How I spent my last sixty daysPart I
6 December 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Back in August I was approached by a contingent of TV and video professionals about putting together a pilot for a reality show. We met and hit it off. Initially the group consensus was to put together a show that would illuminate my simplistic (yet subtly sophisticated) approach towards fitness. As luck or fate would have it about that time Stacy, my wife, was approached by a young friend who was having weight-related medical problems. Pushing 240 at a height of 5-1, this 27-year old was verging on being put on blood pressure medication and diabetes medicine. It was at a time I was working on a script for a meeting with the New York-based TV director: suddenly I was hit with a Zen satori-like flash of insight why not work with an obese individual facing a serious health issue? Coincidentally an article had been published in the New York Times that same week indicating that 30% of Americans were classified as clinically obese (30% body fat or greater) and declaring that that there was an obesity epidemic. Stacy talked to me on a Tuesday about her friends plight; I had my Newtonian apple-hits-the-head moment on Thursday and by Friday had banged together a one page script outline for our meeting on Saturday. Mark, Hillary and Fred looked at my idea over lunch and Mark, (who had seven Emmy award under his belt) summed it up, This is great: life and death trumps vanity every single time. Rather than work with people who wanted to look better for their ten year high school reunion we would work with people in dire need of help in order to curtail or forestall looming or imminent health issues. Ironically, the lady who wanted my help and caused me to recalibrate my thinking declined our offer and passed on the opportunity to participate.
The TV contingent suggested we select three individuals. The idea would be to follow on film the odyssey of a single transformed person. I was asked what was the minimal timeframe needed to obtain results. I pondered the question a bit; I had made my coaching bones working with elite athletes seeking to improve their performance. I was new to working with heavy people. Good results in sixty days, amazing results in 120 days. My expertise had been confined to working with motivated athletes that were genetically gifted competing at the national and world level. I had given advice to folks from all walks of life in my columns and on-line shows for many years at the Washington Post and later on this website. I had not personally trained anyone other than elite athletes for twenty years. Now the game plan was that I would find three local obese people and train them for sixty days. We needed one dramatic transformation and by working with three people our odds were better than putting all our proverbial eggs in one basket: if I picked one person and they bailed out during the process it would derail the whole project. The local newspaper found the TV Show worthy of a little press and ran a short article with my website posted at the conclusion. Within 24-hours I had 45 responses from local obese folks seeking my assistance and willing to participate in our program. To make a long story short I conducted ten interviews and decided that six would make great candidates. Each had a compelling story; each was sufficiently motivated and had the situation that would allow them to do the work.
The TV folks were slightly dubious. Six people? Whats up with that? The six folks had impressed me with their seriousness and willingness to commit. Most of these people were facing serious health issues. I felt as if I were in a lifeboat beating away with an oar drowning people seeking to get in the lifeboat. What the hell. I told myself. Lets be inclusive instead of exclusive. I was undergoing a second mental recalibration: rather than find a single likely specimen why not work with totally untrained people? An ex-elite athlete gone to pot would be easy to whip into shape. A top athlete has muscle memory, a past strong work ethic and dormant discipline that we could resurrect. All of which would make my job easy. It is a relative walk in the park to whip into shape someone who has at one time been in astounding physical condition. It is dramatically more difficult to take a totally untrained person, someone who has never in their life been in shape and transform them. I told myself that if I really believed in my methods and was sold on the validity of this totally unique approach to working with the clinical obese then why not purposefully select totally untrained people? Why not make this a true test? Make it as hard as possible on myself and the methods as opposed to seeking to stack the deck to make it easy to obtain results. Instead of sorting through the pile of applicants for some former all-state running back who played for Penn State before going to seed, why not select folks with zero fitness backgrounds? Would that not be the truest test of the validity of the method? Was this about stacking the deck to fool the viewer or about obtaining real results for real people as they struggle to integrate effective fitness into the crazy quilt of modern life with all its problems and complexities?
I unilaterally decided that I wanted to make it as tough on myself as possible. Of the first ten interviews conducted, I selected six people; two of the ten applicants were not clinically obese and therefore ineligible. One did not have the situation i.e. their work schedule was such that they could not commit to the scheduled training times I was not going to be conducting 9 pm training sessions for a single individual. A fourth young lady would have been perfect but her husband did not want her to appear on TV. Out of the initial ten interviews four were eliminated and the other six I accepted. I wanted it to be as close to random selection as possible. One of the six was in their 20s, one in their early thirties, one just shy of forty, one was 49, the fifth 58 and one was over sixty. I purposefully wanted a broad range of ages. Four women and two men were selected. We gathered them mid-September to start. None had ever lifted weights, a few had tried cardio exercise, all had failed using various diets and they were a sad assemblage of humanity. Whipping this group into shape would be difficult at best. I self-imposed more restrictions: total training time would be limited to seven cumulative hours per week. Three 30-minute weekly weight sessions would consist of three exercises (squat, bench press, deadlift) done for 3-sets each. Not a single other progressive resistance exercise of any kind. Cardio training sessions would be walkingno jogging, no running, no aerobic machines or classes the entire cardio effort would consist of outdoor walking done each day for 45-minutes. The diet would be counterintuitive: eat more to loss fat and build muscle. Only foods purchased from the grocery store would be allowed. I was making this already difficult task near impossible: physically transform six obese strangers in 60-days using methods saddled with incredible restrictions. I decided to call in some help
Tomorrow: Karwoski arrives and the process gets off to an inauspicious startdoubt runs rampant
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