At his heaviest, 27-year-old Alex weighed more than 500 pounds and felt uncomfortable going to the gym. Now, after changing his diet and taking up CrossFit, he has dropped 300 pounds and is in the best shape of his life. Sharing his story with Barcroft TV, Alex explains what inspired his weight loss transformation.
“I’ve always had a problem with my weight, I’ve always been the big kid in the class, I was always picked last in gym,” he says. “My weight just started to spiral and get out of hand right after high school. Food was always a comfort, and I just abused it. I was eating all the wrong stuff in all the wrong amounts. 12 packs of Mountain Dew, eating tons of Oreos, pizza, Chinese buffet, ice cream, you name it, I was just eating it. I had no knowledge of what calories and eating all these foods was doing besides making my weight go up.”
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“Every year since I can remember, my yearly checkups have been ‘You need to lose weight, we need to consider surgery,'” he continues. “At one point, the doctor actually told me if I didn’t lose weight I wasn’t gonna live.”
Everything changed one day during his job a courier, when he was making a delivery to a warehouse with a pallet scale: “Just out of curiosity I stepped on, and I was shocked. I saw 480 pounds,” he says. “But if I look back at pictures a couple of months prior, I was bigger. So I believe I was 500+ at one point. From that day forward, I just completely changed my life. I knew that this was my time, this was my final chance, my last, last shot. Knowing that I’m an adult now, this is my life, it can either end really soon or I could start taking care of myself, it was all on me.”
He ditched the vast volumes of soda in favor of just water, and cut the fast food from his diet, which led to a weight loss of 40 pounds in the first month alone. And Alex soon got over his anxiety around working out in front of other people, hitting the gym six or seven times a week and throwing himself into rigorous CrossFit workouts which constantly changed and challenged his body to adapt.
“The gym used to make me uncomfortable, now I’m doing CrossFit every morning at 5 a.m.,” he says. “I lost 280 pounds. The lowest that I hit was 199 pounds. 200 to 205 pounds is where I feel healthy and where I feel like I can perform the best physically.”
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