How I Lost 100 Pounds

Disclaimer: It is much easier to lose 100 lbs. if you start out at 379 lbs.

378.8 lbs. 48 waist, 4XLT shirt, far more ready to rest than to rumble

I think it started with my black suit, a pair of jeans, and chronic numbness in my left leg.

A pastor needs a black suit. At the point when the vest hadn’t fit for years and I couldn’t button the jacket, I began to realize that the weight I had accumulated over the years was becoming a problem.

I play poker with a group of guys at church on the first Monday of the month. It got to the point where I couldn’t sit there for three hours without unbuttoning and unzipping my pants (secretly, under the baggy shirts I wore.) When I started developing a sore on the underside of my stomach I bought a new pair of size 48 jeans and tried wearing suspenders. I was in trouble.

Leading worship on Sundays required me to stand for long periods of time. When I did that my left leg would go painfully numb. That seems a strange combination, “painfully numb”, but you would describe it the same way if you were living with it. Then it began moving down my right leg as well. I was in trouble.

Last September, when our youngest headed off to college, Kelley suggested that we begin walking. So we got in the truck, rode around the neighborhood, and found a 1.3 mile route. The first time we walked it I had to stop five times because my lower back just kept seizing up! But I kept at it and began seeing a bit of progress. That marked my first step toward losing 100 lbs.

There were other moments along the way. Dreading when my grandkids wanted me to join them on the floor, knowing how painful it would be to get down there, and worse trying to get back up. I went on a motorcycle trip with a friend – who is slim and fit – and was secretly shamed as he made healthy food choices and I ate like a teenager with a credit card.

Blair, one of my best friends in the world, told me in October that he had started eating his vegetables and was working on getting healthier. My favorite line was when he said, “I think I have eaten enough cheeseburgers in my life. I know how they taste. I know what they do to my body. I don’t think I need to eat another one to remember that.” A challenge, a glimmer of hope, and a word of encouragement that I join him on his journey.

I “skipped” my annual physical in October. I just “forgot” to schedule it. I didn’t want to hear my doctor use the words “morbidly obese” again. I didn’t want to be chided. And I didn’t want to be reminded that, even with medicine, all my good cholesterol numbers would be bad and my overall number would be 220.

I wasn’t faithful to the daily walking. But I did walk around the block more often than I used to (which was never.) When I walked, I thought about the old days. The years when playing basketball was a great joy in my life.  I played my last basketball game in 1995. The years of running, biking, and swimming that culminated in August of 1998 when I got into a lake in Canada and crossed the finish line 12:58:03 later, after swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and running a 26.2 mile marathon. That was me. I did that. And now I was struggling to walk around the block.

My daughter, Kate, remembered the days when I was an athlete. She remembered feeling proud when I would come back sweating from a run. She came with me one weekend when I did a triathlon. She had taken up running in college but had gotten lax over the years of bearing and raising two children, burying herself in her job, building a life with her husband. So she had begun running again and was even training for a marathon. Now it is my turn to be proud of her…and the question grew in my life of whether maybe, somehow, I could do a marathon someday with her?

I had my performance review at church. I received some painfully honest feedback. Just like the last performance review I had, I was told that “I need to take better care of myself.” Ouch. The truth will set you free but first it makes you miserable. The circle was closing like a vice on my heart.

For years I blamed my weight on my genes. “All the Nelson boys get big. They all get over 300 lbs.” As if that happened by breathing air! For years I never really knew what I weighed. We had a digital scale in the bathroom and it always said “E” – for “Error” – when I climbed on. The only real weight feedback I got was from the doctor and I didn’t go there much.

Name a poor food choice and I did it all. I would go on ice cream kicks and eat a huge bowl covered with chocolate and peanuts night after night after night. “Grilled cheese” meant eight slices of bread, a ton of cheese, with strawberry jelly on top. I drank coffee for breakfast and that was it. Kelley and I ordered two large pizzas because I was never satisfied by just eating one large one by myself. Every food in the world came in single serving containers. I would get back up at night and eat a whole box of Captain Crunch, one big bowl at a time. (That takes about 4 ½ big bowls to do.)

