It's Out Today. Here's What the Photo Doesn't Show.
The Last 10 Pounds: 15 years of data, 13 surgeries, and the record underneath the cover shot.
There’s a photo of me from this past April. I’m 64. Five foot nine, about 158 pounds, around 10-11 percent body fat. If you saw it cold, you’d file it under good genes or too much free time, and you’d scroll on.
I want to walk you around to the other side of that frame. The book that does it is out today.
What got cropped out
Outside the edges of that photo is a spine fused at the bottom and curved enough that I lost almost two inches of height getting here. Lungs that run at about two-thirds of what a man my size should have. A shoulder muscle torn past the point where surgery does any good. Thirteen surgeries since childhood, eleven of them as an adult, behind me. A motor scooter I rode on the wrong day, and the ER I woke up in. A 59-year-old version of me sitting alone in a rented duplex with a divorce finalized and his money cut in half, every reason in the world to let it all go soft.
None of that is in the photo. That’s the problem with photos.
The man in that April photo isn’t a man who got lucky with his body. He’s a man who got a bad draw and kept showing up to the table anyway, for over 20 years, through the kind of run that hands a man a permanent excuse.
I’m not the proof you think I am
Here’s the thing I most want you to take from it.
I’m not standing here as evidence that you need good genes and a clean life to end up lean in the second half. I’m evidence of the opposite. Nothing in my medical file or my history made me a likely candidate for that photo, and I got there anyway. If it worked on a body and a life like mine, the “I’m too far gone” thing you’ve been running on yourself doesn’t hold.
Earlier this month I walked you through the rest of it. The 34,000 food log entries. The 14 photos going back two decades. The stretches where the data went dark and you could match the dates to the worst years of my life. The October at 64 that turned out cleaner than the spring at 41.
This photo is the visible end of all that. The receipt sitting on top of the pile. The record underneath it has the worst years of my life baked in.
I kept the ugly parts in
The book lays three records on one timeline. What I ate, across 34,000 entries. What my body went through, surgery by surgery. And what my life was doing to me while both of those ran. Where my memory and the data disagreed, I let the data win and left the gap showing.
That’s a different thing than a transformation story. A transformation story shows you two photos and skips the 15 years. A stress test shows you the years, including the stretches I’d rather you scrolled past, because the bad stretches are the proof. A clean before-and-after proves a man can string together a good eight weeks. A documented record proves the boring fundamentals hold up against a fused spine and two-thirds of the lung capacity I should have, through the worst run of years I’d had.
Not a transformation story. A 15-year stress test. That’s the whole pitch, and I can back every word of it with a date stamp.
Where to get it
The book is The Last 10 Pounds: What 15 Years of Data and 13 Surgeries Proved About Discipline in the Second Half. The print edition went live this morning, Tuesday June 30th. Three records on one timeline, the April photo on the cover, the ugly parts left in.
Three ways to get it right now:
Kindle, live now on Amazon: Amazon.com.
Hardcover here.
Paperback here.
Or the PDF version, straight from Gumroad.
I’ll create an Audible version soon.
The first chapter’s still free at Last10Pounds.com if you want to try it before you buy anything.
I built and sold two companies, Screen Rant and Game Rant. Neither one fought me the way my own body did. But I kept showing up for it.
I can’t hand you my spine or my lungs. I can hand you the record of what I did with them anyway.
Go build yours.
Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.