Staying Ripped!!
Motivation gets you started. Habit keeps you going. - Jim Ryan

While I was sitting in the sauna one day, I figured out that I could either be a fitness model, a "dancer", or something else that requires you to look great and be in great shape. I started to worry after that though, because there is no way I could be good at anything like that. I can't dance at all, and I always have this "shit-eating grin" on my face, so modeling would be difficult. Also, I could never pull off a sexy look like "Blue Steel" in Zoolander. Plus, I loved to eat!!
Luckily, a few days after that, my buddy Dan Graham invited me to be his partner to take on a 28" pizza in St. Louis called The Pointersaurus. If we finished an 11lb pizza in less than 1 hour, we would win $500 bucks!! This got me really excited!! If you have ever been on a long strict diet, you know that after a while you start craving EVERYTHING in sight. I agreed, and we took on The Pointersaurus exactly one week after I took my final photos. We won easily, winning $500!! A few days later, I started to really think...
During this process, I found out that there were food challenges all over the place, and I was very good at eating. Plus, nobody around me really enjoyed food challenges, so it gave me my own little niche. When you eat thousands of calories at a time, you obviously have to workout a lot the next few days!! Otherwise, you WILL get fat, and I did not want that!! This would be great motivation for me!! After getting back from my trip to New Zealand as the contest winner, I dedicated myself to eating food challenges and working out!! Now I have over 113 food challenge wins, and I still maintain my weight of around 240lbs. Hopefully you read my Getting Ripped!! section about how I lost weight. Now, I will explain what I do now to maintain my weight while doing food challenges every weekend: