The Fat Kid

“We don’t live in the past, but the past lives in us.”

 

“Here comes the fat kid!”

This time, those five words hurt more than usual. Not because they were said – I had been called a lot worse by that time in my life – but because of who said them.

I was young, perhaps 9 or 10 at the time, and already no stranger to being called all sorts of derogatory names by my peers. After all, I had been fat since my earliest childhood memories and was well on my way to learning the subtle art of coping with public humiliation.

But this time was different. This time the person yelling this painful greeting to me was my uncle, my dad’s oldest brother. It took every ounce of strength I possessed not to burst into tears.

My uncle was not a bad person and I’ve long since forgiven him. He was simply a product of a different time and was just stating the obvious in what he believed to be a playful manner.

But the nickname would stick and become the way he would greet me for the next several years during all of our family gatherings. The greeting became my nickname and I learned how to tactfully “grin and bear it” with a smile even as it tormented my soul.

But the sad truth is I really was “the fat kid” of our family.

I was the oldest of five and I looked different. I stood out at every family gathering and not in a good way. I was obese in an era when childhood obesity was rare. The pain and humiliation of that nickname fundamentally changed me.

I became obsessed with losing weight. I hated being fat so I promised myself that I would do whatever was necessary to look normal. My desire would become my obsession for the next sixteen years of my life. I was determined not to go down without a fight.

My Battle Begins

But as a young boy growing up during the 1970s, my dieting options were limited. The only remedies available to me at the time were the body transformation ads contained within the pages of my comic books and muscle magazines.  Sources that I now realize were filled with lies and misinformation.

My comic books and muscle mags were filled with ads for products promising miraculous body transformations aimed at young boys like me. Well, not exactly like me, because back then most boys were skinny and so the ads mostly promised to pack on loads of muscle on frail frames. But beggars can’t be choosers.

I naively believed in the promises of those ads. I bought and tried everything. I purchased the diets, the supplements, and the exercise gadgets and gimmicks, and I bled commitment with each and every new attempt.

I still recall how my hands would shake with anticipation and reverence at the arrival of each new package in the mail. For me, each package represented a promise of a happier life – a new and better body, one stripped of fat and packed with muscle.

But my dreams were repeatedly crushed upon the rocks of reality.

No matter what diet, supplement, or exercise device or routine I tried, my weight continued to increase as my dreams began to fade.

But I never lacked the will or commitment to change. Whenever I embarked upon a new fat loss journey, I embraced it with an Olympian dedication.

Whatever foods I was asked to eat, I ate; whatever pills I was instructed to take, I swallowed; and whatever exercises I was advised to perform, I unquestionably performed them without any concern for the health or safety of my body. Nothing was too extreme for me to try because results were all that mattered.

But what were my results? Failure. I became fatter, more depressed, and more self-loathing with each passing attempt.

What I finally came to realize, but only years later in hindsight, was that all the weight loss methods I tried were based on lies. I never lacked the commitment or the dedication to change, I only lacked the truth. And that missing ingredient would eventually end up costing me almost 20 years of my life.

The Last Dance

To this day, I still don’t know why I attended my eighth grade graduation dance. I guess hope springs eternal in the human heart, especially when you’re young. But I think the reason why I decided to attend was because I didn’t want to disappoint my mom.

My mom loved me unconditionally and no matter what I looked like or what others said about me, I was always handsome and special in her eyes.

This was the first class dance of my life and so my parents spared no expense. They bought me a powder-blue leisure suit for the occasion. But even something as mundane as buying a suit was an exercise in humiliation for me.

Back in the mid-70s, they didn’t make “big” suits for little boys. So I was forced to move up to the adult sizes in an attempt to find something that fit. And with a larger size came a larger price. My family was very poor and the thought of my parents spending additional money on a larger suit that, in all probability, I would only wear once, filled me with shame. But that was only the beginning of my indignity.

