Kurt Morgan: My Diet Is Better Than Yours, The Wild Diet & Losing 87 Pounds in 14 Weeks

This is a very special episode of the show with Kurt Morgan, the 47-year old grandpa who transformed into a fat-burning beast in front of our eyes on ABC’s My Diet Is Better Than Yours by dropping a total of 87 pounds in just 14 weeks. He also dropped an astounding 22% percentage points of body fat.

Let me just say that Kurt and I are overwhelmed with the positive emails, comments, and feedback we’ve gotten from you guys in the Fat-Burning community throughout the show. Getting half naked to weigh in on a reality show on national television is a harrowing task, and we both thank you sincerely for your incredible support.

I’ve been getting hundreds of emails asking when I would have Kurt on Fat-Burning Man, so get ready for this show – it’s a doozy!

Kurt has shown America that you really can be happy and healthy at the same time, and now he’s here to tell the whole story.

Ever since Kurt dropped 16 pounds in 1 week on My Diet Is Better Than Yours, my book The Wild Diet has been sold out on Amazon and most book stores. Good news: It’s finally back in stock!

We couldn’t have done this without you. Thank you sincerely for the love and support and please don’t forget to leave a review! I read every one. 🙂

And here’s some more good news: We hit the New York Times Bestsellers list!

Now, on today’s show, you will learn:

• The surprising foods Kurt enjoyed to become fat-adapted
• How Kurt lost nearly double the body fat of every other contestant
• Why Alecia, Kurt’s wife, lost more weight in the first 7 weeks than any female contestant on the show
• How to drop fat quickly with minimal exercise
• And much more…

Let’s go hang out with Kurt!

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How Kurt Morgan Became A Fat-Burning Man

Abel: I am pumped to be here with Kurt Morgan. He lost an impressive 87 pounds and 22% percentage points body fat in 14 weeks on My Diet is Better Than Yours! He was partnered with yours truly. We’re family at this point.

Kurt, I don’t know if you understand how many people have been rooting for you! The success you’ve had following The Wild Diet has made you an inspiration to so many people. The show didn’t give much of your backstory. Would you tell people where you were a few months ago?

In 2006, I had a head-on collision and I broke my neck. I spent the next year going through surgery after surgery, and I was laying on my back in a hospital bed or at home. I was just immobile and I packed on a lot of weight. When I was finally healing, I thought it was over… but I was still not feeling well. Then I found in 2013 that the metal in my neck was contaminated with staph, and that kept me sick for years.

They had to remove the metal and I had a blood staph infection. So, they put in a PIC line to my heart for antibiotics, but my body didn’t like the PIC line… so it threw blood clots into my lungs. I recovered, then when they went in to take the metal out, I got e-coli from the surgery and got rushed back to the hospital.

For 13 months I laid in the hospital or in my bed at home sick. It was a horrible feeling to feel like a burden on your family. And through the middle of all this my first grandchild was born. I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t hold her. That was a wakeup call—I had to get healthy.

When the show started in September, I had only been back to work for 9 months after being sick. As the oldest contestant, plus my medical history, I knew it was going to be rough for me… but I needed to make the change for me and my family.

Abel: You showed motivation, dedication, and positivity. But going back, can you tell us the amount of your medical bills in one year?

Somewhere around $3 million.

Abel: Astounding. When we started MDIBTY, we went into it blind. We first met on camera. Hearing your backstory and that they’d taken out a lot of muscle around your neck and spine, I knew you were limited in the amount you could work out and lift. You’re also 6’5’, a massive man and you used to be strong– you have a solid build underneath all of that, and I was excited to get you into a better body composition and better health. But also your prescriptions weren’t something good to take long term. I was on medications in my 20’s and was told it’s just crap genetics, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

When we met in person, you and I were in this together. We had a lot of 12 hour days, stressed, and you’re still working day job and maintaining the responsibility of day to day life. It’s not like The Biggest Loser where they get to go to a spa camp and just train for months. How did you manage stress? I think your positive attitude and the way you were able to handle it all really separated you from the pack.

The stress of the show was very high. I knew that I needed to make this change because I wanted to be around for my grandchildren. I have 3 brand new grandchildren, I wanted to be there for them.

