THE TRANSFORMATION
OF / BY DYLAN NEIL
These two images are of me less than two years apart . The first was during the late July of 2022 and the second was stage shots from June 17th 2023 at the Ottawa Natural Championships . I can honestly tell you that there was more work and effort between these two pictures than can possibly fit into this article but i ' ll try to summarize as best I can . I will first give you a short background of me and what led to me changing my life , so you have context of what triggered my drastic transformation and inspire you to do the same .
First and foremost , I have been obese my entire life . From an early childhood I was the largest , heaviest , often red-faced kid and always out of breath whenever stairs were involved . This caused me to feel animosity anytime I looked in a mirror . I felt shame and hopelessness that I ' d be stuck like this for the rest of my life and that it would make it impossible to be accepted by others and crush any hope of a romantic relationship because I believed “ if I don ’ t love myself , how could anyone else ?”. I believed this for a very long time . Reading comic books , I observed heroes with muscles and fit physiques I always aspired to get , but I believed it was never possible for me or near reach .
Although I had gotten into playing organized sports such as basketball and football and enjoyed training in the weight room , I would eat in excess which caused me to maintain and even increase my body fat . Emotional eating wasn ’ t something I knew about by now , I can easily say that I would eat when I was sad , angry , stressed , happy and whenever I was bored . I never saw a way out of this cycle and had given up for a little while . Eventually I stopped playing sports and had gotten into a relationship while starting university . These all caused me to start gaining more excess weight . A few months after this , the pandemic happened , closing all gyms and forcing everyone into lockdown . Now I was eating and not training .
I also found a passion for baking which , to put very lightly , broke the scale . I stopped weighing myself in January of 2021 at 345.2lbs .
Unfortunately , that is not where my fat gain peaked , clothes that fit at that weight were no longer fitting on my body two months later . My health had declined severely and I was starting to be depressed . My girlfriend at the time , now fiancé , was witnessing this and was there to support me . I then got into watching fitness videos of vlogging bodybuilders and training clips of top tier competitors such as Ronnie Coleman , Phil Heath and Chris Bumstead among others .
I started to eat like they were , it initially encouraged me and had helped get me out of a dark place mentally since I now had a guiding interest but since gyms were closed and I was not a top tier bodybuilder , I wasn ’ t losing weight . Eventually gyms reopened , and I had gotten back into working out . My weight was slowly dropping but I hit a plateau . That ’ s when I knew I needed help , so I decided to hire Axel Lopez from Team Sunrise as a coach in January of 2022 . I explained my ambitions and goals and together we made a plan and I explained to him I would be his greatest success and he seemed to appreciate my determination .
At first the weight was dripping down and little by little I was losing weight and gaining confidence . I went down from around 320 lbs to 286 lbs between January and May . I was unsatisfied with this so I explained to my coach I was determined to change my physique drastically and reassured him It would be followed to the letter . So , we turned up the heat .
For an entire 6 months all I was focused on was hitting my daily cardio , step goals and sticking to my meal plan . I had many instances when I thought I bit off more than I could chew and wanted to quit , to cheat on my diet and skip cardio because every