In the space of a year Alasdair Wilkins shed a hefty 45 kilograms without resorting to drastic measures – just determination.
In a first person piece for Vox the University of North Carolina science and medical journalism master’s student – who weighed 129kg just 12 months ago – said that after moving out of his parents’ house – away from their “immaculately stocked refrigerator” – and beginning a new job freelance writing he suddenly had plenty of extra time on his hands.
The 27-year-old felt like it might the perfect opportunity to make a fresh new start when it came to his health and was unbelievably successful in achieving his fitness goals despite calling his weight loss method “so, so dumb.”
“Basically, I just went to the gym, and I … walked,” writes Alasdair. “On a treadmill, uphill, at a brisk pace, for about an hour every day — and I do mean every day — from July to April. That’s more or less it!”
Alasdair – who at his heaviest said he was “intimidated by the gym” – revealed that his fitness style was born out of pure practicality.
“Like a lot of people who struggle with their weight, I was intimidated by the gym,” he told news.com.au. “But there was one machine I could use without the help of a personal trainer and that was the treadmill. So I just started there because it’s the easiest.”
Alasdair exercised for an hour every day from July to April while watching videos on his tablet with the only goal of wanting to feel better about himself, his dramatic weight loss was a complete surprise.
Alasdair Wilkins post-weight loss. PHOTO: Facebook.
“I never would have lost 100 pounds if that’s what I had set out to do. Indeed, the weight loss only happened as soon as I had given up hope of losing weight at all,” he wrote.
“If I had any weight-related goal at all, it was probably on the order of 5 to 10 pounds, and losing 20 would have made me ecstatic.”
“Because I wasn’t putting pressure on myself to lose 100 pounds all at once — or in this case, at all — I sidestepped the biggest danger when it comes to weight loss: discouragement.”
And you know that old union of weight loss and willpower? Well Alasdair described his willpower as “mediocre at best” and instead he says succeeded because he “found a way to be extreme in moderation”.
“I didn’t lose 100 pounds because I have amazing willpower,” he told news.com.au “There’s 26 years of evidence to show that I have very mediocre willpower. I just found a routine that I actually enjoyed and stuck with it.”
As for his eating habits Alasdair wrote of at first ignoring all of the diet books crediting weight loss a healthy diet.
“It was a lot easier for me to hop on a treadmill than to cut portions, at least at first,” he wrote. “I’m usually not so blithely ignorant, but it worked pretty well here.”
In his candid piece Alasdair wrote of how his weight had made him feel like a “personal failure” and how he went to great pains to cover up his deep-seated unhappiness about his “fatness”.
“I constructed a life for myself in which my physical appearance just never, ever came up, as any reminder of how I looked took me right back to the core of my self-hatred,” Alasdair wrote.
“I convinced myself that nobody could ever consider me attractive. At 26, I had never been in a relationship—I’d never even been kissed—and it was torture for me to even talk about the possibility of romance, because doing so necessarily meant thinking about how I must appear to others.”
Alasdair said how being honest with himself and accepting himself began the turning point of his remarkable change which he says saw “these fundamental feelings of self-loathing” he’s been struggling with ever since he could remember disappear.
“I’m much more confident now that I’ve lost weight — but I wish I could have found a way to be comfortable in my skin even without the weight loss,” he lamented.
One interesting observation the science writer made toward the end of his essay was the difference between being an overweight man to being an overweight woman.
“It’s so much easier to be a fat man than a fat woman,” Alasdair wrote. “I received less criticism at 100 pounds overweight in my entire life than a woman 10 pounds overweight does in, what, a month? A week? A day?”
Since Alasdair shared his story on July 7 it has been shared more than 25 thousand times and he told news.com.au he was delighted with all of the kind support he has received.
“It’s great how they’ve found the piece really meaningful and it’s inspired them to get out there and do something about it.”
