Weight, don’t tell me – How to Lose 100 Pounds in 180 Days

To celebrate our 100th issue, we’ve included several 100-themed features. For more, click here.

It hit Bob Courtney at lift-off.

It was early 2012. He was on a flight from San Diego to Baton Rouge, and his seatbelt wouldn’t fit. The airline was out of extenders.

Make it fit, said the flight attendant.

It was an agonizing trip home.

Courtney, who weighed about 335 pounds at the time, considered weight loss surgery.

Then he decided to do it the old-fashioned wayone calorie at a time.

Six months later, 100-plus pounds lighter and 14 inches smaller in circumference, he didn’t look the same.

Out-of-town relatives have been shocked.

“My own son didn’t recognize me,” says Courtney, a longtime news personality in Baton Rouge.

Courtney’s resonant voice still gives him away, though.

Here’s the secret to weight loss, as he tells it:

1. Commit. “It’s not easy. But once you have the mindset that you want to change your life, change the way you feel and look, and your health, everything else is a little bit easier to do.”

2. Run the numbers. “We are bombarded with diets and drugs and pills and exercise that isn’t exercise. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry,” Courtney says. “But what it comes down to is math. It’s all about calories. How much goes in and how much gets burned up.”

3. Get the data. “We just do not realize how many calories we consume every day,” Courtney muses. Once he put together that a silver dollar-sized steak had the same number of calories as a giant bowl of juicy asparagus, he gained added momentum.

Now at 225 pounds, he says he likes that number.

But he might just lose some more.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Bob Courtney lost 14 inches, not 100 inches.