I was five foot six inches tall and weighed around 200 pounds. When I tried on the pants, they were much too long and the zipper on my fly went down almost to my knees. The sleeves on the blazer were just as bad. But that powder-blue suit was the only one that even came close to fitting me so my parents bought it. I remember thinking how ridiculous I looked in that suit as I stared at my refection in the store’s mirror.

The next stop was my grandparent’s home for additional humiliation. I remember standing on a chair as my grandma carefully pinned up the pants and jacket sleeves to a more appropriate length. But as talented as my grandmother was with a needle and thread, she could do nothing with the zipper – I would have to live with that one.

And despite my grandma’s loving hand, I still thought looked like a freak in my suit. But standing behind me on the night of the dance, as I looked into the mirror in horror at my reflection, was my mom telling my how handsome I looked and how proud she was of me. I knew then that I couldn’t let her down. So off to the dance I went feeling like a prisoner walking to the gallows.

The dance turned out to be the disaster I imagined it would be – only worse.

My so-called “friends” never quite saw me the same way as my mom. I looked like a freak and they treated me like one.

I spent the entire three hours of the dance alone and hiding in a corner of the gymnasium praying no one would notice me. The dance should have been just another unremarkable day in an otherwise unremarkable life except for a single act of kindness that ended in utter humiliation.

My only friend at the time was Kenny. He was one of the most popular boys in my class. He was everything I wasn’t – a great athlete, handsome, and full of youthful strength and vigor. And for some strange reason, he liked me. We had been friends since the second grade.

I spent most of the evening jealously watching as Kenny danced with one pretty girl after another. Eventually, he would tire of dancing and come over and visit with me. I cherished those moments with Kenny because they made me feel like I was part of my class – a feeling I didn’t get to experience too often.

Towards the end of the evening, Kenny came by to check up on me only this time he wasn’t alone. In tow was Susie, probably the prettiest girl in our class. I was terrified. Talking to Kenny was one thing but talking with a pretty girl, not so much!

As it turned out, my feelings of impending doom were well founded. As soon as they arrived, Kenny asked Susie if she would do him a favor and dance with me during the final song of the evening. If anyone other than Kenny had asked Susie to dance with me, she would have laughed it off as a the cruel joke and walked away. But she couldn’t say no to Kenny, nor could I. Our fates were sealed together in something resembling a Greek tragedy – but on an eighth grade level.

All I can remember about my dance from hell was constantly staring down at my feet and praying that I didn’t step on Susie’s toes and add to my humiliation. My prayers were answered and Susie’s toes remained uninjured. But the cosmic lord of irony wasn’t finished humiliating me yet.

Just as the song was ending and my heart was beginning to beat normally again, I found the courage to steal a glance at Susie’s angelic face. But what I saw literally broke my heart. I happened to look up just in time to see Susie looking over at her best friend Kim dancing next to us.

And what I saw remains with me to this day. I saw Susie make a disgusting face and roll her eyes in an effort to let Kim know that dancing with me was not her idea and and was pure torture for her. That’s when I realized how embarrassed Susie was to be seen dancing with me in front of her friends. I was instantly filled with buckets of shame and self-loathing.

When my dad arrived to pick me up after the dance, he asked me how it had gone. With my face turned away from him and warm tears of humiliation streaming down my face, I told him that I would never go to another dance again in my life. It was a promise I would keep for the next twenty years.

The Apostles of Fat Loss Failure

Those six words are the ones I use to describe the group of unscrupulous charlatans and quacks in the weight loss industry who prey upon the hopes and dreams of the desperate. They become fabulously rich by promising the overweight masses that their “special” products, pills, and potions will produce quick and effortless weight loss. Unfortunately, they’re lying.

But I fell for every lie promising quick and painless weight loss that came my way. I was so desperate to lose weight that I believed everything those despicable people said. No promise was too outrageous for me to believe nor price to high for me to pay. I tried them all for sixteen years but learned nothing from my countless failures. All I got from my unquestioning devotion to these false prophets of fat loss was sicker, fatter and more miserable as the years went painfully by.

