The Jeff Franco Project - Part I

In late November we were contacted by our friend Jeff Franco.  Quite frankly, Jeff wasn’t particularly happy with how he looked.  He pretty much told us straight out that he’d been lazy and eating junk for at least a couple years.  But now was a time for change.  He contacted us because he’d grown tired of carrying around excess fat around the midsection and because he was sick of not having a beach worthy body in the summer.

Jeff is also an actor.  Given our fascination with fantastic physiques in the movies, it goes without saying that your physical appearance can make or break you at an audition.  You certainly aren’t going to get an action role if you look like George from Seinfeld.

To help Jeff out we decided to offer him something totally different.  We suggested to Jeff that we meet only once monthly to make the entire transformation from flab to fab.  During this process there would be no one-on-one personal exercise instruction.  Instead we’d offer Jeff a 1 hour meeting each month during which we’d assess his progress and make suitable nutrition and supplementation recommendations.  Each month this meeting would be followed with a written exercise program including video clips and photographs of the exercises.  Basically we offered him our Consultation & Training Program.

Here’s the twist.  We asked Jeff if we could document his change in real time so people could see the whole process unfold.  At first we thought he might be a little reluctant but, to our surprise, he jumped right on board.  Jeff’s been at it for a few months now so it’s about time to get this party started.

Here’s what we did:

Month 1 – Habit Formation

The biggest focus of the first month of our program was to establish habits that would help Jeff maintain his fantastic new physique in the future.  This month usually isn’t marked by any striking amount of weight loss and with Jeff starting the program heading into December it is probably good that the diet wasn’t too strict.  The key here was to give Jeff some easy to follow rules that he could accomplish without fail.  Success breeds confidence and once this is established early on the rest of the lifestyle change goes like clockwork.

Some programs don’t incorporate this phase and this is why so many people experience the “soon ripe soon rotten phenomenon”.  They get to where they wanted to be with lightening speed (soon ripe), but don’t have the lifestyle habits ingrained and return to where they started equally as fast (soon rotten).

We should note that Jeff did not have to leave his home to exercise at all this month.

Month 2 – Fat Loss Kick Start

With the lifestyle habits ingrained and the month of December over the main priority of this month was to create a brief surge of exceptionally rapid fat loss to get Jeff motivated.  After a month of forming habits and accomplishing every simple task we set out for him you can bet that Jeff was confident and ready to kick this plan into high gear.

During this entire month Jeff never went to the gym and never touched a weight in his own home.  He even got to spend several whole days eating whatever he wanted.

Month 3 – Muscle Recovery

One of the things we noticed in this month’s assessment was that although Jeff was losing fat, he was also starting to lose a little muscle as well.  Given that Jeff wants to have a beach worthy body we put a plan into action to continue the fat loss without sacrificing any more valuable muscle.

During this month we made some specific supplement recommendations to improve Jeff’s muscle maintenance and had Jeff start exercising in his own home with some of the small weight equipment he had sitting around.

So Where’s Jeff at Now?

Here’s the 3 Month Results

Starting Weight: 198
Current Weight: 183
Total Lost: 15lbs

Starting Body Fat Percentage: 17.5
Current Body Fat Percentage: 14.6
Total Lost: 2.9 Percent

Starting Waist Measurement: 42.75 inches
Current Waist Measurement: 38.75 inches
Total Lost: 4 inches

What’s Coming Up?

This month we suggested that it was time for Jeff to take the leap and join a gym.  With our program in hand we can only anticipate more good things for Jeff.  We promised him he’d be ripped for summer so we’d better be right.

Keep an eye out for future updates on this series as we document the entire change from dud to stud.  Stay tuned for our next installment to view Jeff’s follow up pictures.

3 comments March 14th, 2007