A quick intro: John is one of the hardest-working, coolest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of training.

He wrote this last week, and this weekend a pair of 30″ waist shorts were too big for him.  So this post should be called 56+ pounds and 9 inches later!  Also, if you look at bodyfat percentage instead of just scale weight, John has lost about 80 pounds of fat!  Look at the top two pictures on this page and compare them to the two on the bottom…

Want to find out how this stud did it?  Read on!

~ Luke

I couldn’t do it. There was no way I could get up to work out at 5:00 in the morning.

I couldn’t do it. There was no way that I could give up those tasty treats I convinced myself I deserved and needed.

I told myself I was “big boned” and carried the weight pretty well but people from work were talking about this amazing trainer and these boot camps he ran in the mornings. I was kind of interested. They worked on me for months. Finally Luke got my e-mail from one of my co-workers and offered me a free trial. I’m a frugal guy by nature and thought, hey, free is free, I could do it!

And then I tried it and, seriously, I couldn’t do it. Three push ups that is. Oh, I made it through the warm up alright and a couple of other things. And then that jerk had me do push ups. In my flippant way I remember asking how he wanted them. And then I “did” three and thought he was going to have to call 911.

(Note from Luke:  To be fair, he told me he could do ten!)

I realized that night that fat and nearly forty wasn’t going to work for me. I was a 218 pound, 37 year old man (technically middle age if the life expectancy of the average American man is 77), with a 38 inch waist and high blood pressure. I have all the same excuses as everyone else, but bottom line, I ate too much and moved to little. Combined with a family history of heart disease I was a recipe for disaster and really had no idea what to do about. But Luke did.

I can guarantee that Luke thought he would never see me again after that night. (Very true – Luke) Turns out I had other plans and he was going to be the guy to help me implement them. Something in me changed that night and over that weekend. It may have been the fact that I seriously thought I was going to die after three push ups and couldn’t move my arms more than about six inches in any direction. It may have been that the other two people, the same age as me (and girls!), working out that night could do it and I couldn’t. And I realized that I desperately wanted a different life and a different body.

So that weekend I sat down and wrote out some goals. I knew I was going to need help. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew it was going to require hard work. I knew all kinds of things about my life were going to have to be different. Behaviors were going to have to change. What could I do immediately? What could I commit to?

1. Show up. Being the aforementioned frugal guy, if I was going to be paying for personal training or boot camp I could commit to showing up. That meant changing behavior and would mean being in bed by 9:30 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. in order to be up by 5:00 a.m. I could do it.

2. Eat differently. For me, that meant not skipping meals. I often used to skip breakfast. It meant drinking either a pre or post workout drink. It meant planning what I was going to eat and making sure it was ready to go if I was in a hurry. It meant more vegetables and lean protein and less processed foods and carbohydrates. And I committed to give up adding sugar to things and not eating anything with white flour. I could do it.

3. Share my goals. I decided that I was going to be happy with small changes and I would be okay if it took a while. It took a lot of years to get fat it would be okay if it took a while for it to come off. If I could get under 200 pounds and to a 34 inch waist and to the weight on my drivers license all would be good. But if Luke was going to be my “go to guy” he was going to have to know what my goals were in order to hit them. It meant my group of friends and co-workers were going to have to know what my goals were in order to be a support systems for me. I could do it.

So I started personal training. I was too fat and slow for boot camp but wouldn’t be for long. These workouts turned out to be fun and I was kind of liking them. And I lost weight right away. And then about three weeks after I started I began having some blood pressure problems while working out. But not high blood pressure, too low. It took me a week to get a Doctors appointment but it turns out that I had changed enough in a month and was working out hard enough that my Doctor suggested that if I was going to commit to this that perhaps I should go off the blood pressure medication. Really? After three weeks? I was feeling better and looking better and off blood pressure medication in three weeks? Hell yeah, I can do it!

And do it I have done for 14 months now using a combination of Luke’s personal training and Luke’s boot camp. And I’m still having fun. From 218 pounds to 162. From a 38 inch waist to a 30 inch waist. Turns out, I’m not “big boned”. You might think it would get easier but because Luke is always changing up what we do and different intensity levels it never gets easy. Luke lit a fire in me that I didn’t know was there. I have no idea if I am a “typical” example of someone who has gone through a transformation but I know I couldn’t have done it without boot camp and without him.

So if a former fat boy like me can do it so can anyone else. You just need to get the right people and decide this is what you want the rest of your life to be like. I can do it! You can do it!