A Montana father has dropped nearly 100 pounds after noticing he couldn’t keep up with his children.
Jeremiah Peterson recalls going hiking with his children and struggling during the trip.
“Instead of remembering all the good memories we had made on this trip all I can remember is this one thing that kept playing in my head over and over again,” Peterson wrote on his Instagram. “I found myself running out of breath and having to take breaks way before my 9, 7, and 6-year-old kids.”
The experience prompted a change.
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Thanks to diet and exercise, fueled by remembering the struggle on the trip, Peterson dropped 92 pounds.
The dad said that he spent two hours hiking and an hour in the gym every day for six months. He also followed a strict keto diet, an eating program that features very low-carb and high fat.
Along with dropping the weight, Peterson went from a pants size of 42 to a size of 33.
Peterson posted two before-and-after pictures that showed a dramatic change.
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In the caption for one picture, which Peterson posted on Instagram on April 10, he wrote: “TODAY IS THE DAY!!! WE ALL WANT TO HAVE CONFIDENCE IN OURSELVES. Self-confidence is something we build by setting goals for ourselves and achieving them.”
“The harder the goal, the more confidence we gain from reaching it. For myself, a lot of my self-confidence has come from meeting my fitness and body image goals from my transformation. If you’re suffering from a lack of self-confidence and searching for a way to improve yours, try setting some fitness or weight loss goals. When you achieve them, you’ll gain the confidence to believe you can do more,” he added.
“Then you’re going to find you don’t just have confidence with your body, but in other aspects of your life as well. Do it now. Make sure that you take some step, right now, to further your progress. One of the things I’ve learned over my transformation is that the ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ promise is never fulfilled. Never ever. Tomorrow will fill up with the same distractions and mind-numbing tasks as yesterday, and that promise will be broken. The thing about promises is that the more we break, the harder it gets to fulfill them in the future. The only time to do something is right now. Do something!”
Peterson said that he’s happy to be a personal coach for people that need help.
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Last year, Peterson explained to Men’s Health that he’d grown up in Missoula in the ’80s, always playing outside doing things like building forts, playing sports, and fishing.
After experiencing bullying at school, he made an effort to get stronger, lifting weights and playing basketball. After getting a degree in coaching from Trinity Bible College in North Dakota, he met his wife and they opened a small yoga studio in Scottsdale, Arizona. They later moved back to Montana and opened an antique store, which consumed much of their time, according to Peterson.
Most nights, after the store finally closed, he would sit around and drink a few beers.
“My desire to hike and fish, the very habits that I had created so many years ago, slowly disappeared into the process of building a life and a business,” he said.
That day he went hiking he was 40 years old and weighed 290 pounds.
“On a particular backpack hiking trip out in the mountains with my family, I had a kind of ‘aha’ moment,” he said. He was out of breath, feeling chest pains as his children continued on without him. “I reflected on what my life had been. I thought about what my life was at that very moment, and saw what I wanted my life to be.”
Peterson credited the keto diet for much of his transformation, in addition to cutting out all alcohol and starting to exercise for hours a day.
