Yahoo Lifestyle Weight loss stories: how I lost 30 kg
NAME: Tom Norris
HOME: Paddington, NSW
JOB: Online Sales
AGE: 23
Height: 188 CENTIMETRES
BEFORE: 105kg
AFTER: 75kg
THE WEIGHT GAIN
Norris fell victim to the vagaries of puberty. After he stopped growing, he continued eating. “It was too much breakfast, big morning teas, a large lunch, big afternoon tea, huge dinner and dessert,” Norris recalls, “all while doing very little exercise.”
Things got worse when he went to university and discovered booze. “My first few months consisted of several nights a week of drinking followed by hangovers and bad recovery food!” he admits. “As I was always drinking and hungover there was never the motivation to go to the gym or get any exercise.” The layabout student also had a pack-a-day smoking habit and within six months he was one very fat freshman.
THE DIET and LIFESTYLE CHANGE
One day towards the end of his first year, Norris went for a 10-minute run and was forced to stop three times. “Something snapped inside of me and I decided enough was enough,” he remembers. “I was sick of being overweight, sick of making bad choices about food, sick of smoking and sick of drinking. I made the decision to change everything that day.”
Norris started by walking, riding a mountain bike and cutting out junk food. After three months, he’d lost around seven kilograms. Then he started running and swimming.
“That’s when I hit my straps and the weight started coming off at the healthy rate of about one kilo per month,” Norris says.
Throughout his last two years at uni, Norris exercised for an hour every day, quit smoking and drank less. By the time he graduated a standard week of exercise consisted of 20-kilometre running, two hours riding and 4km swimming.
THE WEIGHT LOSS REWARD
By mid-2007, Norris had dropped to 75kg, a weight he deemed too low for is height. He’s since put on 7kg of muscle, while getting his waist size down to 32. Last year he competed in the BRW Corporate Triathlon in Sydney, completing the race in 33 minutes.
“It opened my eyes to the world of triathlon,” he says.
His 2009 New Year’s resolution was to complete the race in under 30 minutes, beginning a strict training regimen in which he rode 150km, swam 10km, ran 25km and did three gym sessions a week. Such a demanding program means Norris now “eats as much he possibly can”, fuelling his body with nuts and protein shakes.
The hard yakka paid off. In his first proper triathlon, at Kurnell on Sydney’s south coast, he finished ninth in his division and then clocked 29 minutes in this year’s BRW triathlon. He now plans to compete in the State Sprint triathlon series for the 09/10 season and beyond that, tackle Olympic and half-iron-man distances.
THE WEIGHT LOSS ADVICE
Start small. “If you try and do too much too soon you’ll burn out and then it’s easy to fall back into your old habits,” Norris says. “I started walking, then running, then triathlons. It was a slow build up.”
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