Dave O’Brien knew it was time to lose weight.
He weighed well over 200 pounds at the beginning of the year and he wanted to slim down. But he found it wasn’t easy.
“I tried to go on a diet in January and I did good for a couple of days, then I’d go off it,” said O’Brien, 48, a quiet, unassuming man.
He saw an advertisement for the Sweet Home Big Loser contest and decided to enter.
“I thought it would be good for accountability,” he said. “Once I did (join the contest), when the whole town is watching you, that’s good motivation.”
Twelve weeks later, after losing 48 1/2 pounds, O’Brien was named the contest winner due to the fact that he had lost a higher percentage of his original body weight than any of the other 37 contestants who completed the competition. He dropped from 233 1/2 pounds to 185.
So what was his secret? Diet and very regular exercise, he said.
“Specifically, I cut my calories to below 1,500 for the day,” he said. “Usually I hovered right around 1,500. I bought a real cool digital food scale at Bed Bath and Beyond. I measured everything and I think that helped a lot.
“I ate nothing but good food. I started eating whole grains, which are supposed to be more filling and take more energy for the body to burn.”
The other key to his success was regular activity.
O’Brien, who works as a kiln operator at Wah Chang in Albany, said he has to move around a lot at his job, which helped him. But he also spent time on a treadmill or walking with his wife Tammy on Old Holley Road, up the hill from his house on Alder Street.
“I tried to do something almost every day,” said O’Brien, a former wrestler and football player at Sweet Home High School. “There is a gym where I work but it’s pretty hard to do that when I worked a lot of shift. At the minimum I tried to walk at least an hour a day.”
He said he enjoys walking on Old Holley because “it’s kind of a neat way to go. You don’t know what you’ll see out there €“ deer and other things.”
He said he walks too far for his dog €“ “she’s getting kind of old, so now Tammy and I will take her for a 20-minute walk, then go on our own walk.”
The benefits of losing weight proved to be far more than he expected, he said.
“I used to be a big snorer, but after the first 20 pounds, my snoring just disappeared,” O’Brien said. “Tammy told me I was not snoring anymore.”
Also, he said, he would wake up at night with a sore back and, in some extreme cases, had to sit in a chair for a while before he could go back to sleep.
“My back would ache but after I lost weight, that went away too,” he said. “I thought it was the bed but now I think it was just being overweight.
“Those two things right there make it all worthwhile.”
He said his fellow employees at Wah Chang noticed that he was getting thinner.
“They said I was losing a lot,” he said.
O’Brien said he plans to continue, now that he’s gotten down to where he is.
I’m still walking, still watching my calories,” he said. I’ll just keep working at it.”
His advice to anyone trying to lose weight: “Keep moving. I think that’s the key, no matter what you are doing, as far as exercise goes.”