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Weight loss and fitness aren’t optional to Dominic Matteo.  For him they are literally matters of life and death.

We have to go back to 2009 to understand why.  Dominic was in rough shape.  In fact, he was morbidly obese.

He held a decent job, he was happily married, he enjoyed some solid, long-standing friendships, and he liked his hometown, Cleveland.

Yet something wasn’t right in his life – and on a deep level, he knew it. He just wasn’t sure what the problem was, or how to fix it. Or maybe he lacked the confidence to try.

Things could have continued like that indefinitely. Dominic might have existed with this low-level dissatisfaction for years.

After all, many people do – assuming that it’s the best they can expect, or doubting that they have whatever it takes to achieve fulfillment.

But fate had something different in store for Dominic.

And it arrived in the form of two significant and eerily timed events.

First, one of his closest friends suffered a pulmonary embolism and passed away.

Naturally, the news stunned him. It’s never easy to lose the people we care for, but when they’re young and their death is sudden, it’s that much harder to reconcile ourselves to the fact that they are gone.

Meanwhile, on the very day that his friend died, Dominic also learned that his wife, Kelly, was pregnant with their first son.

In a few short months, he would become a father.

This is the kind of juxtaposition that would compel any of us to reconsider our lives and our choices. Dominic was no exception.

He had been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome and “exercise induced asthma.” And he knew that if he kept on going the way he was going, his physical condition would only get worse.

If he wanted to be there for his son in a meaningful way, he had to act – now.

As a kid, growing up in Arizona and New Mexico, he’d loved to chase lizards and ride his bike, and he’d happily explored the desert for entire days.

Yet something was different now.

He felt pulled in a new way to persist and to go deeper in his reading and his learning. And the deeper he went, the more he wanted to learn and do.

Meanwhile, the weight was coming off.  In the first year, he lost 100 pounds. But at that point, he was small and weak. He then decided to put on some muscle and try to lean out even further.

That makes the process sound simple and straightforward. But it wasn’t.

In fact, Dominic started and stopped quite a few times during his journey – feeling unsure that he could continue, or simply not 

Eventually, Dominic lost 110 pounds, reducing his body fat to the single digits. No longer morbidly obese, instead he was unusually fit.

And weight loss wasn’t the only benefit.

As he started to become more comfortable with the process and more confident that he could maintain and even improve on his new levels of fitness, he found himself experimenting, looking at his own outcomes. In effect he was coaching himself.

“For example, I found that certain foods inflamed the arthritis in my neck quite a bit,” he explains. “Cutting those foods out and adding more anti-inflammatory foods pretty much eliminated the arthritis issues.”

Always curious, and always a careful and methodical thinker, Dominic was now bringing these strengths to a new area of his life.

As result he was feeling healthier, not only in body, but also in mind and spirit. He was coming into his own..

Still working full-time as a systems analyst for a major insurance company – and by now, a proud father – he also became a part-time coach and trainer, working with other