Volume II - From 310 to Thriving
The Same Man, Rebuilt
Two photographs. One on a boat deck in 2015, the other in a studio in 2026. What happened between them is not a diet - it is a complete metabolic re-engineering.
One frame, eleven years
The 2015 man at 310 pounds and the 2026 man at 139 pounds, occupying the same frame. Not two people - one body, re-engineered, with the older version still visible underneath.
"Damn, you're big. You're going to die soon."
That photograph didn't create my problem. It exposed it. For the first time, I saw the gap between the story I had been telling myself and the reality everyone else could already see.
How the eleven years actually went
October 2015: 310 pounds on a boat deck, a fifty-inch waist, a fatty liver, an enlarged heart, a resting pulse of 110, and a pre-diabetic lab panel. Nothing about that day was sudden. It was the end state of thirty-three years nobody had measured.
The rebuild began with two small decisions and a logbook, not a crash diet. By 2018 I was 153 pounds - and still fragile enough to have a TIA and end up on three blood pressure medications. A number can arrive long before the structure that holds it.
Then came the drift. Ninety-nine pounds came back because I stopped measuring. The second rebuild was slower and deliberate: a fasting window, a macro structure, a training rhythm, food prepped before the moment I would need it. In early 2026 my doctor discontinued all three medications. Today I hold at 139 pounds at sixty-five.
That is the whole story in one sentence: I am not a man who lost weight. I am a man who built a system and then kept running it.
2015
October 2015 - 310 lbs
The photograph that told the truth. A body run past every warning light, still smiling because the decline had become invisible from the inside.
2026
2026 - 139 lbs
The same man, a different operating system. The rebuild held because the identity underneath it changed.
- Starting weight
- 310 lbs
- Current weight
- 139 lbs
- Weight lost
- 171 lbs
- Years between photos
- 11
What the numbers do not show
The weight is the easiest part to measure. What the photographs cannot capture is everything else that changed: four serious medical conditions reversed, three blood pressure medications discontinued, a stroke survived, a relapse recovered from, and a training habit that starts before most people are awake.
Volume II is the rebuild log. It covers the part almost nobody writes about honestly - what it is to live inside a body changing faster than your identity can keep up with. Appetite signalling changes. Energy availability changes. Relationships, clothing, self-image, and the way rooms respond to you all change.
The through-line is stability. A machine that loses 100+ pounds with no new operating procedure will drift back to its old settings. This volume is about building the procedures that make thriving the default state rather than a temporary condition.
Read the books behind the photos
Choose Life, then From 310 to Thriving
Volume I is the collapse and the first two small decisions that turned it around. Volume II is the rebuild in detail - the science made simple, the daily routine, the mental game, and the long game after the weight is gone. Every chapter of both volumes has its own page you can read right now.
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