We had a gym membership. At one point we belonged to a really really nice gym. I loved the showers and the swimming pool. I hated walking by the basketball court on my way to the locker room, seeing others do what I simply could not physically do any more. I dreaded the walk of shame from the locker room to the pool and, even worse, that moment when I took off my t-shirt before hiding under the water. So, even though it cost a lot of money to belong there, I seldom…and then never…ever…went.

Eventually we let our membership rest and joined the YMCA so that we could have another gym that I wouldn’t go to.

I ate large at Thanksgiving. A big meal in our community gathering at church and then another big meal with family when we got home. I felt sick and getting sicker. I knew it was time.

But I think the ultimate kicker came the weekend after Thanksgiving. My buddy Kenny and I went for a ride to the Texas Hill Country on Friday and Saturday. At one point when we stopped for a bit Kenny looked at me on my bike and said, “Dude, you need to think about losing some weight.” The pot called the kettle black. I got seriously pissed and blasted him. He was right.

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An oft-repeated line in the recovery community goes like this: If you could have fixed your problem on your own you would have fixed it a long time ago.  I knew I couldn’t turn my life around, change my eating habits, or lose weight, on my own. I had tried that.

I had also tried to get help. I did a couple of different weight loss things at church over the past three years. I got motivated by a movie and tried the juicing thing for awhile. Years ago I did Weight Watchers. Each time I would lose 20 lbs. and gain 30 lbs. Do that enough times and you wake up one morning weighing 379. That is what happened to me.

So I thought about what I would need from outside help. My list was pretty short:

1. I need direction. I need someone to tell me what to do, what to eat, how to eat it. I don’t want to make decisions or many choices. Just tell me what to do.

2. I need support. I need other people to encourage me to do what I need to do.

3. I need effectiveness and relatively quick results. I knew I was willing to work hard and to focus but I also know how hard that is to sustain over time without positive feedback.

4. I need accountability. As an athlete, I needed a coach, teammates, and a scoreboard. Back in the day I was blessed with coaches I respected, teammates who wanted to win, and the only statistic that ever mattered to me was that our team ended up with more points than theirs.

5. And I need simplicity. Keep it simple stupid! Even in the multi-disciplinary days of doing triathlons, I kept it very simple. I planned my workouts far in advance and every day that I did what the plan called for marked a win in my world.

Here in Houston there are lots of places to go for help losing weight. Two pastors I knew once lost a lot of weight in a doctor assisted program at the Houston Medical Center. They gained it back. No knock against the program they used but I needed something that I could sustain for years.

I wasn’t interested in anything that required mail order food or specially packaged stuff or weird drinkable meals. I wanted simplicity.

I had met with a nutritionist that my doctor recommended. She was a very nice person. She gave me a long list of assorted things that she thought I ought to eat. Too complicated. Too weird. Too expensive. Not for me.

I used to listen to sports talk radio when I drove around town. Often there would be commercials for Quick Weight Loss Centers. The personal testimonies of the radio personalities were intriguing to me. Two years ago – back before I quit playing golf because my knees hurt too much to play - my friend Jamie showed up for our Friday game and I was shocked to see that he had lost some serious weight! He said he was going to the Quick Weight Loss Center. It wasn’t enough to motivate me to join him but it was a memory I never forgot.

I decided to give it a try. There was a Quick Weight Loss Center not far from my office so, on Thursday, December 1, 2016, I went in for a consultation. I was terrified, embarrassed, and hopeless. But as I waited for my turn in back with the consultants I saw something important.

I noticed a big white board on the wall directly in front of my chair. It was a list of names and how much they had lost in the previous week. My scoreboard! Immediately my competitive side kicked in and I thought, “If I do this thing then my name is going up on that darn board every week!”

My turn came and I went back to talk to a consultant. I got on a scale. 378.8 lbs. My starting point. She took my blood pressure. It was fine. It is always fine. Go figure. And she took my “Before” picture. Hideous, depressing, but that really was me in all my glory.

She asked me how much I would like to weigh. Without much thought I just said, “I think I would rather be somewhere in the 250’s.”  She disappeared, I figured to crunch some numbers in a computer, and she came back with the news:

“Achieving your goal of losing 120 lbs. will take 32 weeks of weight loss. We would then follow that up with a six week transition period and a full year of maintenance after that. Any time your weight fluctuates more than five pounds you could come back and we’ll help you get back on plan.”

