Man loses 184 pounds in NINE MONTHS with yoga!

Check this out--184 pounds in 9 months--that's over 20 pounds a month! doing "Regular Guy Yoga"--which I've never heard of before now.

---

BALTIMORE: Man loses 184 pounds with yoga

Associated Press

BALTIMORE (AP) — Arthur Boorman hit bottom — literally — in his battle with obesity and other health problems.

Boorman, who lives in Brooklyn, is a special education teacher at Severna Park High School. About two years ago, he was working with a student at the youth’s home. Suddenly, the chair that he was sitting on collapsed under his 5-foot-6, 340-pound frame.

Boorman, 48, is a the Gulf War veteran and former Army paratrooper. He was unable to walk without the use of canes because of problems with his legs and back, He understood after the humiliating experience that he needed to reverse his downward spiral.
The teacher thought he’d give yoga a try. While researching the subject on the Internet, Boorman stumbled across something called YRG.
YRG — “Yoga for Regular Guys” — is a workout program that combines traditional yoga poses with calisthenics and isometric exercises. It was created by former world champion professional wrestler Diamond Dallas Page.
Boorman was severely overweight and disabled, when he bought the YRG DVD. He started doing the exercises while leaning on chairs and sitting on his bed because he couldn’t stand on his own.
Page designed an eating plan for him. Boorman lost 130 pounds and 17 inches on his waist in nine months. Not only was he walking again without the canes, he was running.
Today, he weighs 156 pounds. His total weight loss is 184 pounds.
Now, Boorman teaches YRG classes five times a week, in Fells Point, Arnold and Pasadena.
“I said to my wife one night, ’I’m not a person anymore. I’m becoming furniture. People have to move me around,”’ said Boorman, recalling a conversation from when he was at his heaviest. “I couldn’t drive because of my legs. My wife had to drive me to work, and then pick me up and drive me home. Every day, my wife had to wrap me and strap me and assemble me so I could hobble out with 30 pounds of braces and 20 pounds of canes. (Page) gave me my life back.”
So what makes YRG so effective, and how does it differ from regular yoga?
Page says YRG elevates the heart rate and gets people into their fat-burning zone. He suggests those who do YRG to train wearing a heart monitor.
“Yoga doesn’t pay enough attention to upper body,” Page said by phone from Los Angeles. “I do. YRG is that engaging of the muscles that creates isometric pause. That jacks the heart rate right up. What I love about YRG is that you can see the results by looking at your wrist and getting a true heart rate.
“With YRG, you never have to do any other cardio. YRG will not only keep you in that cardio zone, but it will give you energy, flexibility and stability.”
YRG is more physically based than spiritually based.
“There is no spiritual mumbo-jumbo in my class. There is no humming or chanting,” said Page. “Not that it’s bad, but it’s just not me. I start my class by saying, ’If you’re new and you came for the yoga where you reach your arms to the heavens and the universe smiles back at you, you might be in the wrong class.”’
While women also do YRG — “Yoga for Regular Gals” — he targets men who, in Page’s words, “wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga.”
Page, 52, didn’t become a wrestler until he was 35. He was one of the sport’s top stars during the industry’s boom in the late ’90s. When he was 42, he ruptured two vertebrae in his lower back. Doctors said he would never wrestle again.
Then he was introduced to yoga by his then-wife Kimberly Page, a former wrestling personality. It helped heal his body and became part of his daily routine, he said, and before long he was adding new features to his regimen.
That was the beginning of YRG.
At 43, Page returned to wrestling and had the most successful year of his career.
Page sends an e-mail to everyone who buys a YRG DVD online. Boorman responded with an e-mail about his condition and two photos of himself; Page asked for his phone number.
“He basically read me the riot act,” said Boorman, recalling his first of many conversations with Page. “He said, ’Are you going to leave your wife a widow and your (three) kids without a father?’ Obviously I knew that, but nobody said that to me until he did.
“He also told me that I could walk again. All I had been thinking was that I might lose some weight and might even get rid of the back pain. Walking again was his idea. The idea that I could walk again gave me great motivation to move forward.”
Boorman said he had gained more than 100 pounds after getting out of the Army in 1991. He also had suffered damage to his legs, back and hip because of the wear and tear from making more than 200 jumps out of airplanes.
“The pain in my back subsided to a dull throb, but it has never gone away,” he said. “Some days it’s worse than others. At one point I went in for surgery on my leg, but I got a postoperative infection and ended up worse off than I was before (the surgery).”
Once, Boorman went to a local yoga studio to ask about joining a class, but was turned away.
“They looked at me and said that I couldn’t come into the class,” he said. “They said, ’We have all these liability issues. And second, we don’t have anyone that can help you. You can’t do yoga if you can’t walk.’ YRG works because it meets people where they’re at.”
After the straight talk and encouragement from Page, Boorman was on his way to a new life. He did YRG every day and followed Page’s eating plan. “Organic juicing is a big part of it, and I had to really cut back on the breads and cheeses,” Boorman said.
Boorman lost 30 pounds in the first month, gradually moving from the beginner workout up to the hard-core routine.
YRG has more of a spiritual aspect than Page realizes, Boorman said.
“No, he doesn’t chant and we don’t contemplate our navels or anything,” said Boorman, “but regular yoga and YRG both have a constant goal of self-improvement. ... Where other people talk about spirituality, Dallas talks about having an attitude.