I don’t want to be the old grandpa that lays on the couch and doesn’t do anything.

This is real life. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and I had so many things at the beginning people were like how do you cope? Well, when you come from a dark place, you don’t want to go there again.

You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back up on that line and go. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: Why did you choose The Wild Diet for your plan?

There were a lot of different options. The Wild Diet, in the short synopsis from the show, seemed like it was real food. I’ve been on crash diets and even took HCG injections from a doctor and that was 800 calories a day. But The Wild Diet didn’t seem like a diet. There’s cheesecake and bacon cheeseburgers… I thought, if I can eat real food and still lose weight, this is the plan for me.

Abel: When you first saw it, did you think it would work? Did you expect you’d win?

Everyone wants to win, and I thought I could have a pretty good shot, even knowing I’d be the oldest and my medical history would limit the amount of physical activities I could do. But I started it for the right reasons.

I didn’t care about the grand prize or the money, I did it for my health. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Grandpa Meanie’s Positive Attitude

Abel: It’s funny when you separate real life from what you see on the other end of the reality TV camera. But you have this unshakable, positive attitude. We’d all say, “Grandpa Meanie doesn’t give up.”

In real life if you give up, you’re done. There is no stop. Everybody has bad days and good days—you celebrate the good days, say “oh well” to bad days and you keep on moving.

If you live in the negative, it consumes your life. I choose not to live like that. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: Let’s go through the first week of the show. We were thrown into this crazy thing last minute. I didn’t even think I was going to be on the show, but then 24 hours later we’re shooting. You were in the same boat. When we started out, you and I went out to get grass-fed burgers with bacon, pastured cheeses and so on… what were you expecting to lose the first week?

I’d say 3 – 4 pounds. Actually, the first week we weren’t really on the plan as hard as I should have been. We were kind of improvising with what I had in the house. I was flabbergasted when I stepped on the scale and that’s what came up!

Abel: Kurt won the first weigh-in with 16 pounds weight loss! We weren’t doing intermittent fasting. We were basically getting you fat-adapted—eating fat instead of carbs and sugars to make sure your body was building the biochemical machinery for you to run on fat long-term.

Also, I wanted to earn your trust. A lot of people don’t believe you can lose fat this way. They don’t believe you can drop fat and get incredible results by eating these foods, not in spite of cheeseburgers but because of them. If you’ve been eating processed food for a long time, your body’s not getting those quality proteins and fats that you get from pasture-raised meats.

What did you think about the daily bone broth?

I was skeptical. But the way you explained it was: you’re making beef broth, like my grandparents used to. They always had a pot on the stove to make stock and soup. Bone broth really helps with intermittent fasting—you have that nice fatty broth and it takes you through the whole day. It gives you energy, minerals, calcium, and collagen to help your joints.

After I drink bone broth, I have energy for the rest of the day. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: When you’re running on fat, it’s like go mode and your brain feels it. What was it like eating this way? How did your mental state change?

Eating the processed foods, I felt sluggish and foggy. A little of that was from statin drugs—they commonly cause short-term memory loss. After the 3rd week on The Wild Diet, I was totally off all my medications. After that my energy was up. And actually it sounds funny to say this, but my vision actually improved from getting off the junk food. I had more energy, more stamina, I slept better at night… I just became a healthier person.

I didn’t realize how bad I felt until I got off the junk. @kurtmorgan8 #TheWildDiet Share on X

Abel: On the show, you don’t really see us eat vegetables on camera. They wanted to brand us from the beginning as an extremist fad diet. Looking back, even our shirts are in the color of bacon.

But the truth is, with The Wild Diet, you were eating twice or three times as many vegetables as meats.

Your protein is important, but your veggies give you a lot of the nutrients and minerals you need, plus natural fiber. I like the natural fiber—I love Brussels sprouts, and what’s better than Brussels sprouts and bacon? Saute them up and that’s a meal. My protein is really only about 3 – 4 ounces—people think i was eating like 24 ounce t-bones.

Abel: Maybe that was true the first week.

Whatever protein I was eating, I was eating double the veggies. And I don’t cook them until they’re done and wilty. I try to eat them as raw as possible.