I don’t remember everything about that conversation but these were the high points that I carried away:

• This program has a proven track record. It works for the people who work it.
• We make sure that your body has the nutrition it needs. When your body is well fed and hydrated, you don’t feel hungry all the time.
• We provide supplements that augment your weight loss by working in conjunction with your own body chemistry to keep your metabolism up, your energy levels high, and help your skin tighten as you lose weight.
• We provide three daily snack choices that are carefully chosen to meet your needs for tasty snacks while not compromising the effectiveness of the overall diet.
• We believe this plan will help your body use stored fat from all over your body and therefore you will quickly and safely lose weight. It is about the “chemical burn” rather than the “caloric deficit.”
• This program is going to be ridiculously expensive and worth every penny.

So I signed up. I didn’t buy the farm, I just stuck my toe in the water.

I paid $650 for the coaching that I would receive for the duration of the program. I signed up for a required class on Friday night that I needed to attend before I could purchase the supplements I would need. Then I went home and told Kelley. I told Blair and I told Jamie. And a few others. I was already building my support and accountability network.

Friday night I went to my first fat class. The video went through how the program worked and why all the components mattered. It introduced the various supplements and snacks. I was there with one other couple. When the video was over, they ordered all the stuff they would need for the duration of their plan. I wasn’t ready to do that so I said I would be back Saturday morning to begin the program and I went home for my “last meal.”

I don’t remember what I ate but I did finish off the evening with a bag of Doritos and a tub of French Onion Dip. The leftover Doritos are still on the top of our refrigerator. I never opened them again. I keep them as a totem – Doritos you will NOT win!

Saturday morning I went to fat class. (Right away I named all of my check in times, “fat class.” No pejorative intent, it just helped me face reality.) Sitting next to me in the waiting area was a big African American guy. As I always do, I started a conversation with him. I asked him if he had been doing this for awhile. He got all excited as he told me his story.

He whipped out his phone and showed me his “before” picture when he weighed nearly 600 pounds. He had lost over 150 lbs. in a little over a year. He was so excited! Whenever you weigh in and have lost weight, the consultant will ring a bell. But he wasn’t satisfied with a bell, he made everyone clap too. He said his doctor was amazed at his progress. I can’t remember his name but I’ll never forget his story.

By the time I was ready to leave I spent roughly $1300 I didn’t have for the stuff I would need for the first 10 weeks.

So you don’t have to hunt and peck for this information, here is the tally:

My next 10 week supply cost about $1500, and my last purchase was $725. The program always has something on sale and offers discounts of 20% or 30% at various points along the way. The ludicrous mark up on their products is how they stay in business so I’m willing to play. Basically it has cost me thus far about $4,175 to lose 100 lbs.

Two things about the money. My copayment after a heart attack would be far more than that. And second, God provides. Kelley has been nothing but absolutely supportive that I do this. I got a great Christmas gift from the congregation that jump started things. And as a pastor I sometimes make extra money. This year I have had three funerals and six weddings. All of that helped. Nothing needed to go on to a credit card.

My program start date was Saturday, December 3, 2016. I began at 378.8 lbs.

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At first it was very confusing and even a bit overwhelming. The Quick Weight Loss Center program gives you a list of acceptable foods and portion sizes, broken down between proteins, vegetables, fruits, and starches. I’m expected to drink only one cup of caffeinated coffee in the morning but unlimited decaf. 80 ounces of water per day.

There are supplements that I take before and after each meal. Two tubes of dietary fiber that I stir into my coffee, one in the morning and one in the evening. Two tubes of powder called “Boost” that I mix with water, hot or cold, one mid-morning and one mid-afternoon. And I get three snacks a day from a list that is divided into three types of snacks, one from each type per day.

It took a little getting used to until I recognized the patterns for each day. Those patterns become daily rituals. Together, that provided the direction, effectiveness, and simplicity that I knew I needed.

I get accountability from the center consultants. I went in to their office every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. They weighed me, took my blood pressure, measured my chest and waist weekly, and told me the little adjustments I needed to make to stay on track. Any week that I lost 4 or more pounds put my name up on their scoreboard. Perfect.

My primary support has come from my wife. Kelley has been awesome this whole time. Every Sunday she bakes and perfectly and wonderfully seasons five boneless, skinless, chicken breasts. She cuts them in half and puts them into sandwich bags so I go into each week with ten meals worth of protein. She also boils a bunch of eggs. She gave me two places in the refrigerator to store, at my eyesight, the stuff that I eat.

