These Small Diet Changes Helped This Guy Lose More Than 100 Pounds

On his 45th birthday, Nicholas Davies realized he had to get his weight under control. Somebody was filming me opening up a card and I just looked a slob, Davis, a 49-year-old chief technology officer in London, says. I hated the way I looked and it created a wave of self-hatred that washed over me like a tsunami.

At his heaviest, Davies was around 320 pounds. Clothes wouldnt fit me properly and everything I wore kinda look more like it was a tent than a t-shirt, he says.

Thanks to his restaurateur grandparents, hed always trended toward over-eating. But it wasnt just readily available food that led him to over-indulge-there was a psychological factor as well. Being an introvert I used to turn to food to deal with stress and unhappiness, he says. Being unhappy, he often doubled-down on work, which brought its own stresses and bad behaviors-long hours, eating late, skipping the gym.

And his size made him shrink from socializing; its easy to feel self-conscious when youre too big to fit into a roller coaster, for example. Withdrawing from people made him turn even more to food, in a vicious cycle.

He resolved to change. His attitude, he says, had always been the biggest impediment. As unhappy as he was, hed kept putting off any kind of action, maybe because it seemed too difficult to start. But in the end I got to saying that yesterday never came, he says, tomorrow will never come, so what is more important is what I do today.

So he started small. He switched to a low-carb diet, eating only two meals a day. He quickly started to slim down, and introduced 30 minutes of cardio a day. He tried CrossFit, but found it too macho, with a lot of unneeded moaning and grunting. Instead he turned to gymnastics, appreciating the mobility, flexibility, and timing it required to land even some of the easiest movies. Pretty cool at any age, he says, but when youre learning at 45 and never done this at all in your life, this seemed even more cool.

Some family upheaval led to setbacks, and he traded gymnastics for a personal trainer at his gym- UP Fitness -who had him hitting the machines-but not in the macho way of those earlier CrossFitters. With a mentor, he worked his way up to 8 hours a week in the gym. At his slimmest, he was about 192 pounds, though he soon began packing on more muscle; his body fat is now 15.8 percent. His waistline has slimmed, and hes back to wearing bigger shirts only because his muscles demand it.

For Davies, the transformation has truly been amazing. My mother met me at the train station and walked straight past me I had changed that much, he says. Everybody was shocked how much I had changed.

And he plans to keep going. He doesnt think in terms of goals, but about his larger journey. Remember it's not about the destination, its about the journey, he says. You will fail, you may fail often and thats okay. Hes okay with failing, because it gives him a chance to pick himself up and keep going.