How To Go From A Pigging Pig To A Muscular Menace

 

My previous blog post sounded preachy. I said a lot of stuff without showing my own results. Today, I'll prove my credentials by presenting what I have achieved throughout the six years of my fitness journey. 

2016 was the year when I began taking my health a bit seriously. Back then, I was focused only on reducing weight and didn't care about my overall health or well-being. However, what caused me to make up my mind to lose weight was a scary experience I had one night. I had a dream where I couldn't breathe, no matter how hard I tried. It felt like I would die. The fear of dying woke me up, gasping for air. I immediately realised that my air passage was getting blocked somehow when I was asleep. Though I didn't know what I was experiencing was called sleep apnea, I knew I was experiencing this likely because I was obese. This was evident to me because I was pretty athletic when I was a kid and never had such an incident happen.

12-year-old me

I only started getting fat when I turned 12. Since then, the fat around my face and neck bothered me - especially when I tried to sleep. But because I had become careless, I thought I would get used to it. I was lying to myself to avoid fixing my poor lifestyle. This mistake of letting myself loose cost me a lot. You might not believe it, but I started suffering academically because I let myself get fat. Yes, being fat made me dumb.

I would always wake up tired and sleepy (even if I slept early). I couldn't concentrate and would experience brain fog quite often. Even my short-term memory was failing. The thing is, obese people's upper respiratory tract fat deposits narrow the airway; there is a decrease in muscle activity in this region, leading to hypoxic and apneic episodes, eventually resulting in sleep apnea. A significant consequence of sleep apnea is impaired cognitive functioning because your brain doesn't receive enough oxygen. I endured this for five years, from the age of 14 to 18. Another thing about sleep apnea is that it can kill you in your sleep. I thank God that I didn't die. Instead, that near-death experience led me to seek a way to finally fix myself. After avoiding action for years, I finally took the first step by controlling the portion and serving of food I consumed each meal.

This is how I looked in 2017
towards the end of high school.

By 2017, when I was a college fresher, I had lost quite a bit of the excess fat but had started to plateau. At that time, I would only do crunches, thinking that it alone would be enough to get rid of overall fat (boy, was I wrong!). A six-pack ab was my only goal because my arms and legs were pretty skinny (or "skinny fat" now that I think about it) except my belly. Getting rid of belly fat always seemed impossible for me back then. Not to mention I had bitch tits too, which also bothered me a lot. In fact, having a pair of man boobs was also one of the primary reasons I wanted to lose fat. Not only did it make me look like crap, but it also made me feel emasculated. So, I continued eating less but didn't understand why I wasn't losing that stubborn fat on my belly and chest. What made me feel even worse was that even though I wore oversized shirts to hide my belly it would still pop and show. 

Not just that, but the belly fat made it hard for me to bend down and tie my shoelaces even though I had lost a significant amount of it. It got to a point where I wished I just had a flat stomach, even if I never achieved the dream of having washer board abs. Thus, I desperately began searching for answers on the internet, and though the available information back then wasn't as much as today, I was still overwhelmed. I found everything so complicated, especially workout plans and the related jargon. Due to this, I avoided hacks and solutions provided on the internet. However, I would go back and forth, eating like a bird and seeking answers on the internet when my extreme diets didn't work. But because I found sifting through information too boring, my progress halted. Again, I was making excuses for the work I had to put in. 

However, in the next year, I decided to get over it. It was boring, but I had to do my research if I wanted results. I slowly started learning about what kind of foods I should eat and how to calculate my daily caloric intake. I also installed a full-body home workout app and performed the workouts shown in it for 30 days straight. I did see some results, but my expectations weren't met. I had significantly reduced my man boobs but still had a paunch, and the exercises weren't as hard as before. 

My progress plateaued once again, but I didn't give up. I ditched the workout and just focused on dieting. Staying on a diet longer helped me to continue my weight loss, though it was excruciatingly slow. 

Anyway, 2019 was the year I had a breakthrough when my family and I went on vacation to Israel. This was when I learned the importance of cardio as a weight loss tool. We had to walk a lot to go places, and without even realising, I had lost enough fat around my belly that my abs began to show. The abs I was working so hard on but wasn't able to see because of the excess fat surrounding it. 

In the same year, in the month of November, I got myself a cheap home gym setup and began working out. I used to do bro splits, and being a newbie, I made gains regardless. But after three or four months, I noticed I wasn't gaining any more muscle. Also, this was the time I started desiring to get insanely shredded, even if it was just for once.

And I did that exactly. I dialled into my diet and got down to the lowest body fat per cent I had ever been. I looked pretty sick, but the problem was that I felt like a twink, small and skinny. So, I started lean bulking, looked into better workout options and learned about higher frequency splits like the upper/lower and legs/push/pull split. 

The gains I made on a caloric surplus
and high-frequency training split.
Weighing at 68kgs.

And the rest is history...

 

My current physique. At 73kgs.

And for those of you wondering,
yes, I train my legs.

Now I'm focused on both strength and hypertrophy. And not only that, I have even used the knowledge and experience I gained throughout this journey to guide my cousin-brother. 

He had been trying to lose weight for a really long time. He'd hit the gym now and then, but his diet was out of wack. He was around 100kgs when he came to me, and with a proper plan, I could bring him down by 13kgs in a few months. 

My cousin, before his transformation.
At 103 kgs.

After a consistent diet
and a lot of hard work. At 90kgs.

Hopefully, this article inspired you and served as an example of what is achievable. If you're struggling and feel lost, don't give up! It's a time-consuming process, like tending to a garden. The work you put in each day to improve yourself, even tiny steps to improvement, will have a compounding effect which will be life-changing. You just have to stay consistent. Ignore the noise. People always have something or the other to say. They shame you when you're fat and pull you down when you try to change yourself for the better. Lastly, keep measuring your progress. Don't compare yourself to others, especially those who have been doing this longer than you. Only compare your improved self with your past - for lack of a better term - "less-improved" self.