She has also given me a steady dose of “I’m proud of you”, “You look awesome”, “It is like you are an entirely different person” stuff along the way. This would have been impossible without her.

I also create both support and accountability by talking about this journey as often as possible with everyone I can. I keep in touch with my friend Blair as we have both been working our plans. I tell people what I’m doing. And every conversation becomes one more reason for me to stick to it and not look back. I never want to go back to where this started!

Day after day, I just keep working the plan. Here is what a day has looked like over these past five months:

I get up early enough to do what I need to do in the morning. I dress for walking, make a cup of coffee, mix my fiber into it, and drink that first cup.  I take the pre-breakfast supplements then I go for a walk, roughly 1.5 miles. Plenty of time to think, pray, and feel good about the beginning of a new day.

I get back to the house and then start on the water. I have a 20+ ounce Yeti that I bring everywhere. I drink four of those a day. I eat a hardboiled egg with lots of Morton Lite Salt on it. I need ½ tablespoon of salt a day and it starts with that. The rest of my salt comes on the chicken or the Lowry’s Seasoned Salt that I sprinkle on raw vegetables.

After the egg I ate a bowl of Special K Protein cereal with 8 oz. of milk and a handful of blueberries. There are other approved cereals and fruits on the list but I finally settled on the same thing day after day. I never grew sick of it and I loved every breakfast. Once I got under 300 lbs I changed the breakfast. Now it is an egg, an orange or ½ a grapefruit, and two pieces of Melba toast. I could add certain types of white cheese to that but I haven’t yet.

An egg for protein, Melba toast for starch, 1/2 grapefruit for...yes, fruit. Filling a plate tricks my brain.

I take the post-breakfast supplements and then put my lunch together. I mix the Boost into two 16 oz. bottles of water. I drink one Boost about 10:30 AM and the other about 3:30 PM. I may or may not eat a snack in the mid-morning.

For lunch I often eat ½ a chicken breast, ½ of a cucumber, ½ of a red or green bell pepper, a fruit, and two pieces of Melba toast. The fruit could be a small red delicious apple (the only approved apple on the list), an orange, ½ a grapefruit, pineapple, or some dried prunes. That doesn’t seem like much but here is the trick: CUT FOOD UP!

Ton of food? Actually only 1/2 a chicken breast, 1/2 a cucumber, 1/2 a red bell pepper, and some pineapple.

When I cut everything up and put it on a plate it visually looks like a pile of food. It tricks my brain every single time into thinking that I’m going to have a huge meal. It takes a long time to eat, up to 30 or more minutes, and it provides interesting flavors and textures. I love it.

Another Boost and a snack in the afternoon and then dinner at night. I might put the other half of what I had for lunch in a huge mixing bowl on a huge bed of spinach leaves or spring mix salad, another ½ chicken breast, two pieces of Melba toast crushed up like croutons, one big dollop of lite mayonnaise (to get my one tablespoon of fat in for the day) and some Quick Weight Loss vinaigrette salad dressing. When you cut everything up it again seems like a lot and it takes forever to eat.

I eat this huge salad, basically the other half of lunch on a bed of spinach, with a dollop of lite Mayo. Delicious. Cutting food up is the key to tricking my brain into thinking I'm eating a lot more than I really am. It works.

I’ll eat cooked broccoli or asparagus a couple of times a week. Shrimp on Thursday. Steak night on Friday. Sometimes with half of a small baked potato topped with “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” I’ll eat half of a potato at night and the other half the next day for lunch. You simply cannot believe how Kelley cooks shrimp and steak. We started out going to restaurants for seafood or steak but Kelley’s is so much better that I prefer to stay home to eat. Sometimes we will grill turkey burgers or fish but those are rare occasions. I just like chicken, shrimp, and steak a lot more.

Another sleeve of fiber in a cup of decaf after dinner, usually one more snack after dinner, and then it is time for bed. The downside of this is that I get up several times in the night for the bathroom but the pain of that goes away when I weigh myself first thing in the morning and see the incremental progress that I’m making.

