Team Beachbody ¡preestreno!Español Guest

About two years ago at 45 years of age, I decided to try and lose some weight. Like so many people out there, I had let my career obligations take control of my life. I had become so obsessed with what I do for a living that I had forgotten what I stay alive for. My single-mindedness created a distance between me and my family and my standards of well being slowly deteriorated as well. I had gradually gotten heavy, although I didn't realize just how out of shape I was. I began using some well-known diet products and in a year’s time, I had gone from 215 to 185 pounds. Unfortunately, I eventually regained all of the weight I had lost.

I had seen the P90X infomercial a few times and it struck a chord. I found myself looking for it all the time and making my wife watch it with me. She finally demanded that I stop making her watch it and just order it. I placed the order and made a decision to not just lose some weight, but to get in shape, to get ripped, to feel comfortable taking my shirt off at the beach.

As soon as I started the program, I was hooked. I quickly realized that if you buy into the workouts, the diet and Tony Horton's philosophies, all of those insane results on the infomercial are actually typical.

Sometimes the decisions we make, good or bad, are just the tip of the iceberg; eventually, the ramifications of our choices reveal themselves. My seventeen-year-old son Matthew took notice of my P90X routine, and before long, he began training with me as well. Although we have always had a good relationship, in seventeen years of fatherhood, I had never found an interest about which Matthew and I were both equally passionate. Matthew has also lost a lot of weight and has become extremely fit. He even used his experience with P90X as the theme for his college entrance essay, and it worked. This summer, he will begin classes at the University of Florida, my alma mater.

I started out just wanting to look good in the mirror, but I have done far more than change the way I look. I’ve lowered my weight from 215 to 150 pounds; my body fat has dropped from 25 to 7 percent; my waist has slimmed from 38 to 29 inches; and I no longer require expensive cholesterol medicine. At 47, I no longer feel over-the-hill, and I am proud to say that my son and I have forged a special bond. We are closer than ever as our relationship has taken on more of a brothers-in-arms quality rather than that of father and son. It is something we will always share and something that very few fathers and sons are lucky enough to find. I set out to change the way I look, but in the final analysis, I changed the way I live.