Fat Loss Tips Blog

My name is Rob Cooper. In 1990, I tipped the scales at 475 pounds and my waist was 55 inches (at least). Over the next two and a half years, I lost 288 pounds, dropping to a low of 187 pounds, and I fit into a size 38 pair of jeans. But I wasn’t finished yet. In the years that followed, I took up the bodybuilding lifestyle and slowly but surely added over 50 pounds of lean muscle while dropping even more body fat. That brought my total fat loss to over 300 pounds. Today, I weigh 240 pounds of lean muscle and I’m in the best shape of my life

How did I do it? It all began with a decision

When I realized that I had hit bottom, I decided I had to do something about my health – and fast! But I didn’t choose to lose nearly 300 pounds of fat – I chose to learn how my body worked, how it used foods, and then began to put the principles I learned into action on a daily basis.

I was working as a cab driver for about 2 years after leaving university. I set the land speed record for the greatest amount of weight gained in the shortest period of time. I went from 320 pounds when I left university to 475 pounds a short 2 years later.

My life consisted of driving a taxi, eating, smoking, drug and alcohol abuse and a lot of “Nintendo”. The only exercise I got was getting out of bed and the short walk from my taxi to the restaurant and back to the cab.

I challenged my skin to keep up with the weight gain, and it lost. I was covered in stretch marks which not only were beet red, but quite wide. Do I have them now? More about that later, but yes, there is hope and yes you can do something about it (I have a little secret weapon that has served me well).

In 1989 when I hit my highest weight or 475 pounds, my body let me know in no uncertain terms that enough was enough. I had what I refer to as “my episode” one night after a shift of driving taxi. My heart began to race and I was having a challenge with breathing. I got out of my chair and began to pace thinking about what was going on.

It scared me.

Did I do anything about it? Nope.

What did I know? Yes I was clinically obese, I was wearing the same clothes day in and day out as I hated shopping and once I found a set of clothes that I liked, I stuck with them for months at a time, washing them every other day.

I was young. I was at the tender age of 22 years. I was invincible.

2 days later it happened again. I was sitting in the same chair after a shift of driving taxi when it all happened again. My heart began to race, my breath was short and I was struggling to breathe. I began to sweat profusely and I got up out of my chair and clutched the wall. My life flashed in front of my eyes and I envisioned my parents finding me – dead at 22 – 475 pounds and nothing to show for my life. It scared the crap out of me.

I made a decision to do something about my health.

You’d think that at 475 pounds, I’d have realized that I was fat and had to get rid of the weight, but that was not in my mind at all. I knew nothing about health and nutrition except for what I had read in newspapers or seen on TV, namely that salt was bad and fried foods were bad, so that’s where I began.

I made a new years resolution to quit using salt, to give up fried foods and to “lose weight by exercising”

I did not choose to drop 300 pounds.

I chose to learn about my health and what I could do to improve my health.

I became a glutton for information and then began to put the information into practice. My first introduction to my new lifestyle was to purchase foods that I knew were healthier and make sandwiches instead of eating out so much. In the beginning, what I began to do was create “fridge experiments” where everything I bought quickly turned green and melted away while being in the fridge for a week. I learned how to create penicillin!

It wasn’t all that bad. I did eat some of it, but at least the decision was set and it began to create a new mindset that I used.

I was out of the house more than I was in the house and ate at a lot of fast food joints. When I did, I reduced the intake. I’d eat one big mac and shake instead of two. I replaced fries at the restauraunt with a baked potatoe and I quit putting salt on anything.

I still drank pop, but switched to diet pop. I still drank coffee but quit using sugar in it.

I believe that once you make a decision and fully commit to it, that the universe supports your decision and attracts into your life things that wouldn’t ordinarily be. Facts came my way, people with info came my way and I began to learn new lessons. Doors began to open as it were and those doors may have very well been there before, but I wasn’t open enough to see them. I wasn’t open enough to see the opportunity. I have found this to be the same with the rest of my life in the years since as well.

Implementing what I already knew

….which wasn’t a lot I might add

I had been dieting since I was in the 5th grade. I had been on a starvation diet when I was in my final year of high school and had lost 80 pounds from December until the summer when I graduated. I say I lost it because I surely found it again, and then more.

I had carried with me some of the product from that diet and began to use the last of it which lasted me about a week. I got very very ill. So ill in fact that my roommate were going to take me to the hospital if I didn’t do something for myself, or snap out of it. They joked that they’d get a forklift and cart me out of the house and to the hospital.

