Struggling with obesity as a hardcore gamer

Introduction

A lot of friends and acquaintances contacted me over the last few months to ask me the same question: “How did you do it?”. They want to know how I transformed from 140 kg and totally untrained to 80 kg with a decent physique. I could say it wasn’t easy, but the truth is different. It was actually the most boring thing I did so far in my life. If I had known how little effort it takes to maintain such a body, I would’ve been shredded decades ago. Many people struggle with weight. The media suggests we have to live healthy, workout and do this and that. I am not here to tell you what to do and I am not here to judge your body. The only thing I want to accomplish with this blog post is sharing my story. If I tell you that I haven’t seen the inside of a gym yet, because I am too intimidated by everyone else there, you might laugh about me. But it is the truth and I will list every little detail that led to this transformation. Perhaps someone finds some parallels to his own life and gets inspired to change.

“By definition I wasn’t just obese, I was morbidly obese.”

First let me clarify something. In the headline you can read “obesity” and “hardcore gamer”. Obesity can be defined by a BMI (Body mass index) above 30. The formula is weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. Don’t worry, there are BMI calculators all over the internet. I am 185 cm or 6’1 tall and with a body weight of 140 kg or almost 310 lbs, my BMI was even above 40. By definition I wasn’t just obese, I was morbidly obese.

Hardcore gamer has no real definition, but I think most people would agree that someone who plays video games for 16 hours each day over years, is considered hardcore. I dropped out of college twice and I couldn’t hold on to any job, because I was too busy playing World of Warcraft. The last time I checked my playtime, it was over 60,000 hours and this was before World of Warcraft Classic got released back in August 2019. Add a Scarab Lord and a Rank 14 to this, which required insane preparation and sleepless nights for weeks, additionally all classes on max level in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and you can add a few thousand hours on top. I don’t play that much anymore, but when I play, I want to accomplish something and it doesn’t matter if it is in League of Legends, Diablo, World of Warcraft or Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. I probably still spend 40-50 hours per week at my computer and at least half of it is for gaming, the other half for researching and content creation, whatever that means these days.

Harsh reality and wrong approaches

When I look back, my weight struggle wasn’t there from the beginning. As a kid I was in a pretty good shape and very active. I think the first real hit I took when my grandaunt died back in February 1993. I stopped being active and spent most of my available time in video games. Playing video games always worked as an escape mechanism for me to hide from responsibilities in reality. When I became too heavy, I hungered myself down to a decent weight, just to fold under the pressure at one point and put even more weight on afterwards. Today looking back at this behavior, I can only shake my head. Like most people, I didn’t understand how the body works. That’s why I went up and down in weight a lot, because I only checked the scale instead of looking into the mirror and even more importantly, listen to my inner voice. Being comfortable and at peace with my innerself is something that took time.

“Having a decent physique was a game I couldn’t figure out.”

If you struggle with weight, then I am sure you experienced guilt when eating. I felt a lot of guilt. During school I was obese, felt hungry all the time and my parents told me to not eat that much. This was a recipe for disaster. I say it again. I felt hungry almost all the time, got told to eat less and was totally overweight. You can’t imagine the psychological pressure. Having a decent physique was a game I couldn’t figure out.

“I wasn’t aware how much I actually have to eat and how little I have to train.”

In November 1999, my grandmother died. Another big knockdown in my life. Instead of eating a lot and playing more video games, I compensated with push-ups. I reached a point where I could do over 150 push-ups in a row and did way above 1000 each day for a couple of weeks. But guess what, my physique still looked terrible. I did also a lot of cycling back then and trained twice per week in a sports club. The results were always disappointing. Training like a maniac, I looked at other teenagers of my age and couldn’t understand why they were so much more defined. Even during military, when I was in the shape of my life, I couldn’t reach the look I have now. I wasn’t aware how much I actually have to eat and how little I have to train.

Image: Detailed striations in the shoulder. I love it!

The Turning Point

From 2010 to 2022 my weight was almost constantly somewhere between 110-130 kg. I peaked at 140 kg in March 2022 and then something happened. I discovered someone over the internet and fell in love immediately. This love wasn’t returned as far as I know, but it was the beginning of my transformation. I became sick immediately, and to this day I am not sure if it was Covid-19 or just a really bad cold. I believe, this was my immune system kicking in, telling me to get healthy for this woman. It was so bad, that I contacted a friend and told him, if I’m not gonna make it he can have my World of Warcraft account. He replied, I sound like an old man in his last breath. I’ve spent 8 days in bed and made the first step into a good physique. I changed from soft drinks to water. My idea was to have a six pack by August 2022. Little did I know how massive the steel kettle around my belly already was.