Abel: What was it like when we were with the other contestants? Especially at the beginning, we were filming a lot so sometimes we were in a little tent and eating together. You got to see what other people were eating and vice versa. How did that go?

We tried to eat as healthy as possible on our plans—you taught me that low-sugar, whole fruits in moderation are okay, but that high-sugar fruits like grapes will set you back. I’m eating my chicken and green salad with a balsamic dressing and other people are eating like a whole bag of grapes! I’m thinking that can’t be good for them—that’s almost 100% sugar!

One day, I stopped and got Waffle House on the way to the show. I was in a hurry and didn’t have much choice, and they made it out to be like I ate waffles and syrup—it was eggs and bacon. I didn’t have waffles and grits with toast and jelly.

Sometimes it’s about living your normal life and making the best choice possible. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: You work out of your car, so you’d eat the Wild way at fast food restaurants, chains, places you shouldn’t be able to eat healthy, but you were able to. Can you share some tips? That fish place—Captain D’s—You go every Friday night with work friends. How do you make it work?

Captain D’s is the fried fish place of the south. But there’s always healthier options. You can ask for the grilled menu—they do have better options like broccoli! I’d get a shrimp skewer, white fish, broccoli, no butter, no seasoning and water. I’m eating clean.

I’ve noticed my friends making small changes. They’ve started cutting out the hush puppies and the mac and cheese—baby steps. They follow suit because they see the transformation I was making just from modifying what I’m eating. A lot of my friends and coworkers have said they’ve started implementing a few things from The Wild Diet and are losing 3 or 4 pounds a week.

It’s really easy and I’m not hungry. That’s the beauty of the plan, it’s not a diet. It never felt like a diet.

Abel: It’s not a diet, it’s a nutrition plan that allows your body to work the way it was designed to – by burning fat.

When I was running on carbs, my hunger was always there and I had to try to eat less all the time and restrict myself. I was always censoring myself… but when you switch to burning fat, if you don’t have good food around, you just shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t mind waiting another hour.”

You go through the morning without feeling like you need an 11:00am snack, and then start asking where you’re going to go for lunch, and then thinking about what’s for dinner. The power you had is that you could withstand a lot of the those long days without getting cranky, exploding, getting short with people… I saw a lot of that with some of the other contests which shall remain nameless.

It’s such a transition from burning sugar to burning fat. When I was a sugar-burning man, I’d have a boost of energy, then be on such a low I’d want more sugar to pick me up.

When I was on the elliptical and I first cut out sugar, I could actually taste the sugar in my sweat. It took about a week to get it out. Now I don’t like sugar. I don’t use sugar on anything.

How To Shed Fat with Less Exercise

Abel: Let’s talk about your workouts. A lot of other contestants were working out a ton. Jeff and Jay were doing two-a-day workouts, boxing, and climbing stairs with a weighted backpacks. Jasmin was running 5-10 miles a day during the competition and doing a bunch of other exercises. But you focused on the lower impact stuff, getting fat-burning type cardio like walks or on an elliptical to get things moving and build some muscle mass to keep up with challenges—but not really for weight-loss.

Were you surprised by how little exercise you could do and still win the weigh-ins every single week?

I knew going into it that I couldn’t exercise like some of the younger contestants, especially with my medical background. Most of it was just walking the big hills in my subdivision. I’d go for a walk when I got home or at lunchtime during the work day just to keep myself moving.

You don’t have to go to the gym and knock it out. I did go to the gym—I did some cardio and went to the pool, but I didn’t go the gym and kill myself all the time. This was mostly diet and I kept myself moving, and wasn’t a glutton with my favorites—like licorice.

Just going out there and moving—it can be fun! I could walk with my wife, I’d take the grandbaby out in the strollers. It didn’t feel like working out, just family time.

The Truth About Calorie Restriction

Abel: Let’s talk about calories. We were attacked on the show for “starvation.” Ridiculous. You mentioned you went on the HCG diet, you got injections and consumed 800 calories a day. You did that for 3 months and lost how much weight?

38 pounds, but it was a horrible way to lose weight. I had no energy. I felt horrible. I couldn’t get on an elliptical and even do half a mile because my energy was so low.