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While I love the challenge of accomplishing big, hairy, audacious goals, I love the little wins on the way. So my first goal was to lose 25 lbs. by Christmas. Maybe I just wanted to fit into my suit. Maybe I was just tired of being an embarrassment to my congregation. Perhaps they would be bringing friends and relatives to worship. I thought, “Who could feel good about a pastor who looked like me?”

We have a guy at church who would badger me every Sunday. He would literally poke me in the stomach. He would tell me about his son who was also overweight. It got to the point where I dreaded seeing him for fear of being reminded of what I would rather deny. (Since I started on this journey he has become a huge cheerleader and source of encouragement to me.)

The bottom line is that I really do believe that following Jesus and seeking God’s direction in our lives is the best way for us to live personally and the most hopeful way of living for the world. But I was abusing God’s good gift of food and I was neglecting the stewardship of my own body. I was ashamed of myself. I’m not saying I NEEDED to feel ashamed of myself…but I did.

Here’s all I know about that. If I continued to feel ashamed, which is a very painful feeling, I would have more cause to end my day with a bowl of ice cream perched on my stomach to numb my painful feelings away. I did that for years. It sucked.

Or I could redirect the energy of my shame in a more positive direction. I could use it as motivation to do what I didn’t want to do – find a way to turn things around. Simply, find a way to lose 25 lbs. by Christmas.

Here I can only give credit to God. God sent enough markers, enough moments, into my life that I was willing to walk, slowly, up the steps to my initial consultation with the folks at fat class.

I weighed 347.6 lbs. on the day after Christmas. I had lost 31.2 lbs. by Christmas! Merry Christmas to me!

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About exercise.

Everything I have read about weight loss says the same thing – losing weight has far more to do with diet, with food choices, with eating the right foods in the right combinations, than exercise. Too much exercise on such a restricted caloric intake can even be harmful. So I have treated exercise as a treat and a reward since I started this.

I try to walk the first thing in the morning at least five days a week. We re-upped our membership at our awesome gym when I started this so I try to go there several times a week. I want to lift weights (nothing heavy and nothing seriously) just one or two times a week. I swim at least one or two times a week. I use the exercise bikes if I didn’t walk that day. When I got down to 330 lbs. I startied trying to play basketball again. It was ugly but I play with a tiny group of old men and none of us are interested in working too hard at it.

Far more important to me than exercise is what happened when I realized how many daily wins I had the opportunity to accumulate. I realized that I could break every day down to a long list of challenges that I could either win or lose. Rather than trying to lift more weights or swim more laps or, heaven forbid, attempt to run again, I just focus on winning the next challenge. Here is my daily list of challenges I could win or lose:

1)    Get up early enough to do what needs to be done.

2)    Drink your fiber coffee and take your pre-breakfast supplements.

3)    Walk.

4)    Eat the right breakfast.

5)    Take your post-breakfast supplements.

6)    Drink your mid-morning Boost.

7)    Take your pre-lunch supplements.

8)    Eat the right lunch. Cut food up!

9)    Take your post-lunch supplements.

10) Do something fun at the gym.

11) Drink your afternoon Boost.

12) Eat your afternoon snack.

13) Take your pre-dinner supplements.

14) Eat the right dinner.

15) Take your after-dinner supplements.

16) Drink another cup of fiber decaf.

17) Eat your evening snack.

18) Get to bed at a reasonable time so you can do it again tomorrow.

Those, for me, are 18 easy wins. I might not get them all done in a day. I might not eat all three snacks. I might not always get to the gym. But every item on my “win list” is easy to do and easy to accomplish. Doing this allowed me to lose 3-4 pounds a week without a long plateau. And on May 10^th I celebrated 100 Day. For two days in a row I weighed 275 lbs. at my gym. I lost over 100 lbs.

But I’m still not at my goal weight.

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Every week along the way I have tried to read at least something about weight loss and maintaining a new body weight. It could easily be discouraging. The vast majority of people who lose a significant amount of weight in a relatively short period of time end up gaining it all back. And more. But as Kelley has often told me, “So what? If 90% of the people gain all of their weight back, who is to say that you can’t be one of the 10%?”

She’s right and I cling to her words!

So even though I am still in the “weight loss” period of my program, I have already started taking steps toward long term maintenance. Here are the steps that I believe are most promising and doable for me.

Stay active!