“I think a lot of people have this psychological barrier, where the fear is just bigger than the hunger for results.”

For decades I have told myself to train and to get in shape, but never started. I think a lot of people have this psychological barrier, where the fear is just bigger than the hunger for results. Fear to do something wrong, fear to fail, fear to give up, fear to not see any results, no matter how hard they try. I was in the same situation and I am thankful that on 24th March 2022, my life got kicked into a different direction. A Turning Point, an event that makes it inevitable to go this path helps a lot, and if you haven’t experienced one it might be a lot harder to find the motivation to start and keep doing this transformation you dream about. But even without such a Turning Point, let me tell you this: It is way easier than you might think! You can eat more, you only have to train a little, you will sleep better and you approach crisis calmly. At least for me it works this way. Before, I had many sleepless nights and tried to force myself to sleep, just to be awake until I had an appointment or had to go to work, and right at this time I fell to sleep and slept like a stone. I gave up on my duties and responsibilities and suddenly I could sleep. Now is different, I can stay awake for longer hours, fall to sleep immediately and I wake up before the alarm rings. It is very surprising, but everything works for me now and I have to say it again. It is easier than you think!

My Step by Step Plan

Having a good looking physique is based on 4 pillars and I had to master all of them. The name of these 4 pillars are water, nutrition, rest and workout. I would keep them in this order to give you an overview about the priority. For me it took 20 months to accomplish a six pack and striations everywhere. But only a few people know that I started with workout in May 2023, 14 months after I began my transformation. I wanted to do it step by step to experience the results of every little change. I strongly believe, for most of you it will be the best approach too.

“Don’t worry about the correct workout or the nutrition before you got used to water.”

Step 1: Water

Don’t worry about the correct workout or the nutrition before you got used to water. It is hard to tell how much water you should drink. I started out with around 4 liters per day which is 1.06 gallons. Now, I still drink around 3 liters or 0.79 gallons. Don’t feel bad to drink a lot of water. It cleans your body from the inside and boosts your metabolism. It also leads your body to store less water. With this change to water, I reduced my weight to around 110 kg within the first few months, without changing anything else. I lost between 2 – 4 kg per month.

“I had a tower of empty pizza boxes that reached from the floor of my apartment to the ceiling.”

Step 2: Nutrition

The next step is nutrition. It was time to remove fast food from the menu, something that can be really hard as a hardcore gamer. During my Scarab Lord and Rank 14 grind in World of Warcraft Classic, I ordered pizza almost every day. I had a tower of empty pizza boxes that reached from the floor of my apartment to the ceiling. The second tower of empty pizza boxes next to the first one was almost my height tall when it collapsed. Then we also have “Döner Kebab” here in Germany which is the number one fast food. There were Sundays, when I ate three of them back to back, just because super markets are closed on Sundays and I failed to buy anything in advance. A lot of you are probably in the same situation right now. But with a bit of planning you will never fall into this trap anymore.

For me the goal was to eat 2 g protein per kilogram of bodyweight. So in my example right now with around 80 kg of bodyweight, I want to consume 150-200 g of protein each day. First this sounds easy and for the first days you will think yeah this isn’t hard. But if you have to do this every single day, you will realize how much you actually have to eat. Protein in form of chicken and fish is also pretty expensive. Fortunately, here in Germany we have “Magerquark” which is lowfat quark. 500 g Magerquark have almost 70 g of protein for only 1.35 €. I eat the entire thing mixed with water and a sliced apple or a sliced banana for breakfast and another one after workout. This is an entire bowl of food, which fills the stomach for quite a while. Especially, when I drink a lot of water too. Get used to Magerquark! It is something like a cheat code when it comes to your body.

Image: My breakfast and post-workout meal, a bowl of Magerquark with sliced fruits.

Before every workout, I try to eat a lot of carbs to have the required energy. My standard meal are 150 g rice, 500 g frozen vegetables and 300 g chicken or fish. I put all of it into the rice cooker and fill it up with a bit of water and some seasoning. This one-pot meal takes less than 2 minutes in preparation and I don’t really have to watch anything. For this little amount of effort I get something really delicious which is also easy to consume. I wouldn’t cook like this for my girlfriend, family or friends. But for me personally this is alright. It gives me more time to do something useful, like writing this blog post. I try to eat this around one and a half to two hours before workout. Immediately after workout, I take a shower and eat the meal I described earlier.

