ABU DHABI // Samer Al Saleh has turned his life around by losing 40 kilograms in the past year, taking his weight to 102kg.
Now his personal trainer, who also owns the gym where Mr Al Saleh works out, said he would give his client a free lifetime membership if he shed an extra 10kg.
Mr Al Saleh, 28, a Lebanese expatriate, has struggled with weight issues from an early age.
Having been told by his family that “chubby is healthy”, Mr Al Saleh developed a love of food when he was a child.
He weighed 65kg by the time he was in the sixth grade and 103kg when he was in secondary school.
“Then, my father supported my need to lose weight. He said ‘for every kilo you lose, I will give you Dh100’,” Mr Al Saleh said.
He took up playing basketball and other sports, and within two years he had trimmed down considerably.
“I started eating the right stuff and I went to 78kg. I could wear regular clothes again,” he said.
“Before, everything I had to buy was from the adult section and I always looked weird. Even my personality changed after the weight loss, I was more happy, more confident.”
However, when he began university he slipped back into his bad eating habits and the pounds piled on once more.
“It went downhill from university. Being an engineering student, I spent a lot of time in the lab and we were always ordering in.
“There were a lot of junk food options and that created the perfect recipe to make a fat kid.
“We had low awareness of diseases and they were not pushing you to be healthy,” he said.
“Every year, I would gain about 10kg. I was not fit and even though I enjoyed basketball, I could not play a full game.”
When he graduated from university and started his career, Mr Al Saleh said his weight gain was “exponential” because he had to remain at his desk for almost 10 hours a day.
“That is when I reached my record weight of 142kg,” he said.
Mr Al Saleh also had personal issues that led him to eat comfort food, which added to his weight gain. He said his lifestyle at the time was getting “out of control”.
Friends tried encouraging him to go to the gym, but working out held little appeal. It was not until a trip to the Sega Republic amusement centre in Dubai Mall that he was motivated to change his life.
“I was playing the punching game and got a lot of tokens, and that is when I decided to go for kick-boxing,” he said.
On October 1 last year, he joined KO Gym and started kick-boxing classes.
Gym owner Zack Taumafai, who trains Mr Al Saleh, said his client was committed to losing weight.
“He was enjoying the workout and when he was training every day he was losing a kilo here and a kilo there,” he said.
Mr Taumafai said if Mr Al Saleh lost an extra 10kg by December, he will never have to pay a membership fee again.
“For him to lose the weight that he already lost, to lose 40kg in one year, is already a big achievement. The gym is pretty much a second home for him now and I just want him to lose that extra 10kg, and he will do it,” he said.
Mr Taumafai said many other gym users were motivated by Mr Saleh’s lifestyle changes.
“The whole aim in the gym is to motivate people to achieve what Samer has. You can easily fall into that side where you eat, and you wake up one morning and the clothes you love don’t fit. Then you have to find a way that’s going to solve that problem,” he said.
aalkhoori@thenational.ae
