Pro Poker Player Wins $1M Weight Loss Bet With Friends

Walter Fisher dropped below 10% body fat in less than 6 months
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 21, 2017 5:10 PM CDT
Pro Poker Player Wins $1M Weight Loss Bet With Friends
Professional poker play Walter Fisher's friends bet him $1 million he couldn't get to 10% body fat. They lost.   (Instagram)

It can be hard to lose weight without the proper motivation. It turns out a million dollars is proper motivation. ABC News reports professional poker player Walter Fisher made a $1 million bet with his friends to reach his goal weight—and won. After a four-week gambling hot streak collapsed in devastating fashion, the 36-year-old Fisher found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and up to 50 pounds heavier. He tells the New York Post he was "broke, big, and isolated." He attributes the weight gain to "amazing, wonderful, rich" casino food—double veal parms, full pizzas, single-serving chocolate cakes. "It was disastrous," Fisher says. He was 245 pounds with 33% body fat. His friends bet him $1 million he couldn't get down to 10% body fat in six months.

On June 22—five and a half months later—Fisher won the bet: He was 175 pounds with 8.8% body fat. It wasn't easy to get there. Fisher traded casino food for oatmeal, egg whites, and tilapia. He hired a personal trainer and nutritionist. He worked out seven days a week for up to 10 hours per day, needing cryotherapy to help his body recover in between workouts. "We don’t recommend you try this excessive amount of training to drop weight this fast," Men's Fitness says of Fisher's routine. That could be why Fisher boasts that 99% of people couldn't "do what I did, even with the money as an incentive." And in the unlikely case he gains the weight back? Fisher says he'll just make another bet. (These are the 10 US cities with the worst diets.)

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