Before and after: Brendan lost an incredible 10st 9lbs
Before: 25st 9lbs
After: 15st
I turned 30 at the beginning of 2013 and travelled to Menorca to celebrate. On the holiday, in the Spanish heat, I remember feeling uncomfortably hot and had to stay in the shade or indoors the whole time.
Once back home, I headed to a music festival with my wife and three friends. Just carrying the tent completely did me in! My legs were killing and I ended up taking painkillers to try to get over it. I knew at this point I had to do something. I was only 30 years old; I shouldn’t have felt like that.
After some extensive googling, I came across Slimming World and went along to my first group – I knew I needed to address my relationship with food before becoming more active. I stepped on the scales to face my weight for the first time in years. I was 25st 9lbs.
Strangely, the initial weight loss wasn’t hard at all. Don’t get me wrong, this was a complete lifestyle change for me – and for my wife, who also joined – but it was nowhere near as hard as I thought it was going to be. If anything, I was probably eating more than I had done previously, it was just a lot more balanced. I lost a stone in the first week and another eight pounds in the second. I was hooked.
It was a few weeks after I joined when someone in the group session talked about how they had done this thing called Couch to 5K and how it could make anyone capable of running 5K non-stop in eight weeks. I had never heard of it before but it piqued my interest, mainly because, as a bloke who still weighed twenty-odd stone, I thought it sounded impossible. As the weeks went by, I got a massive buzz out of running slightly longer with each outing. After eight weeks, I ran just short of 5K in 30 minutes. I literally couldn’t believe it! My first timed ‘race’ was York parkrun, the Saturday before Christmas.
It was part disaster, part brilliant. I got stuck in traffic on the way there and arrived about 10 minutes late. Undeterred, I started the Couch to 5K app on my phone and tried to catch up. I was over the moon when I got to the finish line and my phone read 29:52!
Fast-forward to the summer of 2014, and I’d lost just over 10 stone and was invited by Slimming World to the national semi-final of their ‘Man of the Year’ competition. I subsequently made it through to the final and had my turn to tell everyone about my motivations for losing weight, how I had done it and how I had discovered this love of running. At the end of the event, they announced the overall winner – and it was me!
