“Harvelicious” Gets Ambitious

A little more than one year ago, Harvey Consor was 238 lb.—at 5 foot 4.

When his overweight sister ended up in a nursing home after an unfinished medical procedure, he was done with living in pain.

“I just said to myself, ‘If I want to be with my grandchildren and my children and,’ excuse the expression, ‘grow old gracefully with them, I gotta do something,’” Consor explains.

So he called his daughter Jill Beck on her birthday and said he was ready to change. He wanted to know how she stayed in shape in Seattle, Wash. The answer was CrossFit. Beck seized the opportunity and called Shane Arikian of CrossFit Rapture, the Brightwater, N.Y., affiliate near her parents’ home.

“Basically, I had to do everything I could to put my dad in a position to be successful,” Beck explains. “We only had one shot at this. We had this window where he actually said, ‘I’m ready to change.’”

Today, Consor is 50 lb. lighter and 10 pants sizes smaller—and he has several nicknames at the box: H Train, Harvelicious, HQ, Harv the Legend. More importantly, he can hold his grandchildren and even play flag football and soccer with them.

Beck says: “He’s definitely back to the glass-half-full person that we all know and love.”

Video by Mike Koslap.

6min 29sec

HD file size: 118 MB
SD mov file size: 44 MB

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Additional reading: From Obese to Athletic: A CrossFit Success Story by Sue Lozinski, published July 1, 2008.