4 Guys Reveal the Secret to Their Weight-Loss Transformations
This piece is part of a series of stories on weight and weight loss in today’s age of radical body positivity, revolutionized cosmetic procedures, and pharma innovations (Ozempic, anyone?). To read the rest of the stories, click here.
THERE ARE MANY ways to lose weight these days (drugs! fat removal! bariatric surgery! And, yes, still naturally!). We spoke to four real guys about the method they chose, and how it affected their lives.
ALL MY LIFE I've been husky. I grew up in the age of “clean your plate.” I also grew up relatively poor, so when we did eat out, it was fast food and junk food. Fast-forward into my mid-30s, when I had type 2 diabetes and an A1C level of 13 percent. [A healthy range is below 5.7 percent.] I weighed 360 pounds. I went to the doctor and he said to me, “If you continue to do exactly what you’re doing, you’ve probably got about 15 years left.”
I have four kids, and they deserve more than that. So I went on this journey of “Let’s try Weight Watchers and let’s do keto and let’s do Whole30.” I ended up having a sleeve gastrectomy in 2018, and it dropped me to about 292 pounds, which was a gigantic life improvement. I was in a good place.
Then in December 2022, I thought I had a UTI. I went to my doctor to get an antibiotic and he found glucose in my urine. He said he wanted me to try something relatively new: a once-per-week shot called Mounjaro to help with my blood sugar. He never mentioned weight loss to me. I picked up my prescription the next day. (I pay $25 for a three-month supply with my insurance.) Within ten months, I was down from 289 to 216 pounds.
It’s unbelievable to me that today I can get on a treadmill and run for 30 minutes. My A1C level is now around 4.7 percent. I got a buddy who’s a trainer and he’s helping me eat to train. I’ve never been that guy. It’s fun to be that guy.
Yes, I’ve experienced the normal stuff that people say, like constipation. When I’m backed up, I can’t eat. There’ll be days that I get to 4:00 p.m. and I realize I haven’t eaten anything. I’m not unworried about the lack of research on the long-term effects on the body. It’s kind of the devil versus the devil. Maybe I get cancer from this in a few years, but I knew that high blood sugar and obesity was going to get me. All my life I’ve heard there’s no magic wand. This is my magic wand. —Josh, 43, North Carolina
I'VE HAD PROBLEMS with weight since I was a kid. It had to do with the fact that I was a celiac and didn’t know.
Eventually, in 2012, I sought out a local doctor to try to figure out what was going on. They did a scan of my liver at that time and they found a mass, so they assumed that I had stage-one liver cancer. My wife and I flew out to the Mayo Clinic, and that’s when I was diagnosed as a celiac. The mass that they were looking at was actually advanced fatty-liver disease.
I had been going back and forth to Mayo and hadn’t considered a weight-loss program until November 2021. I pushed doctors to look at the fatty-liver disease more extensively. That’s when we found out I had stage-four liver fibrosis. I was on the verge of cirrhosis and needing a liver transplant. I could die if I didn’t deal with it. I just had a baby girl who was a year old. I knew that I needed to get serious.
My BMI at the time was 36, so I didn’t qualify for a full-blown sleeve surgery. I was told about this new, innovative procedure called an endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty. I liked that it wasn’t permanent and that I would be back at work two days later. Before the surgery, I had to prove for six months that I was willing to change my lifestyle. I went on a diet that was recommended by a nutritionist, and I also had a series of blood tests and scans. I passed, and I had the procedure in August 2022.
In the first 45 days after the procedure, I lost about 20 pounds, largely because they require you to be on a low-calorie liquid diet. After that, I lost about two pounds a week. Now I’m down from 268 to 208 pounds, and I have a completely healthy liver. Before the surgery, the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was go to the gym. Now I have a trainer and I work out four times a week. My sleep apnea and joint pain are gone. I’ve got energy. I chase my kid all over the house. It’s the best thing I could have done. —Zach, 37, New Mexico
I'VE EXPERIMENTED WITH noninvasive weight-loss treatments for years. None of them did anything remarkable to the layer of fat in my midsection that I can’t ever seem to get rid of, no matter how much weight I’ve lost. So I was like, “Fuck it, let’s just try AirSculpt.”
For the procedure itself, they gave me Xanax, Demerol, an antibiotic, laughing gas, and a topical anesthetic. I was awake the whole time. Then the technicians brought out what looked like a super-long straw, inserted it into my abdomen, and went to town. They sucked out about half a liter of bubble-gum-colored, viscous fat from my abdomen.
The other thing that they did, which is optional, is tighten up the abdominal skin using radiofrequency and helium. That adds time to the procedure and, all told, I was there for five hours. When they were done, they put me into this compression garment, like a wrestling singlet, with thick foam pads to increase the pressure on certain areas because I was leaking blood and fluids.
In the initial consult, they were like, “It’s a 24-hour downtime. It’ll just feel like you had a tough workout.” That wasn’t true for me. I was in a lot of pain the first week after the surgery. My flanks were super sore, and I couldn’t really twist my body. Then I got this super-intense pain radiating through my left thigh. Eventually that segued into total dead leg—a rare side effect. (Lucky me!)
For two and a half weeks, no one in my family knew I did this. When I eventually told my wife and she asked why I did it, I was like, “Silliness and vanity.” I think it speaks to a certain frustration because you’re working out so hard to get strong but also to look the way you want to look. When your body doesn’t cooperate the way that you want it to, which it rarely does, why not?
It’s hard to say whether or not AirSculpt is worth it for me at this point. My stomach is definitely flatter and tighter, but I don’t have six-pack abs or anything. My hope is that when I’m finally healed in six weeks—it takes about three months total—I won’t have that extra layer of fat around my midsection. I’m pretty optimistic. —Steve,* 41, New Jersey
MY PARTNER AND I were home all the time during a series of Covid lockdowns. He decided that there were two choices: sit around and do nothing or use that time to get a little healthier. I found that inspiring, so I took a cue from him. I didn’t have a number in mind about how much weight I wanted to lose. It was more of a “Let’s see where this goes.”
Originally, I started using an app called Glo, which had prerecorded workout classes that I did a few times a week. The progress was easy to see, which was helpful to me because I’d gone through spells of going to the gym before. After about a month, I joined another app called Future. You do a FaceTime meeting with a fitness coach, talk to them about your goals, and they set you up with a workout plan. It just clicked for me. Eventually I worked my way up to working out six days a week.
During this time, I also joined my husband on a few experiments with different diets. When everyone else was making banana bread, we were doing a lot of weird keto recipes. Then I started using an app called Lose It! to track what I was eating. It was perfect because we weren’t going out to restaurants anyways. I was totally in control of what I could eat. I’ve lost about 80 pounds since the summer of 2020, down from 265 to 185 pounds.
My feelings about my weight loss are complicated. I’m happy with what I’ve done, but mainly I’m surprised at how willing other people are to talk to you about your body and what’s going on with it. The other day, someone asked me if I was taking “the shots,” referring to Ozempic. Then someone at work brought up this idea of “Isn’t it funny to lose weight and everyone thinks you’re on these weight-loss drugs, but you’re not?” It felt like they were daring me to say I’m not.
There’s a slight desire to set the record straight, because I’ve worked really hard. I think that might be the most offensive part to me... when people assume you just took an easy road. It’s never fun to have people misunderstand you or think things about you that aren’t true, but I’ve woken up too many mornings at six o’clock to get in a workout before going to the office and grilled too many chicken breasts to feel insecure in what I know is the hard work I’ve done. —Bert,* 42, New York
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
This article originally appears in the January/February 2024 issue of Men's Health.
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