But I don’t hate them because they stole my money; I hate them because they stole my hope.

I Failed Because I’m a Failure

The greatest sin the Apostles of Fat Loss Failure committed was in convincing me that I was “broken”; that I was never meant to be lean and happy. I’m sure this wasn’t their intent but it was the logical outcome of their endless lies.

They prayed upon my innocence.

I grew up with parents who taught me lying was wrong – period. I was taught that there were no “grey areas” when it came to lying.

So, naively I assumed others believed the same thing. I was wrong. Assuming the good intentions of others turned out to be my “Achilles Heel” when it came to losing fat.

 I was perfect prey for fat loss predators without a conscious.

I began dieting back in 1972 when I was ten. There was no internet or social media back then. My only sources of information on how to lose weight came from the ads in my comic books and from the occasional monthly muscle magazine I purchased.

My naivete along with my moral compass created the “perfect storm” for my eventual self-destruction.

The process was simple. I would see an ad for some remarkable fat loss product, beg my parents to buy it for me with money they didn’t have, and when it arrived I followed it unconditionally. But the results were always the same -failure, frustration, and continued self-loathing.

But how could it have been otherwise; I was committed to a lie. It’s just that I didn’t know it was a lie.

Every time a new fat loss supplement, diet, pill, or exercise gimmick arrived in the mail, I was filled with hope and inspiration. But the ads that promised salvation delivered only failure, again and again.

The diets, supplements, and exercise gimmicks NEVER turned out as promised. But, to my eternal shame, I NEVER stopped believing in them.

For sixteen years I repeated this delusional process. I would begin each new diet filled with the hope of success only to have it end in pain, disappointment, and failure.

This process continued unabated for years until an unsettling and destructive thought began to seep into my consciousness.

I remember lying in bed late one evening sometime in my late teens after another failed weight loss attempt and thinking, for the first time, that maybe I was constantly failing because I deserved to fail. I was beginning to believe that there was something inherently wrong with me, that perhaps someone like me didn’t deserve to succeed or live a happy life. It was that moment when I began blaming myself for my constant fat loss failure.

And that’s the moment when I  started to physically punish myself for my worthlessness. I remember beating my forehead against the headboard of my bed until I began to bleed. This, I thought, was fitting punishment for a worthless person such as myself.

My process of of self-destruction thus began on that evening.

The first casualty was my physical health. I began trying more extreme methods of fat loss. Nothing was off limits now because I didn’t care. Amphetamines, starvation, exercise addiction, and even bulimia became my tools. The more pain I could inflict upon my worthless self, the better I felt. I was in an apocalyptic battle; I would either lose weight or die trying.

The Beginning of the End

In the spring of 1986, I was awarded a scholarship and accepted into the graduate program in Agricultural Economics at the University of Illinois. It should have been a moment of celebration. Instead, like everything else in my life, it was ruined by my ballooning weight.

I took a year off between undergraduate and graduate school in another unsuccessful attempt to lose weight and change my life. I failed miserably and ended up weighing the heaviest I’d ever been at around 275 pounds. Graduate school, I thought, was going to be a nightmare for me. And I was right.

Upon arrival at the U of I, I promised myself yet again that I was going to change my life and finally lose weight.

I moved into student housing and immediately started looking for a gym. I found one about a mile from my dorm. My plan was simple. I would get up early six days a week, walk to the gym (I had no vehicle at the time), workout for a couple of hours, come home, attend classes, perform my scholarship duties, and study.

My eating plan was even simpler: eat one meal a day. I was sure my plan would work. It didn’t.

It’s difficult to admit even now, but I once school began, I quickly realized that I was in over my head academically. I had always excelled in school by working harder than my peers. And it worked, until it didn’t.

My academic success was the single source of pride in my life. It was the only thing I was ever good at. But the classes at the U of I were on another level altogether.

