Losing a significant amount of your body weight is no easy feat, let alone losing 164 pounds in 10 months, which is what Kevin Hennessy was able to do.
Hennessy's start weight was 320 pounds, and he had a 52-inch waist. Hennessey says that the weight just crept up on him over the years: One day he just woke up and was too big for a seat on an airplane. "I'd drink up to 20 triple cream double sugar coffees a day, food for me meant going through a drive through, then I'd drink quite a lot of alcohol so that I could sleep every night, only to get up and start again the next day," he says.
The decision to get healthy was a sudden one. "I came home from work late one night, and my 13-year-old daughter was still up. I asked her why she wasn't in bed, and she said that she couldn't sleep because she was worried that I was going to die. She told me that she had heard of so many people having heart attacks because they were fat, and she was scared. That was the turning point for me, I knew I wanted to be around to watch her grow up," says Hennessey, "It was like a switch went off in my head and from that moment I was done, I started eating right and looking after my body."
Once Hennessy started his weight-loss journey, he watched X-Weighted whenever he could. "It was very motivating, because Paul Plakas was on there helping people like me. It would give me strength; I saw where others failed just like when I failed. When I binged, it made me get up and start again the next day," he says "I learned through Paul that you just put your foot forward and you keep going."
At the beginning, working out was not easy for Hennessy, "When I first started I could do about 2 1/2 minutes on the treadmill, and then I would spend 15 minutes in the pool - that was about as much as I could manage," he says. Over time, he got much fitter and he was working out for an average of 2 1/2 hours a day. "There were a lot of hard things about being fat and working out at the gym. One day I got stuck in a piece of equipment," he says, "then there were the occasional rude comments from people and people staring at me when I was working out."
There were periods in his journey where Hennessy's weight loss was fast, at one point he lost 18 pounds over 14 days, but he also had his fair share of plateaus. "Sometimes I wouldn't lose weight for a couple of weeks, but through watching the show and talking to other people I was expecting that to happen. You just keep pushing it, I changed up my exercise routine and soon started losing weight again," he says.
The transformation that Hennessy affected was incredible. He went from clothes that were a size 5XL being too tight, and having trouble finding clothes that would fit, to having the opposite problem - now he is so slim that he has to shop in completely different stores.
His friends are amazed at how much has changed. "I've run into friends that haven't seen me in a year, and they didn't know who I was," he says, "Until they heard me talking they had no idea it was me."
To those that are starting their own journey towards fitness, Hennessy has this advice: "If you fall off the cart, don't beat yourself up over it. Just get up in the morning and start over again. We are going to fail, the secret is not to get so depressed about it that you give up, because you can't give up."
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