Weight Loss Body Transformation
AskMen Body Transformation: This Celebrity PT Will Give You The Body You Want
The FINAL Result! Sort of.
Alright? I'm Gav, I'm a 30-year-old fat guy who loves booze and sleep. I've taken on the AskMen Body Transformation Challenge because I want to make some big changes in my life. Here I'll be posting updates and progress pics of my fitness journey, every two weeks, until my final weigh-in three months down the line. In a nutshell, my aim is to get fitter and FEEL healthier.
I thought three months of getting fit and healthy was going to drag but I absolutely can’t believe it’s all over. Twelve weeks went by quicker than my old self would’ve guiltily demolished a large Dominos on a Sunday all by myself (whilst secretly convincing my housemate that I’d just had 3 friends round to help me eat it). I promised myself at the beginning of all this that I would try my absolute best to avoid bollocks fitness cliched phrases like “my journey” but I’m at the end of my....adventure? No, that’s just as bad. Odyssey?! Christ, it is damn hard to write about fitness without sounding like a complete jebend sometimes.
Anyway, it’s been three months since my personal trainer, former Mr. London Fabrice Le Physique, agreed to train me for three months. Since then, my life has consisted mostly of pain and suffering but it’s really challenged the way I approach most things and I’ve properly loved every single minute of it and that’s mostly down to this guy:
I owe a ridiculous debt of gratitude to Fabrice for all his patience and reluctance to piss himself laughing whenever I rolled myself over trying to do a plank or got so much sweat on his weight bench that he had to ask me multiple times “mate...are you alright?”. He’s also been a proper inspiration for me to train harder and not to mess about when I’m training by myself. He gave up so much of his time for me and always did it with a ridiculous smile on his face.
Training by myself has been such a huge part of all this. Fabrice and me worked out that I’d actually only seen him 23 times since we started so a lot of this has been me taking my cue from him and using what I’ve learned to make sure when I’m at the gym by myself, I’m not just kicking my heels and watching Sky Sports News on the their lovely tellies. I’ve talked about it on my podcast but I found for ages that I absolutely did not have the confidence to push myself as hard as I did with Fabrice just in case I f*cked up and the bigger boys in the weight room laughed at me and then chased me around the changing room whipping my arse and making fun of my big man tits.
That’s not to say that my gym isn’t amazing, because it is. I go to a Virgin Active in East London and it’s one of the nicest buildings I’ve ever been allowed inside. It’s right in the middle of the city so there are a load of blokes called Henry who probably love Jeremy Clarkson and watch Mock the Week but the gym itself has loads of awesome machines, tellies that show wrestling quite a lot of the time and a pretty unique 'salt' room in the spa area. It even has a desk that you can drop off your shirt at before going to work out and when you finish it will be magically ironed. For someone who never learnt how to iron properly but is too embarrassed to wear a creased shirt, this is big. Like I’ve lay there some mornings thinking about skiving off a 7am gym session but convinced myself to go just because I couldn’t be arsed to iron a shirt. Laziness is f*cking weird, man.
If you’re at a shit, cheap gym and finding it hard to motivate yourself to go and your continuing self-hatred gets worse and worse every month your gym membership standing order goes out then I can tell you I’ve definitely been there. I was a member of one of those cheapo Easygyms for about eight months. I went twice. I know it sounds bonkers but if you’re in a similar position, you might want to try getting down to a posh gym for a session and see if that helps motivate you to go a bit more. It did it for me if only for the ironed shirts.
So, how did I do? Not f**king bad, to be honest.
I’m not going to dick you about either, most 'before' and 'after' pics are nonsense. You’ll get some grainy 'before' pic taken on a Nokia 7650 in the house at the end of the Blair Witch Project and an 'after' shot beautifully lit and snapped by a Vanity Fair photographer. I’m not going to do that.
Here’s me on January 3rd, the night before I met Fabrice:
I’m really good at health now so I’ve broken the picture down with my superior fitness brain so you can get a better idea of what was going on:
And this was me last night (the one on the right, don’t take the piss):
I think I did alright. Not spectacularly, just alright. It’s a great start but I really wanted to be able to see a much bigger difference.
To break that down here’s some numbers for you to look at:
Week 1 Week 12
- Weight: 101 KG 88 KG
- Chest: 44" 37"
- Hips: 45.5" 39"
- Waist: 46" 35"
- Bicep - L: 14" 16"
- Bicep - R: 14" 16"
- Thigh - L: 21" 20"
- Thigh - R: 20.5" 20"
- Body Fat % 37% 23.3%
So big numbers are that I’m down 13kg (2 stone) and managed to get my body fat percentage down by 13.7%. The other big number for me is dropping 11 inches on my waist and having to stick three new holes in my belt since I started.
That loss is possibly the most impressive because I’ve actually managed to lose a whopping 9.3kg of fat just from my belly. I’m still lots over what the recommended amount of flab in a human person should be but you can’t argue with a corkscrew going through a belt, really, can you?
My main aim way back when I started was to lose weight and feel healthier, and I’ve definitely done both those things. I used to get sweaty just standing on a crowded tube and feel my entire doughy mound creek at the idea of doing one sit up. Now I can bash out 100 pretty easily just for (not actual) fun. I couldn’t do a single burpee when I first started now I’m actually starting to enjoy them which is stupid, I know, but I think it’s just because I’m glad I can do them so I want to do as many as I can before somebody points out I’m doing it wrong or something.
The best thing about all of this? When I think about it, it wasn’t actually that hard. I actually enjoyed most of it. I’d set myself up to hate the training but doing a bit of exercise for an hour at a time a few times a week isn’t just doable, it’s f*cking easy! I had a total of 23 personal training sessions with Fabrice who helped make not only the time I spent in the gym – but working out at home too – a million times more productive. It’s easy to start dropping weight if you make the time for it and even though I spent a lot of the last three months moaning, it genuinely wasn’t that difficult.
Fabrice set me a goal way back on Week 1 to get my body fat from 37% to 20%. I was properly nervous heading to the big man’s gym for the final weigh-in because something in me told me I hadn’t done that. And I was right. I got it down to 23.3%, so I f*cked that up a bit. Fabrice wasn’t disappointed at all (something I was bricking it about) which was good news but even better news is the absolute mad bastard wants to carry this shit on for ANOTHER 3 MONTHS!
“We can’t stop now, man. Give me 3 more months and you can really change your life.”
It’s probably the best gift anyone’s ever given me (except that lush filter kettle my Mam got me for Christmas 2010) and Fabrice said so much nice shit about me in what I thought would be our last session that I can’t type any of it because it genuinely makes me tear up a bit and I’m a big dumb gym jock now so tears are probably protein leaving my glands or something. But you can hear the best bits of the session on the latest episode of my podcast, Jabba to Jedi:
So there we are, instead of ending this blog by saying goodbye, I’m going to end it by saying thanks for reading all this shite for the last 12 weeks and keep an eye out on AskMen soon for details of how you can see more flabby photos of me in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, keep following my sweaty progress on Instagram, JabbaToJedi or if you want to experience this transformation with your ears instead of your eyes, check out the new fortnightly podcast I started on itunes or on Soundcloud.
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