Matthew Gorry lost 60kg, now he wants to be a personal trainer

ALMOST 18 months ago, 22-year-old Perth man Matthew Gorry weighed 155kg.

He says he was depressed and his health was in terrible shape. Now he’s lost the weight that troubled him for so long and wants to become

a personal trainer. Here, he tell us how he did it.

“I started in April 2014. I was overweight and I was very depressed. I was 155kg and not the most attractive boy in the area. I couldn’t find clothes that fit me, I was borderline health wise, I was at risk of having a heart attack, I had high cholesterol and a bad liver. I was on the verge of having diabetes.

I used to eat terribly. One of my go-to lunches was half a chicken, four chicken tenderloins and a soft drink from Nando’s. That was my favourite lunch.

I didn’t want to do anything back in the day. I didn’t want to go out with my friends. I would make excuses not go out with the guys because I was worried people would stare at me.

I was really embarrassed to walk into a normal clothes shop and know that there’s nothing that will fit you.

Something needed to change. I started eating straight up healthy food. I haven’t had McDonald’s or Hungry Jacks or KFC since March 2014.

I joined a gym but I didn’t really know what to do, I would walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes on the low impact speed setting.

I got myself a personal trainer and we did high impact interval training (HIIT). We did a lot of circuits in a short period of time in the gym.

One of the exercises was 10 squats, run up and down the hill, 9 squats, run up and down the hill, and going all the way down to zero. That was really painful. But everything was hard for me.

I weighed myself every week and I was losing 3kg every week. I lost 60kg in six months. But I had a lot of excess skin, and I still do.

It’s a bit depressing because you do all this work and you think you’re going to get an amazing beach body, but you know you’re not going to get there because you have all this loose skin. You have to just deal with it or pay around $30,000 to have it removed.

Surgery is too expensive for me. I’m trying to do it naturally at this stage. Maybe in the long run I’ll try it. I’ve still got quite a lot of skin. I’ve been doing weights to try and lose the excess.

I’m doing strength and conditioning exercises 3-4 times a week and cardio once a week.

Now I stick to whole foods. I only eat real foods and I do a lot of home cooking — grilled chicken and vegies, things like that. I do sometimes have a sneaky food court kebab — you can’t be too strict with yourself.

Now I can go into a shop and get the clothes I want and know that they are going to have my size. You just have more options.

I used to think, ‘They don’t like me because I’m fat’, but I wasn’t giving them the time of day because I was too scared about what they’ll think. Once you lose the weight you’re more confident, so you’ll go up to them and give them the time of day.

I’m surprisingly studying fitness. I want to help people like me who were overweight, because I know I can reach them on an emotional level. The course is 6 months. Now I can be a fitness instructor — I can teach groups like pump class and body attack. But I want to be a personal trainer and help others.

I use photos as my motivation. I saved that photo on my computer desktop and it’s a reminder of where I don’t want to get back to. It reminds me how depressing my life was then. And that I’m so much happier now.