It’s unfortunate, but sometimes it takes drastic life events to discover something about yourself. One of these experiences happened to Patrick Delaney in 2015, when his father died of a heart attack. Patrick was 30 years old at the time and weighed around 154 kilos. With a body and lifestyle not unlike his father, Patrick feared the same thing would happen to him, prompting him to turn his life in another direction and regain control of his health.
Patrick Delaney’s Weight Loss Journey
A computer engineers by profession in his early thirties, he had always been a teenager struggling with his weight. Although he spent his years in high school and college working with an incredible ethic, the work itself was not the problem. It was his diet. During his fast-food years, his meal consisted of a fried chicken sandwich with fries and soda five or six days a week, every week.
After work, he often stopped at fast food restaurants, one famous for its tacos and another for its pizzas. Your order? Three supreme chicken burritos and an order of breadsticks. The combination of hard work and the immediacy of fast food at your fingertips may have been convenient, but it was deadly. Now, combine this with social drinking at an average of 10 beers a night and no exercise; the image becomes quite clear. At the age of twenty-one, Patrick reached 300 pounds.
He attributes this largely to 3 things:
- Skipping breakfast and only eating two meals a day leads to a strong appetite and overeating.
- Know almost nothing about nutrition or the diet-weight relationship.
- Not realizing how many calories you actually consume.
There are people who consume 4000 calories a day, which is what Patrick was doing without eating breakfast. Not realizing your actual eating and activity habits is actually quite common and when you least think about it you already have a lot of extra pounds. But with a body composition monitor, you can stay on top of other important measurements like weight, body fat composition, visceral fat, water composition, calorie intake, and more! Tracking multiple factors at once can help paint a much more accurate image than a standard scale.
Patrick was leaving out a key component: physical activity. In college, he went to a gym and used the treadmill several times a week, but the lack of results put him off and he stopped.
„I always thought he was just a fat guy because of genetics or a slow metabolism,“ Patrick said. „I never thought there were other factors.“
How Patrick’s Weight Loss Plan Worked?
As Patrick prepared for his father’s funeral, he realized that he needed to make a change to lose weight. In particular, with your diet. He began by immediately eliminating the sodas. This seemingly minor change easily cuts around 600 calories per day. Patrick began to see results almost instantly.
However, the food problem remained. It is not easy to go from eating fast food almost every day, several times a day, for years, to eating healthy. Patrick’s self-awareness led him to download an app that allowed him to track his calories on a daily basis. The simple app helped put your calorie intake in perspective and held you accountable, even when the going got tough.
After the soda, Patrick slashed his fast food and restaurant meals. Instead, he spent more time in the kitchen cooking foods like chicken breasts and vegetables that would feed him throughout the week. He also went from eating two meals a day to five or six smaller ones that he filled with nutritious snacks like Greek yogurt, almonds, and grapes.
It makes a big difference when you are filling your body with more foods with healthy carbohydrates and fats instead of less foods that are hardly food in the first place. In theory, some may think that Patrick’s habit of skipping breakfast would have helped his weight. Less food equals less weight, right? Not quite.
Other habits Patrick Delaney uses to stay fit
As of July 2017, Patrick weighed 90.53 kilos and is aiming to reach 81 kilos. Contrary to what you thought before, you now realize why going to the gym won’t necessarily do something if you’re not balancing it with a healthy diet. In the past two years, he has found an active routine that works for him that balances cardio and strength training. The amazing thing is that it all started with just 30 minutes of walking on a treadmill. Now, he’s graduated to his personal favorite, a rowing machine along with bicep curls, short triceps, chin-ups, bench presses, lunges, squats, and planks.
“Now, I want to go out and move instead of sitting all day, I crave healthy food, not junk. I recently had a soda for the first time in two years and it didn’t taste good anymore, I didn’t want it. “
„It’s a bit superficial, but the attention from the women has been amazing to me,“ exclaimed Patrick. „I remember a girl was looking at me in the store and, for about five minutes, I thought there was something on my shirt before I realized that she liked it.“
Patrick Delaney’s Tips for Weight Loss
It took Patrick two years, but he began to see results instantly from the moment he cut the soda. Those same results are possible for you too.
“ Before you start making changes to your diet to lose pounds, be aware of all the foods you are currently eating. That way, you will have a baseline and know what to do in the future. “
