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Senior year of high school wasn’t a lot of fun for Tivaj Hopkins. He weighed 400 pounds, he skipped an amusement park trip because he was so big, and he couldn’t find anything nice to wear to his prom in his size.

“I was just watching from a distance while everyone participated in things I couldn’t do or didn’t feel comfortable doing. When I compared myself to my peers, I felt as though I was an alien,” he tells TODAY.

Hopkins was still a teenager, but he had very high blood pressure, high cholesterol and asthma. “Any time any levels were measured, they were pretty high. It was stressing my mom out because I had so many doctors’ visits. And it was creating pressure on me, because I knew what it was doing to my mother. I thought I was disappointing her,” he says.

He knew he would need to lose weight at some point, but he wasn’t inclined to try. That mindset changed when he was hospitalized at age 17 with what he refers to as a “mini heart attack,” with an elevated heart rate and shortness of breath.

“That was a reminder that If I didn’t make any changes, I wasn’t going to be here much longer. I didn’t want to die knowing that I hadn’t achieved anything. I was more afraid of not achieving anything than dying,” he says.

At the hospital, they told Hopkins he should eat better, but they didn’t give him any solid guidance he could follow to lose weight and improve his health. So, he came up with his own plan. It worked.

With walking, weightlifting and changes to his diet, he lost 180 pounds and cleared up his health problems: “I don’t have asthma and I’m off my high blood pressure medicine. I don’t have to take any medicine at all.”

Now, he works as a personal trainer, helping other people find their paths toward better health and fitness. “Once I lost the weight, I had a little confidence to do things that I wasn’t able to do or that I didn’t think that I could do,” he says.

He found a no-excuses way to walk daily

Hopkins was looking for a job after he finished high school in 2018. He knew working in a fast-food restaurant, or even in a retail store with fast food nearby, would lead to temptation that would be hard for him to resist. So he decided to get a job in a UPS warehouse.

The job was physically demanding and kept him on his feet all day. But he felt like it was the right choice for himself and for his future. It got him started on a healthier path.

“I had to tell myself, if I keep stopping because something’s hard, that’s going to be the summary of my life. So I went to work every day and I put myself in an imaginary world where I wasn’t doing it just for me. I was doing it for the kids I might have someday. I would want them to know that their father is a person who works hard and doesn’t stop when things get tough,” he says.

After about six months working in the warehouse, he was feeling stronger and people were starting to notice his weight loss. He felt ready to expand his exercise routine.

He added strength training workouts at a gym

In January 2019, Hopkins joined Planet Fitness. He liked that the gym was open 24 hours a day, since he could go work out after he finished a late shift at the warehouse. And as a young person on a tight budget, he could afford the low monthly fees.

Hopkins had no idea how to lift weights, and he was nervous at first: “I realized that nervousness comes from focusing on what people think of you. I couldn’t think about what people thought, or about how I looked in the gym. After I pulled myself back from that, the nervousness was gone.”

The gym’s design made it easy for him to get started. Each weight machine had a QR code he could scan to see a video demonstration of the exercises. “It felt so welcoming,” he says. Those videos gave him the first inkling that he might want to become a personal trainer someday.

As he got stronger, he spent more time in the gym, working out six days a week. “I was learning more and more and adding to my routine. I had to add more days, because I couldn’t do everything all in one day if I wanted to make progress and reach my goals,” he says.

He was careful not to do too much too soon: “I realized that when people try to do everything all at once, it’s sometimes too much pressure, and they fold. I didn’t want to do that to myself.”

After about six months at the gym, he noticed something he had never seen in himself before — his biceps: “When I saw my first muscle, I realized I could do this.”

He taught himself to cook healthy food

Hopkins stopped eating fast food and switched to a high-protein diet where he watched his portion sizes. “Once I mastered the gym, I figured I could master getting my nutrition in. That was another really good part of my transition — changing my eating habits. That’s how I became who I am now,” he says.

He set a goal to learn to cook for himself, which he says was a learning curve. But he felt like if he didn’t cook, he would be putting too much stress on his mother, who was already cooking other food for the rest of the family.

“Cooking was something I learned to do on my own for the first time in my life,” he says. He makes healthy versions of the fast foods he used to eat, like chicken sandwiches with grilled chicken and his own condiments.