READ ABOUT BILLS WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY:

As a business owner, I’m responsible for my own schedule, and part of my routine was trying to squeeze every minute out of every day. Therefore my choices for lunch (and many other meals) was “something fast”. I wanted to maximize my time, and that meant eating on-the-go.

In my 20’s, a slice of pizza (or three) didn’t stick around like they did in my 40’s. I found my weight climbing each year, and although a few months of dieting here and there would produce results, those results were all short-term.

By 2017, my weight had ballooned to over 300 pounds, an increase of about 100 pounds in the previous decade. Gaining 10 pounds a year doesn’t sound terrible, until you string ten of those years together.

A sign from…BOB?

I was introduced to Nick by my good friend Bob. One day I met Bob for lunch at Friendly’s restaurant. I was in the middle of eating a 2,500 calorie meal while inquiring about Bob’s choice of a grilled chicken salad, when he told me about this trainer he recently started working out with. His exact words were “I just started on this program, and Nick will kill me if I go off it so soon”.

Bob’s a very smart guy — Yale masters and Berkeley undergrad type smart. He is a professor at Syracuse University and the world’s foremost expert in his field. His opinion means a lot to me.

Bob gave me Nick’s number that evening, and I contacted Nick the very next day. We scheduled an introductory meeting for that Monday, May 22nd.
I walked into his office weighing 309 pounds.

294 Days with Nick

Nick is a bit of an enigma. He is not what I expected. He looks like a cross between Vin Diesel and The Rock, yet our entire conversation that first day was about the science of eating and metabolism.

He then pointed to a poster on his wall, and it said “you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet”. It showed that only 20% of losing body fat would come from weight training and cardio. 80% would come from diet choices.

I was expecting a physical trainer to be espousing the merits of “pumping iron” and how I needed to be in the gym every day to see results. Nick was the complete opposite.

He talked about the long-term benefits that a healthier lifestyle would have on my family. How my own longevity (or lack thereof) would impact them.

Finally, he asked “so how much do you want to lose?”

I was embarrassed to say it out loud, but I told him “I think I have to lose at least 100 pounds”.

He didn’t hesitate with his response. His brow furrowed a bit like I had said something crazy and he replied “100 pounds? That’s nothing. You can probably do that in about 10 months.”

While I was still in disbelief, that boosted my confidence a bit, and I said “if that’s so easy, then lets make it 110 pounds”, because that would get me to 199, the first time I would be under 200 pounds since college.

I told Nick that I didn’t know what I was doing, but that I was good at following directions, so as long as he told me what needed to be done I would do it.

Month # 1

Nick provided me a tutorial on the ketogenic eating lifestyle, and we decided to meet for an hour every Monday and Friday for resistance training (weight lifting). He also “prescribed” 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise each day.

Nick was always just a text message away as I was learning the ins and outs of my new eating routine. He was incredibly helpful, even encouraging me to text him photos of different food labels while I was shopping. I would send him two nutrition labels of foods I was considering, and he would get back to me within minutes explaining how and why one choice would be better than the other.

At the end of my first week I was down 10 pounds. After reading everything I could about the ketogenic lifestyle I wasn’t too surprised at the 10 pounds, and of course all of the naysayers on the internet would quickly proclaim “it’s all water weight”, but I didn’t care. I was under 300 pounds again.

By the end of my second week I was down 16 pounds, and by the end of my first month I was down 25 pounds, tipping the scale at 284 pounds.

Month # 2–3

I didn’t think it would be possible to lose 25 pounds every month, so in my second month I wasn’t disappointed to lose an additional 16 pounds. In my third month I was down another 10 pounds.

My new lifestyle was starting to become a habit. At the end of 13 weeks, exactly 91 days, I was down 57 pounds, weighing in at 252.

I was more than halfway to my initial goal of 100–110 pounds, so I made a new goal of 124 pounds. That would get me down to 185 pounds, my weight throughout most of high school and college.

Day # 197 — Down 100 pounds

I met my initial goal of 100 pounds on day # 197, just over 28 weeks since I started with Nick. Nick’s estimate was 10 months, and we hit it in about 6 ½ months.

Day # 294 — Down 124 pounds

The last 24 pounds took a bit longer, but I hit my final goal in 294 days.

294 days with Nick, and my life (health) completely changed.

So what happened on Day # 295:

I’ve seen a few episodes of “the biggest loser”, and I’ve read plenty of “weight loss success stories” online. Most of them all have the same ending — initial success, and then old habits take form again and everyone gains the weight back.

