The first thing my trainer, Natali, said to me was, "You're not here to lose weight. You're here to build a body that can carry your life." I didn't fully understand what she meant. I was officially obese at 232 pounds. Now 65 years old, I had spent the better part of three decades making peace with my reflection in the mirror — or pretending to.
It was a Monday in February when I walked into the Built4This training gym. Not a New Year's resolution exactly, more of a quiet reckoning. I got winded during brisk walks. And I could no longer play a meaningful role in my favorite sports. Something had to change, and I was finally ready to admit I couldn't outthink my way to health.
Natali Medlen, owner of Built4This Personal Training based at Onyx Gym on Swan Road and Fort Lowell, put together a program from scratch that included weight lifting, cardio, and a proper meal plan. Three days a week, lifting. Two days of walking. She watched my form like a hawk and corrected me constantly — "spine neutral, brace your core, shoulders back, drive through your heels."
The first year, I got stronger. Measurably, undeniably a little stronger. I could feel it in the way I moved through the world — less effort on stairs, less strain carrying groceries. My posture improved. My sleep deepened. I added muscle I could see in my shoulders and arms. Natali would show me my progress charts, numbers trending in the right direction on every metric.
Except for the scale. 232 pounds at the start. 231 at month three. 233 at month six. 230 at month twelve. The needle wobbled but refused to drop. I wasn't discouraged — I was warned that this might happen — but I wasn't naive either. I had a goal, but the scale stared back at me. Blankly. No movement.
Year two brought more of the same pattern. I got better at lifting. My resting heart rate dropped. We added an extra training day and bumped up my protein intake. But I still weighed, give or take, a few pounds more or less than when I walked through the door a year before.
My doctor offered a simple explanation: some bodies are very good at holding onto weight. Mine, apparently, was exceptional at it. Exercise was doing everything it was supposed to do — building muscle, improving cardiovascular health, reducing inflammation — but fat loss requires a caloric deficit that my particular physiology was masterful at resisting. My hunger hormones, she explained, were working against me. When I burned calories, my body responded by demanding more of them right back.
Meanwhile, one of the trainers, John Mattern, early on identified some tough spots, damage, in the rotator cuffs. It had been a source of blinding pain for years. His workout plan for that was a slow, steady rebuild of the smaller shoulder muscles.
NATALI INSERT
By year three, I had accepted this reality without surrendering to it. I kept lifting. I kept showing up. I was the healthiest heavy person most people had ever met. Stronger, fit, metabolically sound — and still 232 pounds. Then Robin Glicksman, a friend and business associate, mentioned tirzepatide.
It was a conversation I'd been resistant to for a long time. Weight-loss medication felt like an admission of failure, which I now recognize as a deeply unfair way to think about medicine. We don't shame people for taking blood pressure medication. We don't call insulin a shortcut. But I had internalized a story that said the body you have is a reflection of your willpower, and accepting pharmaceutical help meant the story ended badly for me.
Robin, owner of BB Beauty med spa, said I was stuck in a mind game. I let go of that story. It wasn't serving me.
Still a couple of reservations. Like the guy on YouTube saying that "everyone who takes these shots will be dead in five years." Well, that's not true.
I started the injections with Robin in February of the fourth year. Weekly doses increased slowly. The most immediate effect was a strange quieting of the noise I hadn't known was constant—the low hum of hunger that ran beneath every waking hour. It didn't disappear. It just... lowered. I ate less because I wanted less. For the first time in my adult life, I left food on my plate without feeling deprived.
NATALI INSERT 2
There were some rough patches early on. The medication slows your digestive system. Waaaay slow. This led to a couple of days of moderate to intense gut pain at the start, but today my body has adapted, and there are no side effects.
The scale began to move.
Not dramatically at first. Three pounds in a month, then five, then the numbers started accumulating like interest. Natali noticed before I did — the way my shoulders looked broader because there was less surrounding them. The way my shirts fit differently. We adjusted the program to protect the muscle we'd spent three years building, leaning into what my body finally had the space to do.
Over at the Onyx gym, I was dubbed "the incredible shrinking man."
By December, a year after I started injecting myself, I stepped on the scale... I had reached my target weight of 180 pounds. Fifty-two pounds. Gone. So now, the dosage is being slowly reduced as we search for a stable, managed base weight.
At the start of my medication, Robin ran a full-body 3D Styku body scan of my fat and lean muscle. Then, a year later, we ran the scan again. At the start, my fat mass was 75.3 pounds (!!!), and it was now 65.4 pounds. My waist dropped from 42.6" to 39.3".
But many muscle groups were also losing excess weight as the fat melted away. And with less fat in and around my muscles, the size of my arms and legs actually dropped, while looking a little more toned. My biceps went from 14.1" to 12.4". My calves dropped from 17.8" to 14.7" and my chest dropped from 45.9" to 41.6".
ROBIN INSERT
I think about Natili's words a lot now. We're not here to lose weight. We're here to build a body that can carry your life. She was right, in a way she couldn't have entirely predicted. The three years of training built the foundation — the muscle, the discipline, the understanding of my own body. The medication unlocked the door and reminded me that the foundation was always meant to carry me forward.
It wasn't one thing. It was never going to be one thing. That's the part they don't put on the posters or talk about in the commercials.