When people are trying to make a positive change in their lives, it’s not unusual for them to chart their progress online.
Not only does this give them a series of snapshots to show themselves how far they’ve come, but it also provides a lot of motivation to know just how many people are rooting for them. And while the transformations themselves are often incredible, the best part always has to do with how much happier they look the farther they are on their journey.
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And that’s especially true when these people decide to leave behind habits that were leading them on a destructive path and embrace a sober lifestyle .
Although this is never easy and will undoubtedly see some stumbles and false starts along the way, one man’s ongoing journey reveals just how worthwhile it is to persevere.
Like so many people, Kenny Dunn started drinking when he was in college, but eventually found himself regularly drinking in excess.
Although he told Bored Panda that he had tried to stop before, it became clear that he needed help to do so when his habits brought him low in 2016.
The problem became impossible for him to ignore when he realized that he had drank 19 beers in three hours.
As he put it, “Something inside me said, ‘Kenny, your life is no longer manageable.'”
Since one of his friends had started getting sober a year prior, he reached out and asked her for help.
She would then drive him to his first meeting in a 12-step program and he credits those meetings for his ability to remain sober ever since.
And as he would soon learn once he started recovering, alcohol wasn’t the only vice holding him back. He also found that he was addicted to sugar and decided to switch to healthier carbs such as sweet potatoes, beans, oatmeal, and rice.
So while he was clearly much happier than before once he was a year into his journey, that’s a big part of why his body changed so much in that time as well.
In his words, “It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to an alcoholic that excess applied to food just as much as alcohol.”
But while Dunn had clearly lost significant weight in the first year of his journey, he would spend the next four putting on an entirely different kind of weight.
After maintaining his diet and increasing his number of workouts per week from three to five, he would end up gaining 20 pounds of muscle between 2019 and 2020 alone.
In his words, “I once was a man who couldn’t do more than a single push-up let alone a pull-up. In the month of October 2020, I racked up 1,500 pull-ups and 7,000 push-ups.”
And today, we can see that Dunn’s muscles (and his beard) are even mightier.
While he credits the help he’s found from others for his ability to stay sober, he said that the rest of the improvements he’s seen in his health have come down to staying consistent in his routine.
As he said, “I could never have gotten into the best shape of my life at 38 years old if I hadn’t been consistent.”
He also stressed to those now facing addiction that asking for help is not only not a weakness, but the best thing they can do to put themselves on the road to helping themselves.
h/t: Bored Panda
