Who: Sam Shane
City: Sherwood Park, Alta
Age: 42
By The Numbers: 308 pounds at my heaviest, currently at 197 pounds, for a total weight loss of 111 pounds.
The Weight Gain: I was a scrawny skinny string bean of a kid. I started gaining weight in my mid-twenties. I was eating away emotional pain and went from manual labour to working in a bank due to injuries form a car accident.
Sam Shane Siemens before.
At this point, I had tried the grapefruit diet, the starvation diet, the no-carb diet — you name it, I tried it.
Final Straw: I was buying ugly slip-on shoes and realized I was buying them because tying shoe laces was difficult and exhausting. Later that month, I was at a specialist to discuss diabetes medicine and when I brought up losing weight, the doctor waived his hand dismissively and sarcastically said, “No one actually does [lose weight] you know.”
I was getting tired of being referred to in conversation as “Hey, big guy.” Tired of being offered “fries” as the side dish by servers automatically. And the list goes on.
"Food is energy, you can’t create energy from nothing — it boils down to the amount of calories in and the amount out."
Story continues below.
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