Less Diesel, More Fuel

<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">So, how did Shaquille O'Neal lose all that weight?

Put his mind to it, mostly.
"He had a lot of self-motivation," said Ryan Oliver, a personal trainer from Portland, Ore., who oversaw O'Neal's workout regimen last summer in Orlando, Fla., implementing a program designed to meet the goals of the Miami Heat, which wanted a slimmer Shaq than the one it had acquired from the Lakers.

Lighter and leaner, O'Neal has helped the Heat to the top of the Eastern Conference this season, much to the chagrin of Jerry Buss.

Last week, the Laker owner said that he did not regret trading O'Neal in July but also noted, "I suspect if I had known that he would lose 60 pounds, I probably would have made a different decision."

Actually, Oliver says, O'Neal dropped about 27 pounds over a three-month period ending in mid-September, two weeks before the start of training camp, after working with the trainer twice a day, five days a week, and altering his diet.

He weighed about 330 pounds, with less than 15% body fat.

O'Neal, once described as "fat" by former teammate Kobe Bryant, has said all it took to motivate him was a nudge from Heat President Pat Riley.

And the runner-up to Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns in the most-valuable-player voting has kept the weight off, noting that his legs and knees feel better because of it and vowing, "I'll never put it back on."

Oliver, who moved back to Portland in September, said he followed the Heat's mandate in reshaping O'Neal: Shed pounds, build endurance.

"Just to keep him going, in a sense," said Oliver, who works for 24 Hour Fitness, which plans to open several O'Neal-branded gyms in the Miami area. "Granted, he still kept his strength?. We just wanted the fat mass to come down."</div>

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