Makki walked into A.M. Total Being Fitness for his end-of-September assessment and slouched back into a chair. His body language said it all: His muscles were relaxed and he looked tired. His body didn’t lie. This was the first time David set foot in the gym in almost a week.

David admitted that some of the trappings of Ramadan – fasting long days without food or water and eating socially – finally caught up with him by month’s end. And it showed on the scale: 245 through 9 months. That’s two pounds up from last month.

“I didn’t get where I wanted to get,” David said.

David cited a number of reasons for his gain, including packing on five pounds when he took a family trip to Disney World Labor Day weekend. Eating fewer meals during Ramadan didn’t help to speed up his metabolism, either. But perhaps the biggest single element holding him back is life outside the gym, including the pressure of losing weight publicly.

“I can’t tell you how many times I go out, and someone says, ‘Hey, you’re doing great.Keep it up,’” he said. “That puts pressure on me psychologically because you know you have to do something. If you don’t, it’s going to be a letdown.”

“That,” personal trainer Anthony Moses told David, “is good pressure to get you to go where we’re trying to go.”

But there’s something else, at times, holding David back from his goal.

“I take care of more than my immediate family: my mom, my dad, my brother, my brother and his wife,” David admitted. “I’m responsible for about 15 people. It’s not just me and my wife.”

That’s when David’s trainer, Kris Donald, chimed in: “That’s even more reason why you have to do what you have to do.”

Anthony then shed some light on David’s dilemma with his own personal challenges.

“If you went through a divorce and you know you got diagnosed with a fatal illness, you had to move, the economy was bad, your dad got murdered, your cousin got killed, you just got married and you had two kids. Is that pressure? And you got six kids who depend on you. That’s pressure! I do it every day.

“That’s the total being,” Anthony told David. The he pointed to his heart: “You have to get connected to the source because you can’t change everybody around you. It’s going to be there. As long as you know it’s there, you’ll take charge, and it won’t pull you down emotionally.”

David took it all in, and then had only this to say about the rest of the year:

“The change is coming.”*