Chris McGrath had been big all his life, and says that he was attending Weight Watchers meetings at age 10. About 3 years ago, he finally reached a point where he was ready to take control of his weight and lose it once and for all.

“I knew enough from what I’d been through over the years to know it was a fairly simple equation: Eat right, move your butt and it will happen. But of course that equation is a lot harder to put into practice than it is to articulate,” says McGrath.

He began to look into getting a laparoscopic band, but after attending an information session realized that having an elastic band around his stomach was not going to change his thinking and behaviour. “I knew that I needed to have a complete change in attitude about food, my activity level and how I felt about myself,” he says.

Making a Deal with Himself

McGrath decided that he would give himself 6 months to try and lose 20 to 30 pounds, then if he wasn’t able to do that, he would know that a surgical intervention was the only thing that would help him. “At that time I was close to 435 pounds. Likely I was even heavier, but the scale wouldn’t read any heavier than that,” he says. 

Surprisingly, McGrath says that he was fairly healthy considering how much he weighed. “I had high blood pressure and skin issues – I was the big sweaty fat guy. I had all the indicators that something was not right, but managed to move through life without many complications,” he says. Every night before bed, McGrath would say a prayer that he would wake up in the morning – “I was at a very low point.”

He committed to eating right and being active, then managed to drop about 30 pounds, on his own, over that 6 months. “However, I knew that 30 pounds was not 200 pounds, and that I wasn’t going to be able to lose the amount of weight that I needed to, on my own,” he says.

Getting Support

Laying in bed one night watching TV, he saw an interview with Sebastien Rahman, a personal trainer in Toronto, where McGrath lives. “Something he was saying really resonated with me, and I said to myself “If I wake up in the morning, I’m going to call him”,” he says. McGrath did call him, and started to get the support he needed to tackle his weight-loss journey.

When he met with Rahman, about 2 weeks after seeing him on the television, he interviewed him and asked for references. Rahman asked him what his goals were, to which McGrath replied, “I’m a 435 pound man, what do you think my goals are?” His new trainer was honest with him, telling McGrath that this was going to be a hard task and could take up to 5 years.

After a couple of sessions with Rahman at the gym, McGrath bought a membership and days that it was, “All guns blazing from there.” He met with his trainer once a week, and regularly hit the gym on his own. He ate according to the Canada Food Guide, and using the knowledge he had gleaned through years of dieting, but allowed himself one cheat day per week where he could eat whatever he wanted guilt free.

Seeing Results

When McGrath started, he actually gained a little weight, and refused to be weighed or measured initially. But, within 3 months, he noticed that exercising wasn’t so hard. In 5 months, he was seeing definite changes in his body. “We started doing girth measurements, and I could see marked changes in my body and it was very motivating. I was dropping anywhere from 6 to 10 inches a month,” he says, “to date I’ve lost close to 10 feet of fat off my body.”

McGrath hit the point where he had lost 200 pounds on December 1^st 2009, pretty much 2 years to the day since he started his journey.

McGrath hadn’t seen his mom in year when he met her at the airport after losing the majority of his weight and she walked right past him. “She saw my dad talking to me and thought to herself, why is he talking to that man? Then it dawned on her that it was me. This past Christmas my sister saw me for the first time in 3 years, because she lives in New Zealand, and she was extremely surprised,” he says.

Motivating Factors

There were several ways that McGrath kept himself motivated, one major one was through his blog, The Second Coming of Chris, which has over 600 people reading and drawing inspiration from it. “Keeping the blog was like therapy. The food and exercise were the easier parts of the losing weight equation, the blog enabled me to tackle the emotional stuff,” he says.

“I’d watch X-Weighted and wondered if being publicly accountable would help me. I had even printed off and filled out the application forms twice, and thought about going to the casting calls but never followed through. I knew that kind of level of being public wasn’t going to fit for me, but the blog did,” he says.

A lot of people contact McGrath to tell him how inspiring his blog is to them. “I found it really uncomfortable at first, but now I realize that it is really touching,” he says, “It isn’t just people who are trying to lose weight that are finding things that resonate in my blog, it is people that are struggling to get their head around what this is all about and how to be a fit, healthy and balanced person.”

Needing a Boost

In September 2009, McGrath said that he started to plateau, not just in terms of his results, but also in terms of his level of interest- “I was starting to get bored, you can only go on the elliptical trainer or treadmill so often without losing interest.” He had set himself the goal of hitting the 200 pounds lost goal by Christmas of that year, but was 40 pounds off with only 3 and a half months to go. “It was like, if I eat one more grilled chicken breast, I’m going to freak! Or if I have to talk myself into going to the gym one more day, I don’t think that I can do it,” he says. Then one of his friends took him to a spin class, and he became hooked on indoor cycling.

“At that point I was about 270 pounds, and the instructor told me to take it easy, but I went back the next day, and the next day, bought a membership to the indoor cycling centre,” he says, “the indoor cycling got me through a plateau of habit and losing interest in what I was doing. It allowed me to connect with cardio-vascular exercise in a totally different way.”

The End in Sight?

People ask what McGrath’s goal is, and he tells them that he doesn’t know. “I think that my body will tell me when that is,” he says, “and if I stay at 230 pounds I am good with that, because I will be a 230 pound man that will run a marathon, do a triathlon, or do anything that he thinks he wants to do. Its no longer about the number on a scale, it is about connecting with who I am physically.”