My Journey from Fat to Gym Rat
Chapter 1
January 2012 - September 2013
January 2012, a huge rememberable date for me now, is where my journey to become to best version of me began. After many hours of researching, reading, watching and generally being interested in making a change to my lifestyle, Monday 9th January 2012, I took the terrifying plunge and joined my local gym. By this time I had managed to get a solid nutrition plan together and stuck to it for the week, i was comfortable and confident with my own ability for the nutrition sides of things. Even though I had a pretty good idea on what I needed to do in the gym to make a start it was still a very daunting prospect for someone like myself, that had never really had a active lifestyle, to sign on that dotted line and walk into what was to become my new lifestyle.
For the next 6 months I stuck to my hand-crafted plans and made some huge progress, not only physically but mentally too. Over those 6 months I had already managed to transform my mind into what felt like a completely different zone. Someone could have told me that doctors had performed the first ever brain transplant and because of the changes my mind had undertaken I would have believed them. Over the first 6 months I had developed so much confidence in my general ability for life, I started to recognise I was actually serving a purpose in life now, I started trying new things in life, testing my ability on subjects I would never of paid attention to before, I even started to talk to anyone who walked past me (I couldn't even look at people before due to confidence issues, let alone talk to them).
Within these first 6 months I had managed to get myself down to 77kg/169lb, showing a total loss of 46kg/101lbs, every time I saw a photo comparison I genuinely couldn't believe what I had achieved. From here I had two options really, I could have stopped and being thrilled with my progress and determination that led to my transformation so far or I carry on and progress through life carving a path for others to follow in my wake feeding on my motivation, I chose the latter.
From July 2012 to Feburary 2013 I decided that I would like to put on a little 'lean size' and see how I looked with a slight overall size increase. So there I went, I increased my nutrition intake slightly, in turn I slowly started making strength gains inside of the gym. I noticed my clothes (new ones after having to donate all of my XXLs) were starting to become slightly tighter/more fitted to my frame, the mirror was giving me the indication I was on the right path. After gaining around 9kg/20lbs I thought that I was safe to drop a few more pounds of body fat and see what sort of physique I had hiding under there. So off I went, dropping the body fat at a slow comfortable rate, I returned back down to 81kg/180lbs but this time I was even leaner than when I hit the 170lb mark thanks to the lean muscle I had gained.