Aaron Lohman, NYPD officer, was set to keep New Yorkers safe every day but the only person he couldn’t cope with was himself.
“I didn’t look at getting healthy as a priority,” he told MensHealth. As a result, it caused the NYPD officer pack nearly 140 pounds onto his six-foot-four frame. At his heaviest, he weighed 425 pounds.
Father of two made several attempts to lose weight going through various diets. But of all, that was in vain. “I would go and reduce my calorie intake by a ridiculous amount, to like, 1200 calories,” Lohman says.
Once, his diet sitting came out of control as he started eating whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted — in spite of several health scares and a family history of diabetes.
On one occasion, Lohman and his former gang team served a search warrant at a fifth-story walk-up apartment. Thus he had to climb the five flights of stairs. In the end, he was so out of breath. He was actually dizzy. “I thought I was going to die,” Lohman says. But still, he brushed it off: “We went out and celebrated afterwards with ice cream and pizza.”
The turning point finally came one night in December 2015: “I woke up in a cold sweat. I’d just had a nightmare about fighting a criminal on the roof of a building, and I was so out of shape I was overcome and thrown from the building,” Lohman recalls.
“On the way down, all I could think of was my daughter growing up without me. Even though it was a dream, it got real for me at that point.”
That was the day Lohman determined to get serious about his health. Now Aaron understood he had to make his health a priority. What is more, to use more sustainable approaches than he had tried in his previous weight-loss attempts.
“I definitely struggled at first, especially with overeating,” he says. But as the time went through, he got to know how to keep his eating clear and how to count calories. He used Fitness app to track his meals, what has helped him to to develop healthy habits like cooking his own food, bringing meals to work, and allowing himself one cheat meal every week.
At the same time, Lohman brings cardio training into his routine. He bought a bicycle and started to perform an eight-mile round-trip three days per week. Then, after five months of regular cardio and food tracking, he tacked on three days of strength work out.
As a result, he has lost a whopping 124 pounds of fat since starting his weight-loss journey two years ago.
“I don’t give myself a choice, I just do it,” he says. When work or family commitments conflict with his workout, he merely shifts the exercise session to his planned rest day.
“My home screen image is a picture of me when I was at my heaviest,” Lohman says. “It’s just a constant reminder of, ‘Yo, do you really want to go back there? Is this the direction you want to take?’” he explains.
For those unwilling to start their own weight-loss journey, Lohman offers this: “What I’ve learned throughout this whole thing is that it just takes practice. My advice is just to start. The time is never going to be perfect and if you want to do it, you absolutely can.”
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