A Quest Fulfilled
Hi, my name is Nick Larson and I went on a quest from 22% body fat to 9.3% body fat. On February 18, 2013, I was around 185 pounds and content with where I was at until I decided to have my body fat looked at. I measured in at 22%. I decided I needed to make a change both in diet and fitness. I already had experience with weight loss; I went from 270 pounds in my junior year of high school to 175 pounds in my senior year of high school. My idea of weight loss was just to cut down on how much I ate and hope for the best. I didn’t care if I got my calories from absolute junk food or incredibly healthy foods, calories were all that mattered for me. That ended up having to change dramatically if I wanted to get my body fat to where I wanted it.
After doing research, I learned more about nutrition and decided that I was eating far too many carbohydrates and not enough protein. I then heard about Quest Bars and it was an absolute no brainer to me to supplement my eating schedule with them. 170 calories? 20g of protein? Low carbs and sugar? I was immediately skeptical and assumed they would taste awful like a lot of the other protein bars I had tried out of the years. I decided to pick up a box of the chocolate brownie ones and fell in love. I was hooked! Of course, I couldn’t eat only protein bars, so my diet still had to be adapted further. My diet changed dramatically. I decided to allow for around 160g of protein, 40g of fat, and under 50g of active carbohydrates. Overall, I set my limit at around 1650 calories a day and used a variety of different applications to track all of these numbers. Some of the foods I used to achieve these numbers were chicken breast, cottage cheese (1% fat), tuna, whey protein, and best of all, Quest Bars.
While diet is very important, I knew that I could not hit my goals without a good workout routine. I’m a full-time student and I work to help pay for school, so initially I wanted to try to make excuses why I didn’t have the time to hit the gym. I ended up making time. I worked out 5-7 times a week and my workouts were typically 20-30 minutes of high intensity running and then some weight lifting to try to bring my muscle mass up.
On May 9th, 2013, I went back to my trainer to get my body fat tested. The results were printed and he looked astonished – 9.3%. My lean body mass was up considerably and my weight was down by 20 pounds. I was equally as stunned as he was.
Ever since losing weight in high school, I’ve been a huge proponent that anybody can lose weight and get in shape with the right attitude and the right diet. I plan to continue with that mantra and I hope to see more stories of other individuals doing incredibly things with fitness and weight loss. I attribute a lot of my success in my diet over the past several week to Quest, as I found myself cheating my eating schedule far less often than any other time I previously lost weight. My quest is not going to stop here. I will continue what I started 10 weeks ago and I can’t wait to see what great snacks Quest will continue to provide me to help me be.