Being so sick, I essentially did a week long fast and dropped about 20 or 30 pounds. Not a healthy way to do it, but it was enough to support my initial decision and inspired me to continue to do more.

Fit For Life and My First Role Model

I had a friend that drove cab with me, who knew about some information contained in a book called Fit For Life by Harvey and Marilynn Diamond. The book outlined something called natural hygiene or put another way “food combining”.

The idea was that digestion is the most energy consuming thing the body does and that if we can eat foods in combinations that simplify the digestive process, that an enormous amount of energy is released and used to clean the body and thus burn fat and become healthy.

My friend had followed the principles before and introduced me to the subject because I had suddenly taken steps on my own to do something.

“when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”

We began to follow food combining principles and he taught me some great recipes that he had come up with.

I learned a great deal about food, about the body, about how the body uses food and suddenly realized that food was fuel for the body. I was introduced to the concept of “rythems of food” and how our body has a 24 hour cycle split into 3 parts of consumption of food, use of food and elimination of food. I had never realized how important it was to eliminate the food we’ve been eating, or that it was a specific 8 hour cycle of it’s own. To simplify, it goes something like this: noon to 8 PM is time for consumption of food, 8 pm until 4 am is assimilation of food and from 4 am until noon is the elimination cycle. What I learned was that if we do not clean our body and eliminate the waste material, we set ourselves up for disease. When our body becomes toxic, it will store fat as a method of keeping us safe from the toxins. The solution was to eat only foods that require no digestion from the time we wake until noon and then have our first digestible meal at noon, and not before. I learned about the power of fruit. Fruit is special in that when eaten in ripe form, requires no digestion but rather – slides through our stomach and into the colon. Fruit is meant to be eaten ripe, on an empty stomach and then given between 20 minutes and a half hour for processing in our stomach.

And so it began.

I had never heard of this before. I decided to try it. I ate only fruit and fresh squeezed fruit juices for each morning of my day and only at noon would I have something else. I continued this practice for years to come.

The other easy principles that I learned was about combining foods together. The idea is that protein requires an acid to digest it, starches require an alkaline and vegetables can be digested in either. So, simply put, eat only proteins and vegeies or starches and veggies, but never proteins and starches together.

The fat began to drop off quite quickly.

The rest of food combining can be read about in the book Fit For Life.

But it didn’t end there.

I began a journey of natural health. I read everything I could on the subject and then implemented a wide variety of ideas from many different disciplines.

I began to preach Fit For life like it was gospel. It was making such a huge change in my life and my energy levels that I told anyone and everyone about it. My roommates became quite pissed off at me and the next stage of my evolution came from one very simple comment – “Rob, you’re baseing everything around ONE book – read a little more on the subject”. I was hurt for just a moment, but then I realized she was right. I began to search out everything on the subject of natural health.

I learned about the colon, about fiber, about acidophilus, about the heart and lungs and about good and bad fats. I learned about Ayurveda or the Indian science of eating for your body type and realized that not only are there 24 hour cycles our bodies go through, but seasonal as well. I learned that different body types respond differently to tastes’, smells, foods and exercise. As I learned, I tried things and then kept what worked and discarded what did not.

I began to use the power of my mind to attract success. I used creative visualization, affirmations and the power of the written word to set intentions. I learned a unique concept regarding thought - that I could create my life exactly the way I wanted it, just by believing it to be so.

It’s not just about what we eat, but also how we think and what we believe that plays such a vital role in our success. Reading books such as “the magic of belief” and “the power of your subconscious” were instrumental in my understanding that we’re not to just sit idle and watch the world go by. We can have what we want and create it ourselves. Eventually “Unlimited Power” by Anthony Robins was on my reading list and I learned about reframing our beliefs. There were times I put the book down when Tony gave an exercise to do. It was intimidating to think that I was about to let go of very negative thoughts. They were my comfort zone. I worked through it. Tony also had a chapter on Natural Hygiene in that book which solidified my belief about what I had learned and had been practicing from Fit for Life.

I read a book called “The Silva Mind Control Method” and began my first experiments with meditation. Frankly, I didn’t get much out of the practice I learned in this book, but it opened me up to the idea of meditation.

I remembered a documentary that I had watched years earlier about the Beatles and their experimentations with Transcendental Meditation. I had a seed planted about it early in life and I reached out to it now. Funny thing is that when people ask me why I began TM, my answer was “for the bodybuilding aspect of it”. What? Well, what I had come to understand about bodybuilding was that the body grew from the stimulus of bodybuilding, not from the work performed. I realized that growth occurred when we rested and if we ate properly to supply the body with the raw materials for that growth. What I came to know about meditation was that it was a way to lower stress and deepen the resting ability of the body. The body “becomes still” and technically, with better stillness and rest, growth should occur. Good enough for me to try. I continued the practice for 10 years twice a day for 20 minutes. Do I recommend TM? Nope. I don’t do that anymore. I find that a very simple audio technique called Holosync Audio Technology provides me with the same benefits if not more and I now use their CD once or twice a day. Much simpler and no hype or negativity associated with it.