Abel: Going Wild, you were eating a lot more calories than that and you were losing at a much steadier clip. Instead of 38 pounds, you lost 87 pounds. This is the type of weight loss, specifically fat loss, which stays for good because you maintain your muscle.

Go behind the scenes with Kurt Morgan and learn how he lost 87 pounds on national TV! Share on X

We never counted calories for the show. The idea is just to eat good food when you’re hungry, and then stop when you’re full. I’m a normal guy, and I know I didn’t count most of the fats I was eating like a handful of walnuts or butter in my coffee or bone broth.

Abel: We focused on making sure you got bone broth, greens, high quality protein every day. We trained your body to simply eat when you were hungry. In the beginning you were eating a lot more and much richer food than anyone else in the competition. As you adapted to burning fat, you found you would fill up on less food.

I was in ketosis since week one. It made me not hungry. I didn’t really need to eat and if I did it was a little and it sustained me. I had plenty of stored fat for my body to burn. Your analogy was a grizzly bear going into hibernation—I just needed to supplement what my natural stored body fat was meant to do. I lost the fat and kept the muscle. After the first week, you had me hooked.

Who ever thought you could lose this much weight just by eating and walking? @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: Since you were first at weigh-in and throughout the competition, you literally could have kicked me off at any point.

I don’t see how that was an advantage. I was the biggest winner, why would I kick you off?

Abel: On the calorie-restriction thing. If you were restricting calories to what they showed on air, you would have lost a lot of muscle. But you went you went from 52% body fat to less than 30% body fat, that’s 22% percentage points of body fat loss, more than double what the other contestants lost. For example, Jasmin only lost 13% percentage points of body fat.

One reason I wanted to go on the show was to see how different dietary and fitness strategies played out next to each other. We’ve known for a long time that once you transition to burning fat, it protects your muscle mass, especially when combined with strength training.

We’re all familiar with The Biggest Loser style of weight loss, and we know many of those contestants don’t keep the weight off. One reason is that they’re eating so little and exercising so much—you can’t do that forever. You lose a lot of muscle and it’s hard for your body to rest and burn through the energy you need to maintain muscle and make sure that fat doesn’t come back. Then as soon as you twist your ankle and can’t run, the fat comes back. How do you think you’ll do on The Wild Diet long term?

This is my way of life forever. You can come over anytime, look in my pantry and it’s all fresh, pastured, organic.

Abel: At the start of the show we went into your pantry and it was packed with foods that didn’t all look like junk, but were supposed health foods because they were low in fat or cholesterol. It was such a cool thing to help you turn over the labels and realize, “That’s not real food.” What’s some advice you have for others in terms of what’s healthy and what isn’t?

Don’t look at nutritional value, look at the ingredients. If you find something you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it. I like to eat foods with the least amount of ingredients and as natural as possible. Eat fresh. Eat local. Eat what’s in season. If it’s not growing locally then it’s been shipped from far and you don’t know what they had to do to it to keep it looking fresh.

Eat fresh. Eat local. Eat what’s in season. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: While we were being attacked by Jeff and other contestants, a lot of things came out. The fact that your wife, Alecia, got the results she did and she was never counting calories, just eating with you and even cheating… at the point where we were being attacked for starvation, Alecia had lost more weight than any contestant on the show. She’d lost 33 pounds! (I had to bite my tongue at that point.)

She was still having hot wings and a real Coke every once in awhile. She wasn’t as strict, so that’s a testament to how good the plan is.

Abel: Rob and La’Tasha defended us. Rob was like, “This is the plan I’d be doing,” and La’Tasha was like, “Listen, I’ve seen Abel eat and he is definitely not starving himself.” Can you talk about how you saw me eat versus some of the other coaches?

I’m almost twice your size and at lunch time you were out eating me 3 to 1. We’d have lunch and then you’d break out your survival pack and be eating chicken legs and bacon and a smoothie and something else and people are like, “How does this guy eat all this stuff and stay so lean?”

Abel: On TV, you make me look like an elf.

It’s funny, I saw some pictures of me with some of the trainers and I look gigantor next to them. I didn’t realize how tall I am compared to other people. It’s kinda funny looking.

