From Fat to Fit in Just Five Hours: Blogger Shows How to Create Those Before and After Fitness Shots With the Help of Chips, Soda, Oil and a Tanning Bed

7 February 2012

If those before-and-after fitness ad photos sometimes seem too good to be true, a Canadian competitive eater demonstrated in a viral video that they probably are — and that you can fake both ends of the transformation in about five hours.

Peter Czerwinski, better known online as "Furious Pete," is a competitive eater, engineering graduate, and fitness buff who has spent years both eating enormous quantities of food and lifting weights. In his "Fat to Fit in 5 hours" video, he set out to show exactly how deceptive the classic transformation photos can be.

His method was delightfully cynical. Do the "after" shot first: hit the gym and pump iron so you're as vascular as humanly possible, add a tanning bed session for definition, and oil up. Then, for the "before" shot, do the reverse — eat potato chips, drink liters of cola, slouch, and let yourself bloat. Same man, same day, totally different bodies on camera.

The $60-billion-a-year dieting industry leans heavily on these paired photos to sell products. Pete's stunt was a reminder that the photos demonstrate photography and staging, not the supplement in the bottle.

Czerwinski, who overcame teenage anorexia before becoming a competitive eater, later wrote about his journey in his book Stay Hungry — making the point that the same body can be made to tell whatever story the camera wants.