Overweight poker player wins $500,000 bet by losing five stone in just six months
"It makes me feel like there is absolutely nothing I can’t do"
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Your support makes all the difference.A $1m bet prompted a professional poker player who weighed 245 pounds (17.5 stone) to lose an impressive five stone in just six months.
Walter Fisher, 36, from Queens, New York, was in the midst of a winning streak playing blackjack, but in less than a month he had lost his $97,000 winnings and gained between 40 and 50 pounds in the process.
“I got overwhelmed and began playing over my head,” Fisher told the New York Post.
Fisher began piling on the pounds by eating entire pizzas, chocolate cakes and veal parmesans until he eventually tipped the scales at 245 pounds.
“I'd lose a bundle at blackjack and eat three or four super-rich single-serving chocolate cakes,” he said.
“I was broke, big and isolated. People dream of what I had accomplished, and I lost control.”
Witnessing his demise, a gambling acquaintance bet him that he couldn’t reduce his body fat to less than 10 per cent in six months.
Desperate for change, Fisher took the bet, tapping into two wealthy friends, Dan Bilzerian and Bill Perkins, for backing.
Eventually, more than $1m in wagers had been lined up with a total of $500,000 earmarked for Fisher if he was successful.
With an arduous journey ahead of him – at this point his body fat measured 33 per cent and he had “no athletic ability” - the poker player enlisted the help of personal trainer Chris DiVecchio who owns a gym in Los Angeles.
Starting out with 30 minutes of high-intensity training, seven days a week, DiVecchio soon increased Fisher’s training time to 45 minutes and after three months, his body fat had dropped to 13.5 per cent – not quite enough to win the bet.
“I ate oatmeal and egg whites for breakfast. I soon put in 10 hours a day, with five hours of cardio. I drank amino acids and glutamine to keep my muscles from breaking down,” Fisher explained.
But, after enlisting the help of Phil Goglia, a sports medicine nutritionist, it turned out that Fisher wasn’t eating enough.
So based on his lipid profile, Goglia changed his diet every week while DiVecchio amped up his exercise regime.
“I ate, trained or rested,” Fisher added.
“That's all I did. Fat melted off. They upped my calories and the intensity of my cardio. I ate a ton of tilapia — it's got high protein, low fat, high omegas. It's bodybuilder food.”
After six months of gruelling hard work, Fisher had successfully lost 70 pounds.
Now weighing in at 175 pounds and having reduced his body fat to a miniscule 8.8 per cent, the poker player has netted around $7,000 for every pound he lost.
“To have gone from an absolute low to where I am now is an achievement and a transformation,” he concluded.
“A lot of people talk big games — and 99 per cent of them would not be able to do what I did, even with the money as an incentive — but I backed it up.
“I backed it up and it makes me feel like there is absolutely nothing I can’t do.”
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