One of the other things they didn’t show on the show… From day one, a lot of the other trainers were at their contestant’s house every single day. From the get-go, I said that in order for me to do your plan and have it be sustainable for the long run, I can’t have you there every day. I have to learn it. I have to buy into it.

The general public doesn’t know you were only with me when we were filming. The rest of it I did on my own.

Abel: That’s such a huge testament to the fact that The Wild Diet works. The fitness industry wants you to think you need to exercise and buy all these gadgets and training machines or get these new shoes every year to run to get fit. Yes, if you want to be a cardio bunny and run all the time that’s fine. But that’s not at all necessary for losing fat.

This is a show related to diet and nutrition. I’m not a personal trainer nor have I ever claimed to be a personal trainer. I’m more of a life coach or a nutrition coach. This is all about your mental state. Especially once you get the simple aspects of nutrition: veggies, fiber, fresh foods, the highest quality meats, and the rest of it is deciding you’re worth it… And realizing you don’t have to punish yourself with a bunch of exercise to get results.

After you showed me the plan and I read The Wild Diet, my wife and I talked about it and we realized that this was sustainable. This wasn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. It’s food. it’s real good food. That’s what makes it special. I don’t ever feel deprived. I still have my 88% dark chocolate if I need a kick. Everyone has a cheat day—If I’m going go out to a restaurant and eat something I really want, I’m going to the best restaurant and eating the best food I can because that’s going to be for me.

Being on your plan has really taught me that you have to take time for yourself. Listen to your body. Heal yourself first. Your body will tell you what it needs. Sometimes it may say you need sugar, then you’ve got say no. You don’t need that.

But there are other ways to get carbs that are healthier. By you telling me to boil the sweet potato vs. baking it, it lowers the GI (glycemic index) and you get that slow release of sugar/carbs. If you are kind of sluggish it fuels you up, but you don’t feel the crash.

What inspired me is that you came from a place of being overweight and sick, following Western medicine. You went to the doctor and his advice did the opposite, so you had to dig deep and find what worked for you. You’re a living testament that the plan works. Now you’re able to share it. Now, I want to share it, too.

This is what worked for me, and now I’m going to share it with the world. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Abel: When you and Alecia first met Alyson and me (and our dog), we were trying to earn each other’s trust and figure each other out. As far as you knew, I’d be just like this wacky trainer the reality show set you up with… and you two were looking us up and down. What were you thinking?

When you’re overweight and you’ve tried a lot of things and someone comes into your life that’s fit, you wonder if they know what we’re really going through. But you talked to us, not at us. If someone talks at me, I tend to shut down. But you talked to us, got our feelings on how we like things and what changes we thought we could make.

I’m an old dog, you taught me new tricks. If you’d have come at me like some other trainers, up in my face, I probably would have shut down.

Abel: Some trainers, coaches, doctors, have a hard time relating to someone. In a lot of cases, it’s hard to relate on both sides. Drew Manning wrote a New York Times bestselling book that’s now a TV show called Fit 2 Fat 2 Fit. On the show, trainers gain a ton of weight and then lose it with their clients, and you see how emotional and mental this all is.

Food is the most important thing, but making that happen in your real life when push comes to shove, that’s the hard part. How do you do that?

It’s about holding yourself accountable. For such a long time, I didn’t think I was any better than to grab a cheeseburger at a fast food restaurant. Now, going through this journey—being sick, meeting you, and changing my life—I’m not depressed anymore.

There were years I did suffer from depression because I felt so sick, and now I feel wonderful. I’m worth more than that cheap 99 cent hamburger. I owe it to myself to put the things into my body that are good for me and to know where they come from. It’s so easy to blame society and say there’s a fast food restaurant on every corner, that’s why I’m fat. It’s a mindset—you have to change your mind.

That’s why Jay was trying to get into Jeff’s head. Jeff could do the diet, but he had to change his mindset.

The biggest competition everybody has is the hurdle in their own mind. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

I might be old and I might be sick, but you taught me just to go slow. If you can only do 2 more minutes than yesterday, that’s fine. Celebrate the little victories. If you don’t have a good day, brush it off.

