How Chris Lost 29 Pounds After Five Years of Struggling With Belly Fat
After five years of getting stronger but struggling to lose belly fat, Chris Moreno dropped from 185 to 156 pounds—and found new motivation to keep transforming.
The scale wasn’t the only thing Chris Moreno wanted to change in February 2020. At 175 pounds, he had fallen into an after-work routine centered around gaming (aka sendentarism), and he could see it wasn’t moving him any closer to the body he wanted.
“I needed to make a change from playing video games after work,” Chris says.
He joined a gym with two clear goals: lose belly fat and gain muscle. Before long, those goals led him to Jim Stoppani’s Summer Shred Challenge . And what started as an attempt to get off the couch became a five-year commitment to Dr. Stoppani’s programs and products.
Trading Video Games For Gym Time
Chris saw nice results from that first Summer Shred Challenge. They weren’t dramatic, but they showed him that his effort was paying off.
“With the first challenge complete, my muscle mass increased a bit and my fat mass decreased as well,” he says. More importantly, the challenge helped turn working out into something Chris wanted to stick with. He was building habits. Over the next five years, he continued following the programs and steadily gained strength.
One part of his original goal, however, remained elusive.
Getting Stronger Without Losing The Belly Fat
Chris was making progress in the gym, but his eating habits weren’t supporting the physique changes he wanted. Although he continued to build strength, he struggled to lose the belly fat that had prompted him to start training in the first place.
Eventually, his body weight climbed from 175 to 185 pounds. Sure, some of that was muscle, but probably not all of it.
“Seeing the positive changes and hearing compliments from family, friends, and coworkers has motivated me to keep going.”
It would have been easy to accept the added weight as the price of getting stronger. Instead, Chris entered 2026 determined to finally address the goal he had been chasing since his first day in the gym. “In 2026, I decided to make it a priority that I would drop my belly fat,” he says.
That decision led him back to another JimStoppani.com challenge: the New Year’s Challenge .
Dropping 29 Pounds With The New Year’s Challenge
Once Chris made fat loss his top priority, the results came quickly. In the first month of the New Year’s Challenge, he dropped from 185 pounds to 170—a 15-pound change in a matter of weeks.
During the second month, Chris added a GLP-1–based medication while continuing to follow Dr. Stoppani’s programs. He eventually reached 156 pounds, bringing his total weight loss from his 185-pound high to 29 pounds.
For someone who had spent years getting stronger while struggling to lean out, the physical change was hard to miss. Others around him noticed it, too. “Seeing the positive changes and hearing compliments from family, friends, and coworkers has motivated me to keep going,” Chris says.
Those reactions have given him more than a confidence boost. They’ve reinforced the value of staying with the process long enough to find an approach that works.
Staying Lean While Building More Muscle
At 156 pounds, Chris is now closing in on the physique goal that first brought him to the gym six years ago. But he doesn’t see fat loss as the finish line.
“Once I lose the very little belly fat I have, I will shift my fitness journey to build as much muscle as possible while staying lean,” he says.
Chris plans to continue using JimStoppani.com programs and JYM Supplement Science products as he takes on that next phase. His favorite product is Chocolate Brownie Pro JYM protein .
His advice to anyone beginning a similar transformation is simple: Don’t expect everything to happen at once, and don’t let slow progress convince you to quit.
“Never give up, be patient, and find what works for you,” Chris says.
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