How I Lost 112lbs in One Year like a Machine.

No, it wasn’t amputation.

This is the story of how I turned 250lbs of lazy fat into 138lbs of hand-standing muscle, and how I’d do it again. When I began I couldn’t do a push-up, not even one; I tried and tried but I just couldn’t make my arms do it. I would push against the floor with enough effort to be sore the next day, absorbing all the pain and reaping none of the gains. This went on for over a week. An entire week of trying, and trying until finally I managed one. But my poor exercise regime couldn’t hold a candle to my levels of consumption. My eating habits were my worst habits. Food had been engrained into my routine since I was a child — I was conditioned to eat whilst I watched TV and likewise I would watch TV whilst I ate. It was a viscous circle where I was usually doing one of these things, so of course I needed to do the other. It was unsustainable. I was unsustainable.

In my journey I have found the human body to be an incredible and resilient machine. Yes, it’s a machine. After all, it does whatever we tell it, and then we turn around and fuel and even (occasionally) maintain it. Everyone owns one, yet it is the most frequently neglected thing in the world — by far. You could even argue that, in life, what do we truly own except our body? Nothing else is guaranteed to survive throughout your life. So why do we mistreat it so badly.

We all overfill the tank, there is no situation where that final plate of pasta will be worth the damage it does to the mechanism. And yet, we all happily chomp down regardless. One of the primary requirements to losing weight is simply to reduce your intake — eat a little less and shed a few pounds, or eat a lot less and lose a lot more. Your sanity included it usually feels like. The trouble with this approach is where do you draw the line? Eat too little and soon you will overreact and land in binge eating, but eat too much and you will feel like it isn’t working. You have to find a balance. Unless you don’t…

1000 good calories are enough to sustain almost anyone. In fact, they sustained me for almost a year. Plain, unadulterated chicken breast, boiled potatoes and peas. Nothing more, nothing less — that was my life for a year. I took all the choice and craving out of my food habits — I would eat a single meal at 3pm and nothing else. No longer did I spend the day wondering what I would eat, or when — I rarely even thought of food after the first month. I had turned an unhealthy obsession for fried foods into indifference in such a short amount of time and it started to pay off. Quickly I started to see results — most weeks I lost 2–3lbs, sometimes more but rarely less. My machine was operating well below it’s fuel requirements and yet I was still performing fine.

I slept better every night, with no more excess energy running around my system I had vivid dreams that I could count on to appear every night. And I woke up easier, even without any breakfast to spur me along. I was slowly fixing, or adapting, my machine in preparation of my new life. I took up running, what a blast that was! I was still significantly overweight so my knees ached and my ankles too but the release that came with it was exceptional. Never had I really done sports, I always had a note in school and sports days were avoided like the plague there were. But now, I wanted all of that — I had been living in a broken machine with it’s engine quietened and slow, yet now, even in the early stages of repair, it was roaring back to life.

I started to become more interested in exercise, but I didn’t want to turn into a weight curling, barbell pressing type of machine, instead I wanted to refine my human machine — strengthen the gears and belts that exemplify human ability. I revisited the push-ups I had struggled so hard at, only to find them just as difficult as before. But why? I was definitely lighter, and overall healthier; I was having trouble figuring out why it was still such hard task. But like everything else, it came in time. Short time too.

I keep saying that we are machines, but we forget that machines can be dumb, they need crystal clear instructions or they struggle — but this was something that I couldn’t yet give it. However, given time, I slowly learned how to support my weight, and then how to balance as I lowered myself to the floor. I fed all this into my machine and voilà! It learned what to do and did it with no trouble, one push-up turned into 10, and then by the end I was able to reach 100. Though that took significantly more time than the first. I then moved on to pull-ups, a terrifying prospect at the start and on of the quintessential shows of strength. I even went to far as to install a fixed bar onto my wall so that I never had an excuse not to practice. A common term in body-weight fitness is “Greasing the Groove”, where you do an exercise dozens of times spread over a day to surpass a plateau, but by doing this every day, I never reached a plateau. I was consistently surpassing myself day after day and week after week. At my peak, with no training and just what I had learned, I was able to transition from a front seated position, into a handstand without touching the floor. I had accomplished everything I wanted and so much more I had never even thought of.

My machine was streamlined, fuelled entirely by fresh foods and juices, it recovered in a quiet, dark room every night and woke up effortlessly regardless of the days prior. I had finally fixed it. I created a mantra for the days that felt difficult, when I didn’t think I could quite make the last push-up or run that extra mile.

I am a machine.

This knowledge spurred me on every time. It reminded me not only of how far I have come, but also of how much further I could go. I wasn’t going to break down, because I never had before and if I wasn’t asleep, passed out or dead then I always had another repetition in the tank, another mile on the clock.

If I could distil this insane journey down into its purest concepts, they would be:

• Eat a consistently small amount, and make it boring and nutritious.
• Figure out the purpose of your machine and train it, master it.
• Give yourself time to adapt, but not too long — force yourself to submit.
• Finally, focus on how your machine is sounding, oil it when it needs it with vitamins, and let it cool down and rest. A broken machine cannot do anything.

Even slightly following this is sure to refine your machine, to what extent is up to you. But even when it gets hard, and you struggle, just remember…

You are a machine.

Did you enjoy this story? Do you want to learn more about life and strange happenings around the world? Then by all means have a look at my other posts on similar topics such as these below.

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You will also find this, and much more, on my website in the near future, ALifeOfMastery.com;