If I feel really hungry, I eat some raw nuts. They have a lot of fat but they also fill your stomach like crazy. I chew a few, keep them in the mouth and put a few more in. This way your mouth becomes really filled and you are busy chewing for a while, similar to putting more and more chewing gum into your mouth. Once you have enough and swallow it down it feels like you have eaten an entire meal, when it was just a few nuts.

Image: Fish, rice and vegetables cooked in a rice cooker.

To keep it more interesting I also eat tuna salad with iceberg lettuce, kidney beans, cucumber and a bit light shepherd’s cheese. I don’t use any dressing. Dark rye bread with a little butter and light cheese or “Lachsschinken” is also great. Lachsschinken is dry-cured and cold-smoked ham and all of these things are pretty popular in Germany and also relatively cheap. You see, no fancy stuff. For me it is important how I look in the mirror and not how good the food looks. I also buy the cheapest apples and the cheapest bananas. The only exception I make are eggs. Here I buy the more expensive ones. Not for ethical reasons, but for the highly increased quality and taste.

I don’t count any calories. I only look into the mirror and see how my body looks after a couple of weeks. I know exactly what I eat, because it is every week the same. If I feel like I am too skinny or lost a lot of volume in my muscles, I just eat an extra meal or add 50g of rice each day. If I feel like my abs are washed out again, I reduce the carbs and fat a little bit. But this didn’t happen yet. I still feel like I am not eating enough for the physique I want to accomplish. My goal is something around 85 to 90 kg of weight with razor-sharp abs and right now I am at 80 kg with abs and striations. Building muscles takes time!

“Your goal is to add enough layers of muscles that your body burns fat while you do nothing.”

Step 3: Rest

Alright, this is probably one of the most underrated steps. As mentioned already with the nutrition, guilt can be a huge factor, and this guilt can also apply when you start resting. At least it did apply for me. I thought, I have to workout hard and non-stop to be in a decent shape. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Most people think that the workout will bring them into shape. Then others say, muscles can only grow when you rest. I want to visualize it a bit differently to make it easier to understand. Imagine your body as a racing car and you are about to tune it. If it has 50 hp, it will be really hard to compete on a racing track. Even if you go full throttle, you won’t drive fast. After a couple of weeks you put in a new engine. Suddenly, you feel your car goes faster, but you lose traction in the corners. You add better tires and improve the aerodynamics. Over time your car turns into a super racing car that drives very fast without even trying. You don’t have to go full throttle anymore to outperform your first version. I think this summarizes it best. Your goal is to add enough layers of muscles that your body burns fat while you do nothing.

Another factor is enough sleep, and I don’t talk about hours. It doesn’t mean anything to lie in bed and waste the entire day. I am talking about quality sleep. For me sleep was always an issue. I was in bed worrying about the next day. Since I have changed my diet and started working out, falling to sleep within minutes is no big deal anymore. Sometimes, my mind is still too busy thinking about stuff. Then I simply skip sleep and go on. I don’t even think about it anymore, I have no worries. I just go. Perhaps this is still related to the things I have written in the previous chapter about the Turning Point. But what I know is, that this kind of energy is new to me and I totally love it!

“Suddenly my fat was melting and veins were popping everywhere.”

Step 4: Workout

The goal is to put on muscles. From following bodybuilding on YouTube for the last 10 years, I already knew that this is accomplished with split training. It means that you only train certain muscles per workout. So I gave it a try, took my cheap dumbbells and started with biceps curls. I finished 3 sets of 10 reps with 10 kg or 22 lbs in each hand. The form was not really good and I was more or less swinging the weights in the end. Nevertheless, the muscle ache was so bad, I couldn’t make my arms straight for the next 2-3 days. At this point I knew, I was totally untrained and it will take a lot of time to get used to the workout. On the other hand I was happy, because it only took me 10 minutes to finish these 3 sets.

I searched on YouTube for dumbbell exercises, specifically for shoulders, chest, back and legs. In the beginning I kept the amount of sets low and rarely trained up to 20 minutes. Since I started working out, my ideal week looks like this:

• Monday: Biceps

• Tuesday: Shoulders + Triceps

• Wednesday: Chest

• Thursday: Back

• Friday: Legs

You definitely want to do legs on a Friday or Saturday, because the muscle ache comes with 24 hours delay and if you do it right, you will have huge problems walking downstairs or doing a squat motion even without weights. When you have to do this at work a lot, you don’t want to be handicapped by a leg workout early during the week.

