Today’s blog is a guest post from a former student of ours from a few years back. He trained pretty hard when he was here, but there seemed to be something missing for him, and he discontinued training with us. I haven’t heard from him in a long time, but then he sent me this email out of the blue. In it, he breaks down some of the missing components and why he wasn’t able to accomplish his weight loss goals when he was with us. Some things had to change for him internally before he could take the necessary steps to make long-term sustainable progress, which he did!
Since his story is both multi-faceted and inspirational, I thought it would make a great post for the new year. So here it is in his own words…
Hi Jerry!
It’s Noah, I wanted to share some successes with you as you played a part in it.
When I left the Protocol, my wife and I were getting ready to have our 3rd baby and I had lost about 40-50lbs. I remember I was sticking to the eating plan pretty well but was disappointed at how slow it was going, and I couldn’t work out as much as I needed to. The baby came and I stopped everything. Fast forward to just over a year ago: I was just shy of 400lbs (first photo), and began having all the health problems associated with morbid obesity.
I was getting ready to be tazed at work (for the 4th time) and was genuinely concerned I was going to have a heart attack <editor’s note: He works in law enforcement in case you’re wondering why he’s getting tazed at work>. I went to my doctor for a check-up and was told my liver was dangerously fatty, my heart was, “giving off readings normally associated with men who have had heart attacks in the past,” my testosterone level was in the 20’s, and my estrogen was in the 300’s. As an “O neg” blood type, I have been donating blood for almost a decade. Well, my resting heart rate was so high I could no longer donate blood. I had signed up for bone marrow donation and was also denied due to my health.
Then I was approached to be a deacon at church and I had to look at my life and assess my spiritual health. It was then that I realized I was living in a type of ‘sin’. Being a work in progress is one thing, but being obese and not addressing it is open defiance of God and his commands.
When I was active with The Protocol, everything I did was always with a ‘diet’ mentality. This time I started to make slow but attainable healthy food choices and implemented a lot of the information from your blog.
I re-read our notes back and forth from 2012, and combined that info with the stuff I read from your blog. I buckled down and made significant life changes that I’m still following over a year later and will be following forever. I also began treating the endocrine issues my past choices had created. I didn't follow regular workout routines, I did exercises I enjoyed. My favorite exercise consists of pulling a 45lb truck tire with a 15lb chain while wearing a 50lb ruck sack for 3 miles and then punching a punching bag with a boxing routine. I also don’t follow the official government diet program; I choose to eat healthy food, and I only eat about 10 different things that I can cook in large quantities so I don’t mess up (with a rare hiccup here and there when I’m hungry).
Fast forward a year and I can actually see the numbers from my scale when it shows 299 (second photo). I have left the 300’s behind. When I started, I had to buy a special scale because the normal ones couldn’t read my weight.
This is freedom to me. Fad diets and fad exercises didn’t work. If any of my incoherent babbling can help someone else, please feel free to use every bit of this you want.
I want to be clear, I never once lied to you about what I would eat when we worked together, I always told the truth and was honest, even when it was ugly. But I believe a lot of why I failed at the time was due to my spiritual state. Being obese is 100% a personal struggle with sin, and I wasn’t close enough with God to give up my ‘food idols’ permanently when I left The Protocol; so the momentum we built and the progress we made didn’t continue.
Now that I’ve achieved the goal we set of getting into the 200’s, I wanted to share that triumph with you because whether you know it or not, you continued to play a major role in my life even after we stopped working together. I wouldn’t even share this with you if you were just a personal trainer, but you are so much more than that to the people you work with. I always felt that your guidance was ever present in the back of my mind every time I didn’t eat a doughnut, or passed by a fast food joint to go home and cook. You probably forgot about the time we spent together, but there wasn’t one thing you said that I didn’t put down in my memory, and I think about our conversations on food almost every week.
So thanks man! Continue to do what you do! You are genuinely helping people change their lives for the better and you DESERVE all the success God is giving you and what you’re achieving because of your diligent service to God through The Protocol.
Sincerely,
Noah
