As the year comes to a close, our MAN v FAT community prepares for its festive break, and for many of our young people, this has been a year of personal success in the programme.
Simon Holmes, who plays for our Swindon club, recently achieved a 30% weight loss milestone and admits he feels much better because of it!
We caught up with him to find out why MAN v FAT worked so well for him.
Why did you decide to join MAN v FAT?
At Christmas last year, I started having to buy XXXL clothes, and generally didn’t feel great about my body/health and ability to move around, keep up with my kids at home or when teaching/running gyms at school.
I saw a friend of mine had joined MAN v FAT Gloucester and some ads had popped up on social media so I thought I’d see if that would help me. I always exercised growing up and continued to do so until my early 30s, but life and injuries made it more difficult, so I didn’t exercise much consistently for over 5 years.
What do you enjoy most about MAN v FAT Football?
What I enjoyed most was meeting a great group of people on a similar trip, who immediately made it welcoming and in a relaxed atmosphere. It was great to see/hear other people’s experiences and gave me the motivation to believe that I could succeed too.
The competitive nature of achieving weight loss goals has appealed to my competitive streak and increased my drive to succeed, knowing that while I may not contribute many goals on the field, I can help lose weight and track the rewards.
Has MAN v FAT helped make a positive change in your lifestyle? If yes, how?
Absolutely – I’m now at the lightest weight I’ve been since 6th grade and definitely the fittest I’ve been in as long as I can remember. The MAN v FAT kick started that journey and since then I have pushed myself to be more active as I lost weight and became fitter.
Losing weight has made a huge difference in my historical knee problems I had as I was slowly building up to being able to do more and was doing things more consistently.
Meeting new people, playing regularly (including a few extra matches midweek and sometimes 11 singles matches) and being part of a team/group of people who struggle with the same things has definitely had a positive impact on my mental health too.
Do you want to follow Simon’s example?
You can join Simon in MAN v FAT Swindon by signing up on the club’s homepage!