Slamdog

Well here we go...

This will make you sick... Very Sick Indeed...

First Pic... Me 5 years ago... at almost 19 stone..




Now we have one taken end of april this year.... Weight there was around the 15 stone 8lbs.



Now for a selection from end of May this year...



And now...

I'll get some pics in the next day or so.. weight is down, body fat is now around the 20% mark from 40%.. I know I have a long way to go but I don't think I have done too bad for a years worth of training.

Go ahead .. take the **** you lean hairless beggars!

megatron

Incredible achievement dude! You can see the muscles coming through now as your BF has continued to drop. First class effort mate - just keep at it, theres some good muscles under there

Slamdog

My current pics should be a bit better... I'm at 14st 8lbs as of this morning...

What makes it for me is that I'm 41 on my next birthday. I have spent 40 years as a fat bloke and don't want to end up with diabetes like my younger brother... (who now weighs in at 20+ stone)

Full stats so far...

age 40
height 5' 8"
weight 14st 8lbs
bf 20%
waist size 36" (down from 44")


was a 30 a day smoker until valentines day this year.. haven't smoked since the hypnotherapy session...

MESSY_UK

Good work buddy, the weights coming off!

Conrad

yeah well done on the loss of weight...just goes to show it can be done with the right mind set! And i prefere the new hair cut

Bulldozer

Great stuff buddy, you must be well chuffed!!

And rightly so!

Slamdog

My hair in the top pic was what I considered short back then... most of the time it was halfway down my back.

And yep, I am pleased, although I would like to have lost more weight. My missus says that I have been fat for 40 years, taking a year or two to get rid of it is still quick... so I should stop whingeing..

tim_e

Definate congratulations there to you m8, well done

big

That is seriously some awesome progress.

Dropping 20% bodyfat is incredible. Keep up the good work.

How did you manage it?

ah24

Good job mate! Stick at it, and post up how you did it, may even get a sticky?;)

Slamdog

How did I manage it...

Ok.. Start at the beginning..

I was a fat baby (12lbs when I came out)

I was a fat child... a very fat kid in fact... I was the geeky bloke.. read everything but didn't do PE unless there was no other option.

Turned into a fat adult... who ended up in a job that let me sit on my butt all day eating crap.

I went to visit my parents and my brother was there... He had been diagnosed with diabetes (was caught on a works medical.. He drives tube trains)

Photos Were Taken...

I looked like crap. I was wider than he was. I looked like the creature from the black lagoon.

That was what started it. I didn't want to be on pills, doing daily blood tests like the rest of the family (both my parents have diabetes too). I wanted to be there for my two kids when they grew up.

So in my usual style... I went onto the net, and looked for 'weight loss'. I found the usual 'Weight Watchers' and 'Slimmers World'. Been there, done that in the past... It worked but was not what I would call pleasant. Yes, the public humiliation weigh in every week was a sure way of showing if you cheated or not but it wouldn't fit in with my work pattern or family commitments.

I was in the newsagents and I saw a copy of 'Muscle and Fitness'. Now there was something... Could I build some muscle? Could I lose weight? I have never seen my abs... Can I do it? All those questions I asked myself. So I bought the mag and a couple of others... 'Mens Health', 'Fiesta'....

Back at home, back on the net... Search for bodybuilding and diet...

Bought the Bill Phillips book from amazon, 'body for life' and started like that. I went and joined the Council gym. Started with the machines (They don't have much in the free weights area) and started to eat food that wasn't in packets.

I quickly found that my biggest issue was with carbs. Pasta, Potato, Rice... I ate it, I put on weight. So I actually cut carbs completely bar a bowl of muesli in the morning and eating more veggies. It was very haphazzard. It was a case of eating less quantity, and zero crap. I stopped the vending machine grazing at work. I stopped eating the works canteen food.

I was slowly losing weigh and my body was changing shape. my belt on my work trousers had to keep getting new holes put into it.