What really made the workout enjoyable for me is its simplicity. You only have to focus on one part of your body per workout. This gives also some variety over the course of a week and keeps it fun. It is very straight forward and your brain can handle it easier. You are not overwhelmed by thinking, oh I have to train hours now. My amount of sets and reps went up a lot, but I still train only up to 4-5 hours per week and often drop back or leg workout. This is how my workout looks these days after training for almost 10 months:

• Biceps: 10 sets

• Shoulders: 23 sets (2×5 front, 7 side, 6 back) + Triceps: 6 sets

• Chest: 18 sets (7 lower, 7 upper, 4 side)

• Back: 18 sets (7 upper, 7 lower, 4 side)

• Legs: 20 sets (5 glutes + hamstrings, 5+10 quads)

I use my favorite exercises that don’t cause any pain and I stick to 15-40 reps with an average of 20-30 reps. Don’t focus on reps too much, instead try to make your muscle tired enough that you have real problems finishing another rep. This can be done by reducing time between sets or for squats not doing any break when you are up. Have fun, get a feeling for your muscles and don’t think too much about doing anything wrong. If you are doing something wrong with dumbbells in the beginning, you train other muscles of your body. Sooner or later you will get a feeling for your muscles and how to isolate them more and more.

My dumbbells go up to 15 kg or 33 lbs, but for a lot of exercises I still use only 10 kg. So don’t be too focused on weight, sets or reps. If you exhaust your muscle and the overall amount of weight you move goes up over time, you are doing it right! The goal is to destroy your muscle during workout and then give it a week of rest to rebuild.

After 10 weeks I could already see the first row of belly muscles, but the progress was slow in the beginning. It went really crazy after like 6 months, when I had build up a lot of muscles already. Suddenly my fat was melting and veins were popping everywhere. Patience and consistency made this possible.

A few words about stretching. You should always stretch before the training and never after! I repeat, DO NOT stretch immediately after workout, because it can cause injuries. Stretching though is important. I trained my calves on Mondays too, until I had a tendonitis in my foot. I couldn’t walk for 2 weeks. Since then I dropped calves from my workout plan and do stretching regulary to make my tendons more flexible.

Image: My cheap set of dumbbells, they go up to 15 kg or 33 lbs each.

“For me, surgery was never an option. I knew right from the beginning, no matter how bad it gets, I will live with the results.”

Problem: Loose Skin

We all want to look great in the eyes of others. But let’s be real, perfection is boring. Only the little imperfections separate us from the rest and make us unique eventually. Be it with facial features, character flaws or hanging skin. If you have scars on your body, they tell a story, sometimes a great one. I treat my loose skin the same way. For me, surgery was never an option. I knew right from the beginning, no matter how bad it gets, I will live with the results.

Nevertheless, I took my time to transform. And I think this is the main reason my skin still looks relatively great after losing 60 kg or 130 lbs. My experience is also that eating fat in form of raw nuts and butter makes the surface of the skin a bit smoother, which is good. The skin has more flexibility and can adjust. Drinking a lot of water also helps.

If you deal with such an amount of weight loss or even more ahead of you, then you will have loose skin sooner or later. So don’t be afraid and simply see the other positive effects a transformation to a decent physique will give you. Nobody sees your hanging nipples or hanging belly skin under a T-Shirt and no sane person would ever judge you by it, actually most are impressed about your discipline and efforts. So don’t worry!

Image: My shape after training for 7-8 months with visible loose skin. Still have to figure out how to shave my back properly.

Final Thoughts

After decades of being obese, I finally managed to take full control over my body. This process was easier than I thought and I hope this blog post inspired a few of you. People always tell you it takes so much discipline, but for me it was like heaven. I can eat more than before, I sleep better than before, I look better than before, I have more energy than before, I get more done than before, the list goes on and on. I was used to sitting in the tram, and even when it was totally overfilled, nobody wanted to sit next to me. These days, good looking women take the seat next to me even when half the tram is empty. I am not used to this. During summer, I often went out for a walk and almost every woman was seeking eye-contact with me, even when they were walking with their boyfriend. Perhaps this is mainly because I am such a strong presence when I walk and I am sure, the weightloss gave me a lot more confidence. But this is also totally new to me and something I am not used to. I was always too ashamed to go to the beach, because of my overweight. Now, with abs and striations everywhere, summer can’t come fast enough. There is no more shame to be outside without wearing a T-Shirt.

Once you understand what it takes and got used to it, this is the easiest ride ever. I hope you enjoyed this blog post, see you in the next one! Bye Bye!