I consider myself to be quite masculine and I’m comfortable in my masculinity. People seem to have some sort of major disbelief when they learn that I meditate. They see a very large bodybuilder / power lifter type person and exclaim “you… meditate?”

I use what works. Yes, I meditate.

Vegetarianism

This was a big step for me. I had grown up on meat and for someone to tell me that meat was bad was like finding out I was hatched, not born. Not possible.

I read some philosophies about animal products, animal factories, unclean food supplies, animal stress, the amounts of land required to raise the animals and the drugs used or given to the animals so they can produce more food or heavier meats. These same drugs make their way into us, as does the stress the animal goes through. It can be a very unpleasant experience for the animal simply to put some meat on our table.

I took it in stride and from what I learned, decided to give it a go. I was told that I was still going to be able to live a normal life while not eating meat and a much higher quality life at that!

Vegetarianism taught me very valuable lessons about health, about choices and about really doing whatever it takes to nourish ones body. I found that in my city, it was much simpler to make choices and have access to some options, but in my home town – nope. Some times my choices for meals were nothing more than baked potatoes, toast and oatmeal.

Do I recommend vegetarianism today? Not necessarily. I believe that to be a personal choice and that it can be done in serious health conditions to aid the body in recovery. Do we need meat to live. Not sure about that one either. I’ve lived both sides of that coin and have fared well. If I ever was to be in a serious health crisis, I’d drop meat in an instant.

I remained vegetarian for 12 years of which 2 where completely vegan (no egg, no dairy). Most of the 12 years were vegan with the exception of times I’d have bread with some dairy in it, or the very odd pizza which had cheese. For any vegans in the world, being strict is what it’s all about, so, I was a very strict vegetarian with many long bouts of veganism mixed in between.

Although I have gone back to eating meat, I am so totally respectful of what the animal has provided for me and I eat only the cleanest possible meats I can find What that means is that I eat only free range chicken and eggs when I can. Wasting of any meats is such a disrespectful act to a being that was raised and then died to be thrown away without a thought. I learned so much about health and nutrition from my vegetarian ways. I learned about various types of grains and the history of ancient people and what they did and overcame to keep growing their grains to feed their people. A little intrinsic, I know, but there’s so much history to the simple grain Amaranth. Bet you never even heard of it.

Other Food Philosophies

I began juicing vegetables and fruit, food combining, macrobiotics, fasting and then re-feeding to increase my metabolism. If I read about it, I tried it. I put it into practice. Juicing became my first priority of the day and at some points, I would even go days or weeks drinking nothing but juice and eating only fruits and raw vegetables.

I then learned about fasting as a method to cleanse the body. The longest I went was 42 days without food, just drinking water. I would never ever do this again and I do not recommend it. Starving your body is doing it a dis-service. During this time, I had wicked blood sugar irregularities. I would get up off the couch, turn the corner to go to the kitchen for some water and blacked out. I must repeat that I do not recommend this.

I realized very quickly that I’d plateau at which time I learned that I must eat more food to keep my metabolism up. I was eating too little food and it was when I began to add in oatmeal and brown rice that things began to change again. I took a course on “whole foods” where I told people that I had a “near God experience”. I responded very well to oatmeal. I bought Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut oats which are a whole food and take 30 minutes to prepare. I would put the pot on the stove to cook and then go out for a walk while it was cooking. I began to stabilize my blood sugar levels, felt more balanced and began to put on more muscle. The same thing occurred with Brown Rice. I began to eat it with every meal along with steamed vegetables with the same results.

I quit smoking and drinking alcohol. I quit drinking coffee and soda pop and replaced them with a herbal tea called Calli from Sunrider, water and fresh fruit juices. Where I once craved a beer, I began to crave Calli tea. I realized that if my body was craving this new “whole food beverage” then I should listen. I remember a time when I had ordered some beers at a local pub and when I was into my third one, I began to crave Calli. I paid my tab, ran home and made a pot of tea.