The U of I was the “major leagues” of education and I was an intellectual “amateur” at best. I knew that if I wanted to succeed academically, I would have to work harder than ever. So, in a futile but desperate attempt to save my academic career, I gave up going to the gym and dieting altogether and devoted every waking moment to my studies. But no matter how hard I worked in my classes, I couldn’t keep up.

And with no constraints on my eating, my weight started to increase again. I went to my classes, studied constantly, performed my research duties, and ate as much and as often as I wanted. Before long, I had gained so much weight that I didn’t even recognize my reflection in the mirror.

Soon everyone, including my professors and peers, began to take notice of my increasing size. And they were not shy in letting me know I was getting fatter. Never think for a moment that just because someone is “intelligent” that they cannot also be cruel. Here I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois and I was being treated like I was in 5th grade again.

So I retreated to my only source of pleasure – food.

For most of my life, I had a love/hate relationship with food. I ate to feel good and then suffered enormous shame and guilt afterwards for my gluttony.  I was in trouble; I just didn’t know the extent of it yet.

And then I began to drink to escape my pain.

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”

Failing at both graduate school and dieting broke me. It was more than I could bear and that’s when I turned to alcohol to escape the pain of living.

I wasn’t a drinker initially, but like with all things “Bryan”, I gave it my total commitment.

My life became formulaic: feel horrible about myself, drink to excess, binge on food, repeat. But the pain never went away for long. It only worsened as my weight continued to increase.

By the summer of 1988 my weight had hit an all-time high at around 350 pounds on a five foot six inch frame. My waist was approaching 60 inches; I was almost as wide as I was tall. And that’s when my health problems began.

I was scheduled for surgery late in the summer of 1988 to correct a foot problem that was a result of a farming accident years ago. The lingering injury along with my increasing weight made walking almost impossible.

A few days prior to the surgery, I had my blood pressure checked and it was dangerously high. My doctor expressed his concerns about my health to me but he could tell by my response that I didn’t care. So he shrugged his shoulders and scheduled my surgery for the following Friday afternoon.

But I had a problem with the day of my surgery – it was a Friday. And unbeknownst to my doctor, I hated Fridays.

For years, Fridays had become almost mentally unbearable for me, especially the evenings. Why? Because Friday nights were traditional “date nights” for the rest of the world. For everyone, that is, except me.

I never had a girlfriend to share my Fridays with and the loneliness I felt on Friday nights was suffocating. My solution was simple. Every Friday afternoon after if finished my work for the University, I would buy a case of beer and drink until I passed out. Problem solved. No consciousness, no memory, no Friday, no pain.

So on the Friday afternoon before my surgery, I did what any self-respecting alcoholic would do – I got drunk. But I still somehow managed to show up for my surgical appointment.

Noticing that I was drunk, my doctor promptly cancelled the surgery and told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t change my ways, I would soon be dead. I looked at him and without missing a beat I said, “Good”. I limped out of his office and went back to my apartment where I continued drinking until I passed out. Just another Friday night for me.

My doctor was a good man and he tried his best to help me but he didn’t realize that I had a Death Wish. I’m sure he expected his admonition to frighten me into changing but it didn’t. Instead, it had the opposite effect. It gave me a strange sense of comfort because now I could see a way out of my misery. I would continue to binge on food and alcohol and hopefully die soon.

With death, I thought, would finally come peace. There would be no more pain and no more daily humiliation.

I now had my plan and nothing was going to stop me from achieving it – or so I believed at the time.

The End

“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

(the words written above the gates of Hell in Dante’s “The Inferno”)

In the Spring of 1988, I received a call from my brother Tom that accelerated my decline.

Tom’s call painfully reminded me of a world that continued to exist outside my own selfish pathetic existence. It was a world filled with people who still cared deeply for me.

Tom was my younger brother by two years and in the halcyon days of our youth on the farm, he was not only my brother but also my best friend.

Our family lived on a small farm in northwestern Illinois. Although vacations and family travel were rare, Tom and I hardly noticed because we were always busy.

