Mark Ludlow struggled with feelings of insecurity and anxiety all through his childhood, and he used food as a comfort mechanism. "This carried over into my teenage years," he says. "My weight kept going up and up and up."
In a recent episode of the Brand New Me webseries, Mark shares the story of how a series of rejections from girls finally pushed him to overcome his feelings of self-consciousness at the age of 21, and make some changes to his lifestyle. "I decided that was it," he says. "I was going to lose this weight once and for all, and hopefully feel better about myself."
Mark lost 112 pounds in 10 months that year, a huge amount of weight to drop in such a relatively short amount of time, however he wasn't able to make such changes sustainable at the time. "I didn't deal with my mental health problems," he explains. "I did lots of exercise, and I followed a diet plan, but these underlying issues I had, which were the reason that I used to comfort eat and drink too much alcohol in the first place, were still very much there."
By the time he was 28, he had put all of the weight back on, and at his heaviest, weighed 330 pounds. So he resolved to undergo another transformation, and to make it stick. He ended up losing a total of 140 pounds. But the outward physical results of his transformation didn't resolve all of his issues. In fact, they created a whole new problem: enjoying his new appearance and sharing physique photos to social media, it turned out, made a lot of women think he was vain, self-absorbed and arrogant.
"Initially, becoming shredded, in the short term it felt amazing," he says. "Longer term, in all honesty... I did it because I was lonely. All I wanted was to get into a relationship with somebody, and I thought, naively, that if I looked like that, that would help me to find a partner."
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It was only after he addressed those feelings of loneliness and inadequacy that Mark developed a healthier relationship with nutrition and exerciseand met his fiance, Zo. He now works as a personal trainer and life coach, and hopes that his journey, and the lessons he's learned along the way, can help other people to make positive changes in their own lives.
"I weigh 195 pounds now," he says. "I'm very happy with where I am physically, but I also have that freedom to have a more balanced life as well."
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