Sreejith Vasanth’s father was competing with people much younger than him in a bodybuilding competition when he was 60. Sreejith was proud. But it also made his own plight, the fact that he’d been putting weight on steadily, more obvious.
The 37-year-old Keralite expat based in Abu Dhabi says he grew up in a healthy household, learning tips about fitness from his father. But when he got married, he confesses, he got a bit lax. He would eat junk food and wouldn’t be regular with his exercise – it all led to him gaining a lot of weight. “One day I saw myself in the mirror and I thought this is not the way I want to be,” he says.
He weighed 95 kilos at the time.
The six-foot-five-inch expat knew he wanted to shed the weight and he knew how; the biggest battle was getting his mind onboard. “Mentally you need to be prepared; fortunately, I had enough control over myself. Sometimes you feel hungry and tempted to drop your diet. But consistency is key to change,” he says.
“Drinking water helped me reduce hunger. And salads at regular intervals helped,” he adds.
And so it began. Every morning, Sreejith would head to the gym at 4am where he’d proceed to work out. He’d finish his routine – an hour of cardio followed by weightlifting – by 7am. Then he’d get on with the rest of his day. “Initially, I did a lot of cardio, running for 40 minutes to an hour. Slowly, I increased my pace and distance,” he adds.
As his body adapted, he says, he became more focused at work, less lethargic. In ten months, the Indian expat had dropped 31kilos. Which is when he started getting concerned stares. He had dropped so much weight that, he says, people had begun to call him sickly.
Once again he drew from his father’s arsenal of knowledge and began to up his weight training and build muscle. Today, he says, he oscillates between 68 and 70 kilos, and is focused on being buff.
His newfound health and positivity has landed him a new job role too. “It’s just a spark of inspiration which can change our mental and physical strength. I consider being mentally strong and consistent the key to my transformation,” he says.