I was eating much better and was going to the gym every couple of days. I wasn't really following an exercise plan then, just exercising. This you could say was not ideal but from being a fat bloater of a truck driver who sat on his **** all night and all day at home to actually getting up and going to the gym was a big change in my life.

I joined up with t-nation and after a while realised that my diet was really not optimal in any way..... by then I had changed to 3 meals and 3 shakes a day. That was still working and i was still changing shape.

Timescale so far... about 6 months... I'd lost a good amount of weight and size by then. I'd dropped from a 44 waist to a 38/40. Poundage was down by 2.5 stone.

Then came a bonus.. a big bonus in fact. I was offered the chance of corporate membership at a gym. £50 a year instead of £25 a month... I jumped at it. When I got to the new gym that first day it was a shock. They had big iron plates... they had olympic bars, squat rack, bench press stations and dumbells up to 90kg... They also have a lot of shiny cardio machines and life fitness gear as well as some heavy duty machines which take plates rather than fixed blocks....

I was like a pig in ****... until I looked round and saw some of the guys there.. big and lean was not the word for it. Turns out, the gym used to be the biggest free weight gym in the area, a proper hardcore gym who moved to a bigger building and added the shiny machines to get the corporate money in.

Not wanting to run out the door, but a little embarrassed about being a wobbler I was having a go at the usual moves. A few curls, a few bench presses, some machine work. It was working but I never stopped reading.

It turns out my approach was all wrong. I was doing isolation moves instead of trying to work properly. My intensity was crap. How did I learn this? I saw a few articles on T-Nation by Chad Waterbury. His methods basically involve compound moves. I switched to compounds... squats, deadlifts, presses and pretty much dropped a lot of isolation stuff. I was trying harder with more weight.

My strength went up... My weight stopped going down.

This was a bit of a downer. I saw something that caught my eye. The Velocity Diet. It was something I thought I could do. It is the ultimate in get slim quick kickstarts. You eat NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. All you have is shakes 5/6 times a day within certain calorie levels. At no point do you go over 100g of carbs. Most days you are at less than 30g of carbs. You do that for a month. It was expensive (sort of) as you used biotest gear (cheap if you buy in bulk from the states). It worked. I dropped a lot of weight in that month... a stone in fact. I didn't actually want to eat again. I was happy with the shakes. I also realised that it was too extreme to be permanent. That was when I went back to clean eating but even cleaner.

More weight, more strength... but weight went back up by half a stone once I went back on food. That was depressing, but when I actually did some comparative body measurements I was slimmer. The weight had gone on, but in different places.

Disaster.. The Fluffy Slipper Incident....

I was at home.. Just coming out of the downstairs bog... I wasn't looking where I was going. I was trying to do up my keks... As I went forward, the wife's fluffy pink slipper jumped out, landed under my feet and caused me to do a typical 'you've been framed' backwards splat. Now in our hallway we have a stone tiled floor. The wife came home half an hour later to find me semi conscious on my back unable to move. She helped me up and I was in agony. My back felt like that little Filipino stripper was using her stiletto's to walk on my lower spine..... After an hour I asked the wife to call an ambulance.... Straight into Northampton General where an X-Ray showed what looked like a fractured spine. So... Two days. Strapped to a board until they could do another x-ray and MRI scan. That liquid morphine is brilliant... The MRI ended up showing that I had only bruised my spine, not cracked any bones so they untied me from the board and let me semi-sit..... That kept me out of the gym for almost 3 weeks. I was just itching to get back because it really is boring to have to just sit.. and sit... watching daytime tv.

I was now at 15st 8lbs... pretty much what I lost on the v-diet was back on again. That's when I read about Precision Nutrition by John Berardi. I paid my money... got my 'program' from the States... and gradually the weight is coming off. I also bought FitDayPc instead of just using the online version. Just me I suppose...

