The Post talks with six New Yorkers who were looking for and found fitness and diet plans that work, helping them to shed pounds and gain confidence and hope in 2018.
As a dog control officer — a teacher who shows law officers, including SWAT teams, how to train their unit’s animals — Paolo Chiappetta, 52, has a physically demanding job. Still, at 5-foot-6 inches and 255 pounds, he wasn’t motivated to shed weight until 2015, when a late-night snack landed him in the emergency room.
“Right when I was laying there, looking at the lights, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this ever again,’ ” says Chiapetta. The father of two had been mindlessly munching, as he often did those days, on a handful of nuts. But the food triggered his diverticular disease — a digestive tract condition linked to obesity. The illness causes small pouches to develop in the intestines, and one of the nuts had gotten stuck in a pouch.
Lying on the gurney, experiencing what he describes as “a spiderweb of pain” radiating from his waist, Chiappetta couldn’t believe his after-dinner binge-eating habit had done this to him. His shock stayed with him for the 10 days following his hospital release, during which he took high doses of antibiotics and could barely eat, only consuming liquids as he recovered.
That was when he swore to change his habits.
“No matter what, I did not want to go back [to the hospital],” he says.
‘It changes the way you get up in the morning, it changes the way you look at everything.’
As soon as Chiapetta was cleared to eat solid foods again, he committed to the Alkamind 7-Day Alkaline Cleanse — a smoothie-heavy program focused on lowering the amount of acid and optimizing the body’s pH balance, which his wife had already seen great success with. He cut out meat almost entirely and made a greater effort to eat more vegetables alongside the diet’s 120-gram tubes of prescribed mineral supplement powder, which contains magnesium and calcium. Kelly Ripa has previously praised the cleanse, which was created by chiropractor Daryl Gioffre and is pretty controversial within the medical community.
After three years of following a liquid-heavy diet, cutting out his unhealthy snacking and binge-eating, and sticking to primarily raw and organic foods, like broccoli rabe and quinoa, Chiappetta is down to 170 pounds.
“I did not really realize the impact, how it changes your life,” he says, reflecting on his weight-loss journey. “It changes the way you get up in the morning, it changes the way you look at everything.” He’s also much better equipped for his physically demanding job — and running after his 8-year-old twins.
Now that he’s down to a healthier weight, he can’t wait to tone up. “I can actually start trying to shape my body,” he says, “I have all these options now.”
Tip: Set mini-goals — which are more easily achievable — such as increasing the number of pull-ups or push-ups by a little each day.
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