We had a farm to explore, chores to do, animals to care for, and, most important, our imaginations to keep us occupied in between.

But by the time I received Tom’s call, I had all but forgotten about those wonderful times on the farm with my brother. But Tom hadn’t.

Tom was calling to ask me to be the best man in his upcoming wedding. He was getting married to his high school sweetheart, Sue, in November. I was speechless. I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified in my life than when my brother asked me to be his best man. And here he was patiently waiting for my answer. I was literally sick to my stomach, gripped by fear, and unable to utter a word.

Tom’s request should have been one of the happiest moments of my life but it wasn’t. I immediately began searching for a way to lie my way out of going. And much to my eternal shame, it wouldn’t have been the first time I lied to get out of attending a wedding.

But somehow I found the courage to say “Yes”. It was a sacrificial “yes” because I knew the psychological hell I was about to endure over the next few months. And it began almost immediately.

First, I realized that I didn’t have the money for a tux. I was subsisting on $800 per month thanks to my scholarship at the U of I. After rent, food, and alcohol, I was broke.

But having no money for a tux was the least of my worries. I immediately began torturing myself with thoughts of the shame and humiliation I would suffer trying to find a tux that fit. Here I was, I thought, six months from the wedding and I was already causing my brother problems by just agreeing to be in the wedding.

My brother didn’t deserve this I thought; he deserved better than me.

And then there was my greatest fear – the wedding pictures. Now, I thought, my shame was going to be immortalized and there was nothing I could do about it.

I’d been successfully hiding from my family in graduate school for the past three years but now there was no escape. My humiliation would be on display for the entire world to see. My days of self-imposed exile were over.

And all I could think about were those damned wedding pictures and how I’d look in them. Having my picture taken had always been my worst fear.

Beginning around the age of thirteen, I developed an almost pathological aversion to having my picture taken. Pictures don’t lie and I was disgusted by the way I looked in them. When it was time to take family pictures, I could disappear almost instantaneously. It was a skill I developed bordering on a superpower.

My “photo-phobia” got so bad that after my freshman year in high school, I never showed up for another yearbook picture. It was if I had dropped off the face to the earth after my freshman year in high school.

But being the best man at my brother’s wedding came with responsibilities, one of which was being available for photos with the wedding party. All I could think about over the the next six months was how I was going to embarrass my brother and ruin his wedding pictures for eternity. That was going to be my “wedding present” to Tom. But I promised my brother I would be his best man and so there was no turning back. My destiny was sealed.

My brother’s wedding was a beautiful event for everyone except me. But that’s the whole point of my story; when you hate yourself as much as I did at the time, you end up destroying everything that’s good in your life. You become “socially toxic” to those around you.

During the weekend celebration, I was the recipient of numerous malicious comments on my appearance, especially while I was wearing my tuxedo. The comments came from “friends” and relatives alike, and there was no place for me  to hide. So I drank – a lot. I think that if I had experienced this kind of ridicule years earlier, I could have shrugged it off and survived. But no longer; I had nothing left to give. I was mentally spent. All that now awaited me was the darkness of the abyss.

First I prayed for help; then I prayed for death.

Tom’s wedding was in November of 1988 and by the Spring of 1990, I had become bedridden from depression. I withdrew from my university position and hardly left my apartment. I was now alone – except for my friend Joe.

Joe and his wife Geni never gave up on me even as I was giving up on myself. Although I never told him, Joe’s friendship following my brother’s wedding, was probably the only thing that kept me alive during that time.

Joe could see me falling apart and he made it his job to be around me as much as possible. He invited me to go with him to bookstores, movies, or just to get together and talk. He probably saved my life multiple times without realizing it. But I was determined to end my life and there was nothing he or anyone else could do.

And then one late spring evening in 1989 while Joe and I were sitting in his car and talking, I turned to Joe and said, “I don’t think I’ll make through the summer.”

