'Extreme Weight Loss' Features West Alum

Mike Epstein decided to be a superhero this year.

The Voorhees resident and Cherry Hill West alum, always a big fan of Halloween, vowed to himself to squeeze into a costume this year, rather than be some shapeless creature haunting the neighborhood.

The real challenge—and the real heroism—would be slimming down from 417 pounds.

The former football player had slowly built up the weight over the years, packing on the pounds as he went.

The stress of his father's death, starting a business and a family all took their toll, though, and the eating habits he carried over as a college defensive tackle—destroy plate after plate and go back for more—tipped things against him.

“It just all piled up,” he said.

At his biggest, Epstein hit 453 pounds. Diets never worked—he'd drop some weight, put it back on, try a different diet; the cycle kept repeating.

The weight took him out of everyday life and left him a spectator for his family, and with three kids as he moved into his 40s, concerns about his health stirred in everyone's minds.

For his wife, Nanci, the experience of losing her own father at a young age weighed heavily.

“I never wanted my children to have to live through that,” she said.

Faced with his own mortality, Epstein first tried out for The Biggest Loser, before giving Extreme Weight Loss a shot. The producers from the latter came calling, and the final interview ended up being at Philadelphia's Four Seasons—the same spot he and his wife had been married two decades before.

“It was a sign,” he said—and clearly a good one, as he made it on to the reality show, which documents a year in the lives of its subjects, as they work to get healthy.

A few months later, he was off to California for boot camp, where, after a weigh-in on a loading dock scale, doctors delivered the news he already had hardening of the arteries around his heart—a scary moment, Epstein said, but one that wouldn't dim his “passion and purpose” for getting involved in the show.

“It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do,” he said of the physical transformation. “I had my moments...but I've never had a bad day in my life.”

Epstein played off that superhero idea as the pounds disappeared, sporting Superman's S, the Bat signal and Iron Man's iconic reactor on his workout shirts as extra motivation on what he said was, at times, “an emotional roller coaster.”

More than the physical side, Epstein said the key to shedding the weight was cracking the mental portion of the equation—something that had been lacking every other time he tried to drop from the 400s.

“I transformed my mind, and my body followed,” he said.

Through the course of a year, he dropped down to 196 pounds—a weight he hadn't seen on the scale since he was 12 years old, in the process losing an entire person's worth of pounds.

He's built some of it back up since—at 225 pounds, with a barrel chest and sizable biceps, he looked every bit the fit, aging football player he'd been at both Cherry Hill West and Albright College while greeting friends and family at a viewing party at the Katz JCC, where well over 100 people showed up for his episode of Extreme Weight Loss.

The images flashing across the screen in the show's opening provided a startling contrast, with the old version of himself looking not just heavier, but older and more tired—Epstein joked he'd also dropped half his age in losing the weight.

For his family, watching his transformation day-by-day gave a the family a different perspective than those who only saw Epstein occasionally—or those tuning in to the show Tuesday night.

“It's great that he did it,” said his oldest son, Ethan. “It just became normal.”

Father and son worked off each other during the year, regularly teaming up for workouts at the JCC—“We put each other to the test,” Epstein said—as the entire family eventually got involved.

“I wasn't the only one transformed by this,” Epstein said. “Everyone benefitted.”

Having gone through the transformation and having tackled the underlying issues, Epstein said there's no question he'll be able to keep the weight off this time, calling it a total lifestyle change.

“We're all in it together,” Nanci said. “We will make it stick as a family.”

Now, Epstein wants to give back, with an eye toward combating childhood obesity and getting people, no matter their age, motivated to change themselves for the better. With an iPhone app in the works and a website soon to be up and running, Epstein said he'll go down every avenue—he's considering motivational speaking, among other options—to reach out to people who are in the same position he was.

“You've got to want to do it,” he said. “I'd like to show people you can do it.”

And that superhero costume? It's all set for October, and fit him straight out of the box.