Abel: Let’s talk about how hard it was, because what you see on TV isn’t reality. It’s hard to describe how much anxiety is in the room when you walk up to the scale. Everyone’s attacking everyone and we dodged the drama for a long time… Until that final week, and then they chose to attack us… The one thing you always said to me, despite losing 16 pounds the first week and an average of more than 7 pounds every single week, you’d say, “I don’t feel like I’m changing. I don’t know if I’m losing any weight.”

Can you explain the emotional state you were coming from?

When you’re so big for so long, you have a very low self-opinion. No matter what you do or lose, you still see the overweight heavy guy.

I see myself every day, so I don’t know if other people see the small changes I see. I know I followed the plan, but I didn’t weigh myself or anything. So there was really no gauge, it was just how we think we followed the plan and exercised. If I didn’t gain, it was a victory.

But it’s all about getting out of your own way. In my mind, no matter how many inches I lost each week, I didn’t feel it until toward the end—I got out of the shower one day and saw myself in the mirror, and I realized I was not as big as before.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is not to worry about the scale. The scale is a number, it doesn’t define you.

Go by how your clothes feel and look at yourself in pictures. A picture tells a lot. You can compare—take a picture with your cell phone and then when you’ve lost nothing one week, you can look at those pictures and see how different you really are.

I’d like to get down to 235 pounds, my Navy weight. But if I can get down to 250 pounds, that’s what my son weighs!

I started at a 48 inch waist and today I’m wearing a 36! I was wearing a 3XL shirts and now it’s a large or XL sometimes, depending on the shirt.

Abel: That’s so awesome. When you were going through this, you didn’t think you were changing, but what would people around you say?

I’d see my friends on Fridays and they’d be like, “Dude, you look like you’re losing weight.” But I had a ton of support from my friends and family. It’s touching to know so many people care about you. Through all this, the Facebook page and Fat-Burning Tribe, I’ve had such an outpouring of love.

People who were in my shape, maybe with medical conditions, are telling me that I’ve inspired them to get off the couch. To me, that’s the best compliment I could ever get. I want to help other people.

You started me on this journey, now it’s my time to pay it forward. I want to take what I’ve learned and pass it on to someone else that can change their life.

Abel: Let’s talk a little bit about your positivity. Through the competition, we see different things going on in the various teams. It always seemed like Dawn and Jasmin vs. Abel and Kurt. You guys had a lot in common, and I think one was that you were super positive and believed in yourself. You were almost pacing each other.

It was a friendly competition between me and Jasmin. We wanted to make sure we fed off each other, and were positive. There was so much negativity on the set because everyone wanted to do well, and sometimes they got angry and deflected. Jasmin and I talked at the beginning and said we decided we’re not going to do that, we’re going to be positive because we want to show the world that you can lose weight and it doesn’t have to be a strain or stress.

I’m a professional salesman. I don’t want my customers seeing me out there mean and nasty. And if you’re training me, and I’m nasty, that would show The Wild Diet in a negative light. Also, my granddaughters and children are going to watch the show and it was about showing them that I’m 48 and a grandfather and I can change my life.

You can do anything you want, you just have to try. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Kurt’s Favorite Wild Diet Foods

Abel: What were some of your favorite recipes?

Chicken parmesan for sure, beef short ribs, and I am a cook so I took some recipes and added my own flair. If there’s an ingredient I don’t like, I’ll substitute with something nutritionally equivalent that I do like. I’ve made some really good bison chili—no beans, natural, organic spices. I try to change it up so I don’t eat the same thing over and over.

Thebacon cheeseburgers and collard wrap feel like you’re not on a diet—it feels like cheating. Share on X

Abel: No one else in the competition was eating this way. They were giving up chocolate, cheese, solid food… If people walk up to you now and ask how you did it, what do you say?

I changed what I put in my mouth. I decided to eat the right way, to eat natural, grass-fed beef, GMO– and antibiotic-free everything, and wild-caught seafood. You always said abs are made in the kitchen, and I believe that 100%. You don’t have to workout, just change the way you eat. Little changes will spur fat-loss.

I can’t believe I’m eating this delicious food and losing weight!

Abel: And you look so much younger. We were able to text back and forth during the holidays and you sent me a picture of your face, and I said, “Dude, is that thing squished?” You look like a completely different person.

