Look at yourself in the mirror. The person you see looking back at you…is that who you want to be? Are you happy with yourself? If you are, then pat yourself on the back and call it a day. If not, then what are you going to do to change? If you’re not sure where to start, maybe take a page out of Redditor capgunbandit’s book and start hitting the gym. Ain’t nothing wrong with throwing some fitness routines into your day, however for capgunbandit, he realized that he was in need of more than what winds up being for many simply a “fad diet” – he needed a lifestyle change.
Drastically.
“So about two and a half to three years ago I weighed about 366 pounds,” he writes in a Reddit post, “I had been fat my entire life and always wanted to change it. I wanted to change because for one it’s unhealthy to be that size.” Estimating his calorie intake at around 4,000-6,000 a day, capgunbandit’s extra weight left him feeling like an outsider:
I had zero confidence. I wanted to be in the military and one day be a police officer or firefighter/paramedic but I wasn’t going to get there being fat. There are plenty of reasons I can rattle off for my obesity but it all comes down to laziness and ignorance to nutrition.
Rather than sit around and cry about it, capgunbandit started lifting with his uncle. Starting every day around 3 p.m., the two would lift for a few hours until it was time for him to get ready for work, leaving “only a small window of time to eat and chill out versus waking up and eating/chilling all day then going to work.”
After one month capgunbandit weighed himself to find that he’d lost six pounds. Enthused by his accidental progress, he figured he may as well keep it up:
I found out about calorie counting which made my progress even better and taught me how to eat (I honestly had zero clue about the whole energy in vs energy out stuff). Then I found reddit and r/fitness and took in lots of info from here and just applied all the basics from the FAQ + other things, 2.5 years go by and boom! I’m fit enough to go to recruit training so I do, and I accomplish a huge goal!
Capgunbandit is now an official U.S. Marine, and while that in itself is nothing to sneeze at, his progress photos nearly blow that feat out of the water:
350+ Pounds:
~320 Pounds:
280 Pounds:
320 vs. 210:
320 Shirtless vs. ~240-260 Pounds
320 Pounds vs. 195 Pounds
[H/T Reddit]