Challenge Participants that Rock (Part 6)

X-Weighted National Challenge participant Ben Metcalfe (fuenke) has lost 65 pounds since the Challenge started!

How you feeling now that you've lost all that weight?

I feel good. I've been doing some pretty intense exercise so I feel sore every so often, but overall I feel really good. I don't snore anymore. My wife says that my snoring is completely disappeared, so everybody in the house sleeps better. Plus I feel a lot more rested when I wake up in the morning too.

I wasn't really experiencing any health problems from being overweight, yet, but I'm pretty sure I was on the brink of developing some. I was out of energy a lot, and often felt like I was very tired and listless. Especially on the weekends, when I wasn't being forced to get up and go to work I didn't feel like I had an awful lot of energy and was always tired. Now I feel like I have a lot more energy, and I am a lot less grumpy on the weekends!

How did you manage to lose so much weight?

I have been dieting, but it hasn't been a crazy fad diets, more complete lifestyle change. I saw a nutritionist and she told me all the things that I need in particular at my age, my size, my height and my weight etc. She told me what I needed to eat to survive, and I try not to stray too far from that.

It is mostly been about willpower, I try not to eat boxed foods anymore and look carefully at the labels of everything I buy. We as a family are a lot more careful about what we cook and what we buy. We have salad every mealtime now, and it's usually a spinach salad. It has basically been about eating what I need, and not just eating what I want. And not stress eating and not eating when I'm bored.

What exercises have you been doing?

I've been using the P90X workout DVDs. Those workouts are insane, and I’m doing them five nights a week. I’ve done workout DVDs before, and I've worked out in gyms before, but I’ve never worked out like I have worked out on those videos. If you are eating healthily and using those workout DVDs, you pretty much see results immediately.

What have been your biggest challenges?

Initially, my biggest challenge was finding the motivation to change. I had to want to do this for myself. My wife had always asked me to lose weight before, but I had to get my mind right in order to get this done, and get the willpower to say no when someone offers me things that I shouldn’t eat, or stopping myself from grabbing take-out on your way home. I have to take it day by day when it comes to having the willpower to keep working out when my body is sore and I just don't want to do another night of it.

How have people reacted to the changes you have made?

I dropped a whole lot of weight right in the beginning, just through the amount of water I was retaining, and initially I was surprised nobody seemed to notice that at work. Suddenly there was one magic day when everybody started saying “Wow, you've lost a lot of weight”. People are telling me that I look great all over the place, it's pretty crazy and it feels really good. It also feels really good to be a walk around the beach without a shirt on for the first time in my life, because I've always been big, since childhood.

What prize you hoping to win?

You know, I don't even know what the prizes are. I just needed to do this and a few coworkers were taking the challenge and I thought I'd use the Challenge as my starting point to do this.