It takes awhile to get used to looking at yourself. I lost so much in my neck and face. It used to be so round, I had a pie face. Now it’s like when I was in my teens. I’m getting used to the no mustache and goatee, but those may make a reappearance for summer.

Abel: The thing you wanted to do – but couldn’t before you lost the weight – was go rock climbing…

My son and daughter-in-law invited me to an indoor rock climbing place. I’m scared of heights, but because I’m now under the weight limit, I gave it a try. I made it to the top and really enjoyed it! I did pay for it because my knee was killing me afterward.

The show didn’t really go over a lot about my knee injury. You see me in a wrap but they didn’t put much stock in it. Well, I went to the doctor and turns out I actually fractured my tibia the first week of shooting. So, I did everything on a fractured tibia.

Abel: The option wasn’t there to go out and run all the time, and I’m glad it wasn’t. It’s not really the best way to lose fat… maybe weight, but you’re sacrificing muscle. On The Biggest Loser, you see that all the time, they break and gain.

When they cast me on this show, I told them they’re measuring it wrong. I said, if you’re looking at health, you want to look at body fat not percentage weight loss.

One of the biggest challenges as you get older is maintaining your muscle mass. You don’t really die of old age, you die of your body breaking down—organ failure, bone loss—and that all starts with losing muscle mass. I was so impressed by how well you were able to get the plan and just nail it.

I don’t suggest people that watched the show who are my size do some of the exercising from the challenges. It was really hard on my body. The stairs and frog jumps and burpees—that was so hard, that really will hurt somebody.

Jeff did speak up and say we are really overweight, you’re going to have us do things people our weight shouldn’t do. We did it because that’s what we were supposed to do. I didn’t ask for modifications for medical history because I wanted to try.

Abel: That’s what I loved about working with you, Kurt, because you’d been told for so long that you shouldn’t or couldn’t, and you just wanted to do it. The fact that you were able to go out and do it anyway is a testament to the fact that you are so mentally strong, and that’s one of the biggest secrets to all of this. You need to be mentally strong.

Shaun T was able to communicate that well throughout the show. He’s such positive energy and a wonderful guy.

You have to change your mindset. Because if you don’t change what’s up here, it’s not going to show in your body.

If you get down about everything, you’re going to be miserable, and no one wants to be around a miserable person.

Abel: Out of all your experiences, what would you say to someone on the other end who might need a little advice to start getting results?

Listen to your body. It’s going to tell you what it needs and what it doesn’t need. It’s going to tell you how far to push it and when you can’t do it anymore.

Treat yourself like you would treat your show car. @kurtmorgan8 Share on X

Put in the best premium oil, the best possible fuel, and just take care of it. That’s your body. You only have one body. You’ve got to take care of it and you have to start now. If I can come off of being in the hospital and so sick and make that transformation in 14 weeks, anyone can do it.

Where To Find Kurt Morgan

My web site is up and running: kurtmorgan.myfreesites.net. That’s where I’m putting my meal plans and everything. On Twitter it’s @kurtmorgan8. You can also find me on Facebook—I take all friend requests. I’m here to help people. I wasn’t just in this to change myself and be selfish. I’ve learned so much from Abel, I just want to pass it on.

You can also connect with Kurt and his wife Alecia on the Fat-Burning Tribe’s private Facebook page.

Want To Shed Fat with Kurt’s Wild Diet Plan?

If you’re inspired by Kurt’s story and want to get results from The Wild Diet, check this out. You can get the exact meals Kurt ate during “My Diet is Better Than Yours” to lose 16 pounds in a week, 57 pounds in 7 weeks, and a total of 87 pounds and 22% percentage points of body fat in just 14 weeks.

After years of researching and coaching the most effective, permanent, and healthy principles behind rapid fat loss and total body recomposition, we developed The Wild Diet 30 Day Fat Loss Program.

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In the program you’ll get:

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And if you grab it today, you’ll get a limited time discount!

You can also check out my book, The Wild Diet, which is now a New York Times Bestseller! Thanks so much for your support.

And if you want to meet Kurt and ask him your questions, he’s part of our online coaching community, The Fat-Burning Tribe. You can meet Kurt, Alyson, and me in our members area!

Did you watch Kurt’s journey on My Diet is Better Than Yours? Let us know your thoughts—post a comment below!