Soon I added more Sunrider foods to my diet and things began to rapidly improve. My skin tone began to change, my skin tightened up and my stretch marks began to heal. My fingernails began to become harder and I began to heal much much faster. I had been addicted to drugs for about 4 years and a short 3 months after starting on Sunrider, my stress levels were lowered so much that I stopped smoking pot cold turkey. I began to sleep better and had an even better outlook on life.
I went from being addicted to alcohol and drugs to being sober and drug free.

I learned about fats – good fats and bad fats. I realized that our body needs essential fats for many metabolic functions and good health, so I added Essential Fatty Acids to my diet rather than following a no-fat diet. To this day, I consume Udo’s Oil as my primary EFA.

Each time I learned a new principle and applied it, I took my weight loss another step further and my health continued to improve.

Exercise

At a weight of nearly 400 pounds, I began walking daily, at least 20 minutes, and more if I felt inspired. I realized that I was not able to do pushups at that body weight and body size, but I could use the stairs in my house to do incline pushups, so that’s exactly what I did.

When I reached my lowest weight of 187 pounds, I traded my drug addiction for bodybuilding. One reason was because I didn’t want to be skinny. But I also realized that when you give up a negative habit, that leaves a vacuum that must be filled with a new positive habit, or else the old habit may easily return. So I started weight lifting and became addicted to the bodybuilding lifestyle!

I could only do three or four sit ups, but I realized that if I did only three sit ups per day, at some point I’d become stronger and I would then be able to do six, and then twelve, and then twenty or more – so that’s exactly what I did. I was nowhere near able to see my abs at that point, but I knew that given time, the abs would be there when I dropped enough of the fat that was covering them.

I started from scratch, but I had read Muscle and Fitness magazine when I was in junior high school and dabbled in some basic training back then, so I knew a little on the subject when I took it up seriously later in life.

I began working out with weights three times a week in addition to my walking, which continued for many more years. When I started, I could only bench press 40 pounds and squat only 80 pounds. But the amount was not important to me, because it was a start. What was important to me was the act of exercise for the sake of exercise.

I was so enthusiastic, my workouts grew to almost two hours in length, including 30 minutes just for abdominal training. Since those humble beginnings, I’ve learned the power of periodization and I began to change my weight training programs every few months. Today, each training program lasts me no longer than six weeks at most. I realize that my body will adapt and I will hit a plateau if I don’t change routines frequently.

Today I train no longer than one hour and treat my abdominals no differently than any other body part. I hit them with intensity, with low reps and focus more on core training than abdominal training. I split my abdominals between workouts, doing upper abs one day, lower abs another, and obliques on yet another day.

In the years that followed, I applied these new philosophies on a daily basis and my new habits became a lifestyle that I enjoy to this day still.

The Power of Protein

Even when I was on a vegetarian diet, I began to put on muscle, but it was a full 12 years after I started, that I learned the power of protein to take my bodybuilding results to the next level.

I had been weight training as a vegetarian for years – with very good results – but wanted to know what effect protein would have on my physique and muscularity. My philosophy has always been to experiment with new ideas, test them and see what results I got before judging. After being vegetarian for so many years and for so many reasons, it was not easy! It took me two years of thinking about it before I made the decision to eat fish, chicken and eggs again.

I started with a whey protein powder, but it wasn’t long until I felt a calling to start using animal protein. When I did, I felt a surge of energy course through my body from the very first day of eating meat and I loved it.

I began to lose even more fat, break even more fat loss plateaus, and pack on even more muscle. I also noticed that my body temperature increased (from the thermogenic effect) and I even slept better.

Today, my training days consist of two parts, a morning cardio session, where I do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) in a fasted state and then another session in the afternoon. I found that these frequent training sessions kept my metabolism burning all day long and I burn more fat.

When I was at my highest bodyweight of 475, I had a 55 inch waist. At my lowest weight of 187, I was a size 38 waist. Now at 240 pounds, I still have a size 38 waist – but I have much more muscle, rock hard abs and a well-conditioned core.

I’ve found that with the increase in muscle and with twice the daily energy output, I require more calories than I used to. Every pound of muscle that I gained requires more food to sustain it, so over the years I’ve had to constantly “tweak” and update my food program.

Even though I’ve lost hundreds of pounds and kept if off for years, I feel my best when I continue to exercise on a regular basis and eat only whole, natural foods. I keep my metabolism up with exercise and by following simple bodybuilding nutrition principles.

At 38 years of age, I am in the best shape of my life, but I know I have much more I can accomplish with my physique. New goals continue to keep me motivated, but along with setting goals such as reaching a specific body fat percentage, my goals today are more about the journey than the destination. My biggest goal today is to continue to train week in, week out – for life - and to continue to strive for peak performance in every area of my life.