Professional chef George Stella serves up a feast of inspiration and 125 delicious recipes to kick-start any weight-loss plan!George Stella lost more than 250 pounds on a low-carb eating plan and has turned thousands of fans on to Stella Style -- eating fresh, natural foods prepared with minimum effort for maximum taste.
Seven years ago, I experienced the unforgettable indignity of being wheeled outside a hospital -- down to the back dock -- so that I could be weighed on a flatbed laundry scale.
I was sick yet again. It was pneumonia, for the third time in a little more than a year. But this time felt different. I felt different. By the time I made it to the emergency room, I felt lifeless.
They wheeled me out to that laundry scale and I was way too sick to care.
I remember sitting in the wheelchair in a hospital gown that didn't fit. There were several laundry room workers gathered around, and one of them announced, "He weighs four hundred and sixty-seven pounds!"
That's when my doctor sat down and told me that I had congestive heart failure. He told me that I had to take this medication, and that medication, and this medication over here. I had no idea really what these medications were, or how I could possibly afford them.
That was when he said it.
My doctor looked me in the eyes and laid it out plain and simple. He said, "You are going to die."
I had too much body for my heart to supply with blood, and that was going to be the end of me.
I was sent home with a lecture and many, many pages of dieting instructions. Menus, recipes, everything, but I was more demoralized than ever. I was dwelling on the fact that I was going to die. In fact, I had accepted it.
But the worst thing, worse than my own health problems, lack of direction, and hopeless feelings, was that my family was following in my footsteps. Making the same bad decisions. Feeling that same hopelessness.
Somewhere along the line we had become...a fat family.
My sons had tried this diet and that diet and had always failed. Anthony weighed in at 225 pounds, my wife at 200, and my youngest son, Christian, was well on his way to a future like mine. At fifteen years old, he was already over 300 pounds and growing. Christian had even been pulled out of public schools and was now being home schooled, because he couldn't fit in with the other kids.
My wife, Rachel, tried to make better choices at the grocery store, but it was too little too late, and it didn't keep us from ordering out for pizza. We all seemed to be resigned to the way things were, to the way we were.
But with that doctor's words always in the back of my head, I realized our life together wasn't going to last long if things didn't change.
Soon after, my father died. I didn't attend his funeral because I couldn't afford the two plane tickets I was required to purchase because of my size.
Things finally became clear. I needed help. We needed help.
But as I sat in that wheelchair, all 467 pounds of me, I didn't know where to start. I didn't know what to do. I was living off disability, so a dietician was out of the question. Most commercial diet plans seemed confusing and ultimately unsatisfying. As a chef that had his start in some of Florida's best restaurants, for me, the idea of eating prepackaged frozen dinners that I counted out on a calculator was just another kind of death sentence. My health was failing and my wife and sons were bigger than they'd ever been.
We were at the bottom and we were ready to listen to anything.
They say that you have to hit the bottom before you can work your way back, and I am living proof of this. Sometimes, my weight loss is so sweet -- the only sugar I really need -- that I almost forget just how hard getting started really was.
When I heard of low carb, everything clicked. Here was a diet that said, the way we understood it at the time, that you could eat all the meat and cheese and butter you wanted and still lose weight. Rachel always says that she thought low carb was a joke, and that she only gave it a chance because -- what other choice did we have? We laughed, and we thought it would never work, but we still gave it our all.
If anything, running across an Atkins book was fate. Low carb came into my life when I was at my lowest, and I was ready to do anything. I finally had that courage to start, but even more important, I finally had something that I thought I could start. Even though we thought it was a joke.
So nowadays, when people ask us how we started, I like to tell them...
