Lu Brito is no stranger to the emotional and physical implications of weighing too much or too little.

Brito, the Gleason Family YMCA’s senior program director, is heading this year’s eight teams of 71 weight loss challenge participants. He remembers himself at 12 years old, driving his 300-pound father to the hospital at 2 a.m., because his father was having a heart attack. He didn’t call 911, he said, because he was 12 years old, and didn’t think to do that; and his mother did not speak English.

“That was an occurance pretty frequently, up until he passed 20-plus years ago,” Brito said. “I saw what he went through with his health issues. And a lot of it was chronic health failure.”

But Brito is the polar opposite. The tall, lean program director said he “couldn’t gain weight” growing up, and recalls being “140 pounds soaking wet” at age 21, on the cusp of his first child’s birth. In an effort to put on weight, Brito said he started training heavy.

“I got up to 240 at my heaviest, bench pressing 380 pounds, and squatting 600 pounds,” Brito said. “But I always saw that skinny little kid, and I was never satisfied.”

Brito doesn’t lift that heavy anymore, but his memories and experiences have translated into a passion for helping people reach their weight and strength goals. He said he “loves to help people,” and that he is excited to help the current batch of weight loss participants.

But he and the eight trainers who are leading the program are not focusing on giving participants quick fixes. Brito said he recognizes the $54 billion-per-year diet industry heavily factors into many of the members’ past weight loss attempts, and he and his team will be trying to correct that unhealthy mentality.

“I think people are smart enough that they know, but they want that easy solution,” Brito said. “But it’s about educating them that there is no shortcut. Yes, you may lose weight initially, but it’s not the kind of weight you want to lose, and it’s going to be detrimental to your success in the long run.”

The program will last for eight weeks. In order to best ensure participants are not undereating, and are on track for a healthy lifestyle, they will also be completing food logs.

Brito emphasized that each participant should certainly use others on their teams to help motivate them to work out, but they shouldn’t compare themselves to others.

“We see pictures all the time of, ‘This is what you should look like,’” Brito said. “It’s about … being realistic and realizing that … you are born with what you are going to be. So it’s about being the best that you can be, not what a model on TV looks like.”