I now enter everything into my software that I eat. It makes me think about everything. I tend to do all the cooking now in the house. It doesn't bother me that I have to cook different stuff for the rest of the family to what I eat. Its a real beggar that the wife is size 6 uk regardless of the amount of chocolate, chocolate cake and doughnuts she eats... her bf is around the 10% mark... never changes....

So as of now... 209lbs this morning... still nursing a works injury which has stopped me in the gym from doing any press type work. I have damaged my supraspinatus.. back at the physio at the hospital on the 7th.... Didn't stop me yesterday doing some squats though... and leg presses.

I would love to say that my diet was strict, but it isn't. I eat what I fancy within the constraints of (a) what's in the fridge (b) what's its Macro Content and (c) can I be ****d to prepare it!


I eat things like scrambled egg, chicken breasts, mince, steak... still lower on carbs than most guys here but it works for me.

I eat vegetables with every meal. even if it is only a tomato (yes, I know it is a fruit but get you for being pedantic), and am getting about 1.5g/lb protein per day. I eat a lot of fruit. I never used to, but eating half a pineapple in a day or 4 peaches.. I also make my own yoghurts... tub of total greek yoghurt, some blueberries, raspberries or blackberries and a couple of spoons of splenda... all mashed together....

My meal timings are flexible, between 2 and 3 hours between feeds. It seems like I'm constantly eating but it isn't crap and I average around 2000-2500 calories a day. That is between a 500 and 1000 cal deficit from maintenance with my activity level so the weight is still going down. I'm not hungry on that level...

Everything has to be flexible really... I'm a night worker on a 4 on / 4 off shift pattern. My gym times are variable, my sleep pattern is never constant (especially with the school holidays) and my meal times are never set in stone. I eat when I feel I have to. I use shakes and bars as a filler some days, and especially at work because I can't cook there. I do pre-prepare meals for the day usually on a work day, sometimes for several days.

That in a nutshell Is how I have got this far.

Where do I go from here?

Well, the food thing is sorted... sort of. I could do with a custom designed meal plan sometimes but as what I'm doing now is working I really don't want to change it. I'm sure there are better ways out there. When my goals change from the fat loss to pure muscle gain then yes, I will be changing things around but for now......

I wish I could find a training partner who also worked odd days and shifts to basically force me to do more in the gym. I would pay for a trainer but they don't pay lorry drivers enough for luxuries like that. Especially not on shifts like mine and with the family stuff as well. She-who-provides-nookie would kill me if I spent any cash on that!

I wish I could stop getting injured. Since losing weight I have had more injurys than ever before. Pulled muscles, bruised bones etc. Maybe I put more physical effort in at work.. maybe I am just working my body much harder that it is used to. Either way... I'll live with it... My knees are not good.. already signs of arthritis in the right knee (result of another MRI, I'd fallen off the back of a lorry that time), my back is normal now.. well a bit stronger really with all the squatting. My shoulder is a bit of a pain but that will get better.

All of the injuries are probably because I am forcing my 40 year old car crash of a body to do something it has never done before.

So now you have a condensed life story.... I hope it inspires someone like seeing pics here of some of you guys has done for me.

Why did I join here? Because the american sites are good, but I don't think for some reason that they are that 'real'. Because guys here are brits, with the same sort of twisted humour it feels far more comfortable to me. Because we can spell words properly here. Because I have probably driven through the home town of everyone here at some point... I might have even delivered stuff to some of you guys...

I'm going on holiday in 9 days time.... I'll look for a gym when I get there....

invisiblekid

Great story mate. Stunning achievement.

You are allowed a week off for holidays you know

Although that said, I'm off to Florida in Sept and with the amount of food I intend to eat I better get my a$$ in the gym too!

ParaManiac

For a number of reasons this is the best post ive read in a while.

Well done Slam dog,you've got my respect.

Conrad

yeah ditto that... bloody good post mate, keep it up.

ARNIE

very good post and funny and inspiring to show what can be achieved with commitment and hard work,well done slam dog.