As I write this, I am on Day # 873 with Nick. My weight today is the same as it was on Day # 294, but my body composition has continued to change. I continue to put on muscle and reduce fat. I continue my cardio regiment five times per week, and I do my resistance training with Nick two days per week.

I had a doctor’s appointment this week, and in just the last 10 months I’ve replaced 19 pounds of fat with 19 pounds of muscle. My body weight has stayed the same over the past year, but my body composition is much different.

Lessons Learned

I don’t like the phrase “keto diet” as that implies something that is a short-term fix, and/or something that is overly restrictive. It’s really not. I prefer “ketogenic lifestyle” or “ketogenic eating”. Not diet. I don’t “diet”, I eat, I have just made a choice about what I eat.

Lesson 1: Once I hit my target weight, Nick had me shift to a “carb cycling” regiment, which in English means I am still pretty strict with my ketogenic eating six days a week, but one day (okay — sometimes two days) a week I will eat whatever I want. When I have those heavy carb days, I will notice my weight jump 3–4 pounds over the next day or so (mostly water retention) and then by the end of the week my weight is right back to normal. It’s great to be in this stage, because I can schedule that carb day (or cheat day as some might call it) around birthdays, holidays, or other social events. Once you start paying attention, it’s amazing to realize how much food (and sometimes not the best food) is tied to various “celebrations”.

Lesson 2: I learned that it is very important to incorporate resistance training (weight lifting) into your weekly regiment. One of the common dangers of ketogenic eating is that if that is all that you do, you will lose weight, but some of that weight loss will come from muscle. By weight training every week, you have the ability to add muscle while you are losing fat. The more muscle you add, the higher you up-regulate your metabolism, making weight loss even easier.

Lesson 3: Don’t go crazy with cardio — at least at the beginning. When Nick “prescribed” 30 minutes of cardio per day, I went along with it, but I knew I could do more. After a week or two I let him know that I could do more, and that I easily could be doing an hour if that would get me to my goals more quickly. I thought he was taking it easy on me, or perhaps he thought my conditioning would not allow more.

His answer surprised me — he said it would not get me to my goals more quickly. He explained that if I started out at an hour a day, my body would adapt to that level of training, and ultimately when I plateaued I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.

We stuck at 30 minutes a day until I hit a week where I only lost 1 pound, versus my average of 3–4 pounds. We then increased to 35 minutes a day. A while later when I went another week losing 1 pound, we went up to 40 minutes a day. Every 3–4 weeks we would add 5 minutes a day, but only when I plateaued.

5 extra minutes might not seem like a lot, but when you are exercising 7 days per week, that extra 5 minutes provided 35 minutes of additional conditioning over the course of the week.

LASTLY Lesson 4: Don’t forget the fat…

A lot of the ketogenic lifestyle is counter intuitive. For a long time society was telling us that “fat is bad” and yet the ketogenic lifestyle suggests that you increase your fat intake. It just doesn’t sound right.

Not all fats are created equal. There are healthy fats, such as the naturally occurring mono and polyunsaturated fats found in macadamia nuts, which are high in Omega-3 fatty acids. And then there are the artificial trans fats, found in your McDonalds French Fries (which is part of the reason they taste so good).

Unsaturated healthy fats will help in the weight loss process, and will also help your cardiovascular system, whereas artificial trans fats will ultimately clog your arteries and increase your LDL (bad) cholesterol.

I knew that my fat intake would be important with the ketogenic lifestyle, but I never realized how much until I went a week with zero weight loss. I had been averaging 3–4 pounds per week, and then all of a sudden the scale didn’t move.

I reviewed with Nick, and he suggested that I wasn’t taking in enough fat. For the next week, I ate the exact same meals as I did the previous week — with one exception. Right before dinner each evening — for 7 nights in a row — I drank three tablespoons of pure virgin macadamia nut oil. Each tablespoon was 120 calories and 14 grams of fat.

Here I was trying to lose weight, and yet I was voluntarily ingesting an additional 360 calories and 41 grams of fat every night. Over the course of the week, this was an additional 2,520 calories and 287 grams of fat.
By the end of the week, I lost 6 pounds.

What’s Next FOR ME…

Just as it takes time to break bad habits, it takes time to form good habits. The last 873 days with Nick have instilled in me (and my entire family) health habits that will benefit us for the rest of our lifetimes. Lifetimes that have been elongated through his guidance, training regiment, and friendship.

Bill Burns | Lost 124 lbs