sat down, and proceeded to berate me for being fat and taking up part of the seat he had paid for – he did this for the 15 minutes prior to take off, insulting me and trying to goad me into hitting him – probably so I’d get kicked off the plane and be out of his space. I decided to ignore him and do what I do best on airplanes – I had a nap, and I made sure to cuddle as close to him as possible. I’m still hurt by this experience, and still amazed at how callous he was. Despite all of my weight loss, my shoulders have not shrunk noticeably so I doubt he would have been much more comfortable even if I was at my ideal weight.
            The second event, was when I tried to apply for life insurance. My wife is a stay-athome mom and at that point I had an 18-month old child who was completely dependent on my income. I decided it was time to extend my life insurance benefits over the base that I got from work. The first thing I did was to apply to max out my work benefit because it gives a lot of benefit for very little money. I was denied for being obese with asthma and sleep apnea. I worked with my insurance broker, and was denied again by several companies for the same reasons. I felt like I wasn’t able to protect my family. I felt ashamed and unworthy. I was absolutely devastated. My insurance broker was able to find a company that would insure me and that’s when I decided to start losing weight. At first I wanted to lose weight so that when I had my insurance physical I would get lower rates. My insurance physical was scheduled for 2 weeks and I was determined to be at 245 (which was the weight I had put in my application) by then. I lost 15 pounds in 2 weeks and felt like crap the entire time. For the most part I was getting about 500 calories a day in the form of 3 protein shakes. My stomach hurt, my immune system was compromised and I got sick, and it was a really terrible 2 weeks. It wasn’t healthy and I don’t recommend this path to anyone. I did feel better at 245 pounds than 260 pounds, however. I had a little more energy, and I was a little less sore when I chased my son around. I got life insurance, but it wasn’t as much as I think I need, the term isn’t as long as I need, and the premiums are really high. I’ll fix those things when I get to my end goal.
            At this point I had lost a good amount of weight, I was feeling better, and I had a choice – go back to those old habits or treat the last 2 weeks of hell as some sort of cleanse and start making better choices. I decided keep going. I don’t have any secret method for how I lost weight. I knew my problem was the amount of food I was eating, so I focused on that first. I just decided to eat less calories than I burned. I started using MyFitnessPal to track my calories. I put in my height, weight, activity level (sedentary), and told it that I wanted to lose 1.5 pounds per week. Originally I was allowed 1720 calories per day and at first I struggled to stay under that. I was usually within a couple hundred calories which was still less than I was burning every day with no activity (it takes a lot of energy to power a bigger body). About once a month I re-set my weight loss per week goal so that it recalculates my caloric needs based on my current weight. I currently get 1500 calories per day and I’m not struggling to stay under it as much any more. I still eat everything I love, just less of it (I eat 2 slices of pizza instead of 2 halves of a pizza). I usually eat a small breakfast (a protein shake or protein bar). On days that I go out for lunch with my coworkers I eat a moderate sized lunch and a smaller dinner. And on days when I stay in the office I eat a small lunch and a larger dinner. I often get hungry in the middle of the afternoon so I will have a small snack as well. I’ve heard all of the various dieting advice – don’t eat fat, don’t eat carbs, don’t eat a big dinner or you won’t lose weight. I ignored all of that advice and focused on my plan of eating less food and I started losing weight.                  When I started losing weight I started with some very mild exercise – my wife and I would take our son and dogs for a short walk a few times per week. Even now, I still don’t really do what most people would consider intense exercise. In November 2015 I got Fitbits for my wife and I. We use this to push us to go harder and get a minimum level of activity (10000 steps) every day. We probably weren’t getting that before, but we always get 10000 steps a day now – even if that means we’re walking around the living room at 9PM while watching TV. I’m also really into woodworking and building things, and it turns out that this hobby burns a good amount of calories because you’re hauling lumber around and the boards usually weight around 25 pounds before they are cut and they are awkward (which forces you to use a lot of different muscles to stabilize the weight). Its not a lot of cardio unless you’re really out of shape (which I was), but it’s a good amount of whole body strength training. I still continue to do woodworking and every time I do a big weekend project I seem to lose a couple of pounds. I built a massive patio table last weekend and I was stiff and sore afterwards but I felt great.
              track my weight in both MyFitnessPal (so that it can use it for calculating my caloric needs) and in an app called “My Weight.” My Weight is great because it shows you a lot of information. It’s a dead simple app to set up as well – you give it your details and a goal date for when you want to hit your ideal weight. It will calculate your ideal weight for you and keep track of how far you are in your goals. My favorite part of this app is the graphical view of your weight loss. It draws your weight loss on a graph, but it also draws your goal on the graph and you can see if you are going faster or slower than your goal. It also draws a trend line based on the data you enter it, which approximates when you will actually hit your goal weight.
         

I’m now slightly past the half way mark in my weight loss. I started at 262.5 pounds, I’m now 198.8 pounds, and my goal is 137.5 pounds. I’ve dropped 10 inches (size 46 to 36) and I’ve gone from 2XL shirts being tight to XL shirts fitting correctly. I’ve lost more than double my 2.5- year old son’s weight and I have a lot more energy to play with him. I’ve done a lot so far to ensure that I’ll still be here when my son is fully grown. I’m hoping to be at my goal weight before Christmas this year. I’m still afraid of going back to my bad habits and putting it all back on, and I think that’s a good thing. I hope that I stay that way and don’t get complacent once I reach my goals because it is so much harder to take the weight off than it is to put the weight on. Originally I think my weight was the biggest threat to my long-term health and that if I tried to change everything at once I would likely fail, so I decided to focus on getting my portion sizes under control first. I think this was the right strategy for me, and now that I have portion sizes better under control I can start trying to change some of the foods I eat.