Joe just nodded because I think he realized there was nothing he could say or do at this point to change my mind. He knew me well enough to know that once I decided to do something, I was all in and there was no turning back.

I was done fighting. I was grossly overweight and drinking and eating my way into an oblivion that was quickly approaching. All that was left for me to do was to figure out a way to end my life without causing my family too much embarrassment.

After sixteen torturous years of falling, I had finally hit the bottom of the abyss.

I had given up on myself and the world and I had finally given up on God; but He hadn’t given up on me yet.

My Miracle Moment

The exact moment of the life-changing revelation that saved my life has long since disappeared into the fog of my memory. But it’s echo continues to resonate in my life to this day.

I remember lying in bed one fateful evening in a state of paralyzing hopelessness when a thought occurred to me that would forever change my life. Below are the ten words that saved my life:

“Maybe I didn’t fail the diets, maybe they failed me.”

Those ten words produced a transcendent experience for me. They allowed me to see the story of my life from a different perspective, one that I had never considered before.

Beginning around the age of ten, I realized I looked different from the rest of my family and friends. That’s when I began dieting. But as I continued to fail at losing fat over the next sixteen years, I began to blame myself for my constant failure. I came to believe that I was never meant to be lean and happy. I failed, I believed, because I was the problem. But my revelation changed all of that.

For the first time in my life I considered the possibility that perhaps there was nothing inherently wrong with me after all. Perhaps, I thought, the problem had been with the methods I was using to lose fat – maybe they were flawed.

In other words, I was finally able to transfer the blame for all my years of fat loss failure from myself to the diets.

This new way of thinking filled me with hope and gave me a reason to get out of bed and try again. I promised myself that no matter what it took, I would discover the truth about how my body stores and loses fat. Science, not magic, would now become my intellectual “North Star“.

The Birth of the Fat Loss Blueprint

Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I possessed two indispensable skills that helped me discover the truth of fat loss: I loved doing the day-to-day research and I had an uncanny ability to “connect the dots” between seemingly disparate ideas.

I enjoyed reading and dissecting scientific literature. My work as a research assistant at the University of Illinois from 1986 – 1989 was surreptitiously at the time preparing me intellectually for the journey I was about to undertake. I was sharpening honing a skill that would eventually save my life and help thousands of others like me live a healthier, happier, and more fulfilling life.

Beginning in  Fall of 1989 following my “revelation,” I embarked upon an intellectual quest to mine the medical journals, academic papers, and physiological texts for everything related to how the body burns and stores fat. Since I possessed no academic background in physiology at the time, my goal was simple – read everything! And so I did.

Nothing was too arcane for me to read. I was exploring an entirely new world and it filled me with awe and inspiration. I was absorbing and processing an enormous amount of information during those initial years and I loved it.

And then, miraculously, the pieces began to come together and congeal in my mind. I began to notice the intellectual “pearls” among the grains of sand.

And that’s when my second gift revealed itself. I was beginning to see patterns of truth emerging in the fat loss literature I was consuming.

I was surprised, and in truth a little angry, to discover that the answers I was seeking on how the body stores and burns fat were already known. The problem was that they were scattered throughout the literature, hidden away in the various journals and texts. There was no common nexus at the time. No one, it seemed, had yet put together all the pieces in a user-friendly format.

That was about to change.

As I read and studied the journals and papers, my mind was constantly separating the essential from the nonessential. My codification of the fat loss process was agonizingly slow. However, each time I discovered a new “piece of the puzzle”, my motivation to continue was renewed. For me, the realization that there existed a solution to my eternal problem was all the motivation I needed to keep me going for over two years.

My quest for the truth of fat loss became my obsession. I left graduate school, took a part-time job cleaning a fitness center at night, just so I could continue my research.

But I wasn’t just reading; I was applying what I was learning to my own life. I was changing how I ate based upon what I was learning, and the results were amazing.

I was losing weight almost effortlessly for the first time in my life, and doing so without pain, pills, starvation, or exercise. I was learning principles, applying them, and they were working.

