Before my journey, I was a very depressed person, I never went out," he says. "I didn't want to talk to anybody. My dating life was nonexistent because I didn't think anybody would ever want to be with me. I wasn't living a quality life. I wasn't even living life, really."
Chris goes on to explain how growing up in the foster system and constantly moving around from place to place meant that for a long time, he "felt alone in the world." When he was first taken in by Janice, the woman who would later adopt him, Chris was 10 years old and already weighed 85kg. "He was a round little guy," Janice says in the video.
Turning to food as a way to deal with his feelings of depression and loneliness, Chris weighed 160kg by the time he was an adult. And that weight gain would have continued, if it hadn't been for a wake-up call over his health.
"Obesity ran in my family, heart disease ran in my family. They told me that if I didn't get my weight under control that I was just going to die young," says Chris. "I remember looking in the mirror one day and everything around me was just falling apart. And I had nothing going for me except a heart attack at a young age. It just clicked in my head. And from that point on, I really just changed my entire life."
He started working with personal trainer Shaun, throwing himself into cardio every mornings and then coming back to the gym to work out every evening. Two years later, he has lost a staggering 80kg—literally half his starting weight.
"To get what Chris has done takes a whole lot of effort," says Shaun. "He's doing what 99.99 per cent of people couldn't do. He's in here, he's dedicated to how he eats, he's dedicated to how he works out. He's done remarkable things, he really has."
Along with all of the positive results come what Chris calls the "hard truth of weight loss": loose excess skin. But he is undeterred. While before he used to hate looking in the mirror because he didn't like what he saw, he says that's all changed: "Now I see progress. I see goals. I see what I want out of life."
This article originally appeared on Men's Health