I’m the guy who couldn’t walk around the block last September. I celebrated 100 Day by walking 1.5 miles before breakfast, playing basketball for an hour at lunch, then playing 18 holes of golf with a friend in the late afternoon. I’m going to keep walking in the morning, keep having fun at the gym, and hopefully at some point adding playing tennis with Kelley and running to train for a marathon with Katie. Those were pipe dreams at 380 lbs. but entirely possible in the 250’s.

Maintain a tiny universe of food options.

That has been key to this journey thus far and I can’t see why I can’t maintain that for the long term. I’m not a foodie. I’m not an adventurous eater. I like simple basic easy to prepare foods. I can eat the same thing again and again and again and never tire of it. Many people who maintain weight loss over years have adopted that diet plan. It makes perfect sense to me.

Have fun keeping score.

For all of my bad habits, I still think it is fun for me to know that I haven’t had a Diet Coke or any other kind of soda since June 19, 2010. That happened quite by accident. I left four unopened 16 oz. Diet Cokes in a hotel room refrigerator at the beginning of a long motorcycle race. After the first day I realized that I didn’t have a Diet Coke that day. After three days I decided to see how long I could go without drinking a soda. Soon it will be seven years.

So I’ve made a list of things that I’m going to not eat, for as long as possible. Most are foods I love. Obviously, foods I loved too much. But none are things I can’t live without. So my game is to see how long I can go without eating:

1)    Cake.

2)    Cookies.

3)    Pizza.

4)    Chips from a bag.

5)    Ice cream.

The amazing thing about this whole experience – which I credit to God because it feels like such a miracle to me – is that I have never been distracted by feeling bad about depriving myself from anything. I have only focused on my daily win list, looking forward always to the next win, the next thing I get to eat, the next thing I have to do.

Alcohol is not allowed on my program. Neither is white bread. I’m not much of a drinker so that hasn’t bothered me at all. The only bread and wine I’ve had is in church on Sundays and I hardly think that is enough to knock me off track. Once I get to my goal weight I won’t worry too much about an occasional glass of wine or a beer but I haven’t missed either thus far.

The “slips” I have had along the way have always been either not eating enough food in a day or over-eating something that is on the plan. Like a whole ribeye instead of four ounces. Or brisket instead of fish (no sauce.) I did eat a platter of fried seafood one night when Kelley and I were driving through Louisiana. I spent the rest of the night feeling like my throat was lined with grease so I don’t think I’ll do that again.

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Can anyone lose a significant amount of weight?

All I can say, from my own personal experience and perspective, (and I speak as a very hard case, a guy who let himself go for nearly 20 years of overeating and inactivity), YES, absolutely ANYONE can lose weight. And those who need to do so can lose a significant amount of weight.

BUT, NO ONE can lose weight simply by WANTING to lose weight any more than paying the monthly fee at my gym got me into better shape. I think EVERYONE needs helps.

I created a little acrostic to remind myself of the help that I continue to need to stay on this journey: Dreams Seem Easy As Steps.

Big, hairy, audacious goals are much more manageable if broken down into tiny bite-sized, repeatable, steps.  Here they are again:

Dreams – Direction. We need direction. We need coaches, people to tell us precisely what we need to do. Then we do it.

Seem – Support. We need teammates. People on the same journey and cheerleaders on the sidelines.

Easy – Effectiveness. We need to do what is effective, what works, what shows results. Going from 378.8 lbs. to 378.7 lbs. doesn’t seem like much unless we expect to celebrate every single ounce as a step in the right direction.

As – Accountability. We need a scoreboard and we need people to hold us accountable. Fat class hasn’t been fun for me at all. I don’t like it when my fudges and missteps are pointed out to me. But I need to hear it. And I need to take direction when it is offered.

Steps – Simplicity. Life is infinitely complex, that’s a given, but try as we might we can’t do everything at once. We can just do one thing at a time. Keeping it simple tames complexity. The seemingly impossible becomes possible. The longest journey begins with a short step, hopefully in the right direction. Keep it simple.

People in all manner of recovery have learned these simple key principles. They work. If you work them. And this week I’m celebrating 100 Day. I have lost over 100 lbs. and I hope to never see them again. I still have more to go and I’m absolutely confident that I will get there. Not today. But I’m one step closer today and that is all I need.

You can do it too!

Celebrating 100 Day! 275 lbs. 38 waist pants. XLT shirt. And I haven't gotten a real haircut all year.