With the positive results from my self-experimentation, I finally had proof-of- principle for my method of fat loss, and for a nerd like me, that was pure research gold.

It would eventually take me almost three years to uncover all the nuances of how to eat to unleash my body’s miraculous fat burning abilities. But those years were incredibly fruitful, both physically and intellectually.

Physically, I lost over 180 pounds and ended up weighing 165 pounds, about the weight I was in seventh grade.

Intellectually, I fell in love with physiology and would go on to earn my Master’s Degree in Clinical Exercise Physiology in 1997. I had finally been granted my wish: a second chance at the life filled with health, hope, and happiness.

My eating plan, however, existed only in my mind until 2006. I didn’t even have a name for my plan – it was just the way I lived and ate that kept me lean, healthy, and happy.

In 2006, I finally gave my plan a name; I called it the Fat Loss Blueprint.

The Fat Loss Blueprint contains no original research on my part. Instead, it’s a codification of the principles governing how the fat loss process works in all human beings. It shows you how to eat the foods you love that places your body in its natural fat burning, healthy state. It’s the final piece of the fat loss puzzle that you’ve been looking for. It changed my life; it can change yours as well.

The “Fat Kid” Today

I met the girl of my dreams in 1992, married her in 1998 and we have three wonderful children.

In 1996, I was accepted into Eastern Illinois University’s graduate program in Clinical Exercise Physiology without taking a single undergraduate course in physiology. My years of searching for the truth of fat loss literally gave me PhD in physiology by the time I applied for an official degree. I graduated with my Masters Degree in 1997.

Teaching others my program was never my motivation for searching for the truth. In fact, I never shared what I had learned with anyone until March of 2006, sixteen years after I my initial weight loss.

In 2006, I was hired by a hospital to teach a program in preventive medicine and I decided to make my Fat Loss Blueprint the cornerstone of the month long course.

My course went “viral” despite no overt advertising. It spread by word of mouth and doctor referral alone, but mostly because of the obvious success my students were achieving.

Today, I continue to have the support of over forty doctors who regularly refer their patients to me for help with fat loss and chronic disease management. Their support and belief in my program means the world to me.

But now it’s time to share the Fat Loss Blueprint with the rest of the world.

I share my story of pain, loss, and redemption because I know it’s not unique. I know their are others out there with similar stories who continue to suffer from fat loss failure and frustration, and who dream of a second chance at life. My message to all those who are suffering right now is that you no longer have to live a life of regret. I can show you a better way.

The Fat Loss Blueprint saved my life and gave me a second chance. And I haven’t wasted a moment of that gift. I realize now how beautiful life can be. I say a prayer of gratitude every day thanking God for the gift I received. It truly is a miracle.

You now know my story. I’ve experienced the darkness of the abyss and survived, scars and all. If you’re ready for your second chance, I am offering this program to you. All you have to do is take my hand.

I came across the following words attributed to Andre Malraux in a book I read long ago and thought they summed up my journey better than anything I could write.

In speaking with a friend of his who experienced a horrible tragedy only to emerge stronger because of it, Andre said, “You are one of those who did not return from hell with empty hands.”

The Fat Loss Blueprint is what I brought back from my own journey into hell. It’s a gift that I am now prepared to share with the rest of the world.

Whether the world is ready to receive my gift, I do not portend to know. But I’m at peace with whatever happens next. I take comfort in the following words written by one of my favorite historians, Will Durant, author of the voluminous “History of Civilization. It took him over 40 years to complete his project and, when once asked if it was worth it, he replied, “Speak the truth and time will be your eloquence”.

I have spoken the truth and now await the unerring judgement of time.

“What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. When we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen”. Henry David Thoreau

 

You are not broken; you complete for success. You were created to be lean and healthy.

All of us, including myself, were created to be lean and healthy. And all it takes to unleash that miracle is Truth and Commitment.

 

Yours in Truth and Commitment,

Bryan