A Stressed-Out Lawyer Dropped 60 Pounds in Four Months With a German Training Method

Michael Simmrin, a 45-year-old lawyer in California, had a young son, a growing law practice, the death of a close family member, and the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic all stacking up at once — and stress-eating through it pushed his weight to 262 pounds. "I was getting tired just walking up the stairs," he says. "I'm too young for that." The wake-up call came at an August 2024 dinner where his friends staged a mini-intervention over his health, followed by his then-seven-year-old son telling him bluntly, "Dad, you have a belly."

Rather than adding more to an already packed schedule, Simmrin restructured things he was already doing. With no time to cook between client meetings and court, he switched from eating out to ordering premade meals from a local delivery service called Macro Plate, which lists macronutrients on the packaging, at around $16 a meal — a cost he says still came out cheaper than his previous restaurant habit in Los Angeles (he notes cheaper high-protein delivery options can run $7-9 a meal for people on a budget). For cardio, rather than carving out separate time, his trainer had him take work calls while walking, which added up to roughly 15,000 steps a day and, he says, helped his mental state as much as his body.

On his trainer Mohand Boudifa's guidance at Ultimate Performance in Los Angeles, Simmrin also dropped the same bro-split he'd been running since college in favor of German Body Composition training — a method built on medium-to-high-rep supersets pairing an upper-body and lower-body exercise back to back, performed with a controlled 3:1:1 tempo (three seconds lowering the weight, a one-second pause, one second lifting it). A typical session pairs a lower-body push like a squat variation with an upper-body pull like a chin-up, then a lower-body pull like a deadlift with an upper-body push, plus a third pairing tailored to the client's goals — for Simmrin, an added chest move. He got his results training only about three hours a week.

Over a little more than four months, Simmrin dropped 60 pounds, taking his body fat from 35% to 17% and his weight down to 202 pounds. "I feel like I'm back to my old self," he says, citing an eight-day family snowboarding trip and renewed confidence in his work as an attorney, where he says communicating and "looking the world in the eye" matter directly to his job.