Photo: Jarred Aslett (2)
Jarred Aslettwas in a bad place in June of 2020. It was the middle of the pandemic, he had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend — and he weighed 480 lbs.
“I hit my rock bottom,” he tells PEOPLE. “I said, I’m going to give myself one week to be sad, and then it’s go time,” he says.
That was July 1, 2020. Since then, the content creator from Twin Falls, Idaho, haslost 230 lbs.
An athlete growing up, Aslett was a state champion football player until his senior year of high school. “Some pretty traumatic things happened,” he says. “I lost one of my best friends and I blew out my knee. It all led to not being in a good mental state when I went to college. And then I stopped playing all sports and started drinking quite a bit.”
By the end of college at the University of Idaho, he had gained a lot of weight. “I was in a fraternity and I was just partying all the time and not taking care of myself,” says Aslett, 34. “When I graduated, I played one year for a semi-pro football team and broke my ankle. Once I broke my ankle, I was sedentary.”
The physical setback was demoralizing for Aslett. “I was still eating like an athlete. I just wasn’t training or doing anything, so it really got out of control.”
After giving up on his football dream, Aslett went into broadcast journalism, where he spent the first few years in front of the camera. But soon he was no longer comfortable. “It got to the point where I just hated seeing how I looked on camera, so I became an executive producer,” he says. “I didn’t want to be in the public like that anymore.”
Jarred Aslett
He was finally motivated to make a change about six months later. On July 1, 2020, he reached out to his older brother Justin, a professional bodybuilder. “He’d always been the one trying to push me to go to the gym, but because he was my brother, I never listened,” Aslett says. Until that day. “I sent him a text that said, ‘Hey, I’m ready,’ and he wrote back, ‘Meet me at the gym in 30 minutes.’ "
That first day in the gym, Aslett worked out for an hour and a half. But it wasn’t a proud moment for the former athlete. “It really hit me how far I had let it go and how big of a road I had ahead of me.”
He says he actually got emotional in the gym. “It came over me like, man, this really got out of hand.” After the gym, Justin took him straight to the grocery store. With his brother’s help, Aslett started eating six meals a day in a calorie deficit and concentrated on his macros.
“I didn’t know anything about nutrition because I never cared to pay attention,” he says. “I consider myself a fairly smart person but I was just so oblivious to everything it has to do with diet. Justin told me what I should be doing, so I made five meals that I knew would hit those macros. And for the first two or three months I ate the exact same thing every day.”
Aslett built a gym in his garage that consisted of an exercise bike, a Bowflex and a punching bag, and he worked out four or five times a week. But what also made a huge impact were his daily walks with his golden retriever. “It started with just a half a mile, and every day I made it a point to walk a little further.”
Between his physical activity and nutrition, the weight started to come off. He lost 235 lbs. in a year and a half. “I was so locked in, like, this is what I’m doing and I need it to happen as fast as possible. I was 100% consistent for a full year.”
He also started going to therapy, thanks to his other brother Brandon, who gave him his therapist’s phone number. “I went to therapy for the first time in my life, and I credit that a lot for my transformation,” Aslett says.
“I started reading a lot of books, and one was about how a goal is just a dream until you write it down,” he recalls. “I made a list of all the things I wanted to do that I couldn’t do at the time because I was just too big. And the No. 1 thing I wrote down was hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from Mexico to Canada.”
So, a year and a half into his journey, he applied for a PCT permit. In January 2022, he committed to hiking the PCT — all 2,653 miles — and started training for it.
Unfortunately, he only made it 600 miles due to his old ankle injury from football. “I still have a plate in there and I got an overuse injury,” he says. “When I hurt my ankle, I was only two months in, but I knew I had to take at least a month off.”
Knowing he wasn’t going to complete the trail that year was “awful,” he says. “But I quickly knew that I was going to try again.” So, this March, he plans to start over again from the Mexico border. He hopes to be on trail for six months.
Aslett has also built up a big following on social media. BetweenTikTokandInstagram, he has more than 1 million followers, many of whom tune in for his diet hacks. “I learned how to incorporate swaps of things that I used to love and just make them lower-calorie,” he says. “One of my videos is about how, growing up, I would eat a box of blue box craft mac-and-cheese and throw a couple of hot dogs in it and that’s 1,400 calories. So now I eat like a chickpea mac-and-cheese instead, and that’s 500 calories.”
While Aslett’s Instagram profile was private when he started losing weight — “I was so embarrassed about how far I’d let myself go” — one of his TikTok videos blew up and garnered half a million views.
“I instantly panicked,” he recalls. “I hit delete, and when it asked me to confirm, I just thought about it for a second. I had actually just talked with my therapist about this. She was like, ‘why are you hiding? You should be shouting out how much weight you have lost.’ " He ended up not deleting the video.
About a year ago he made his profile public, “which was hard because I had all those vulnerable posts in the beginning of me losing the weight,” he says. “I was very open and was going through a really rough time in my life. Some of it was pretty depressing, but it’s important to show people the full story of it. I want to be genuine.”
source: people.com
