It’s 10:30 on Saturday morning, and Josef Brandenburg has just finished sprinting up the steps of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception – 12 times.

At 195 lbs and only 8% body fat, the 27-year-old Brookland resident and personal trainer is the picture of physical fitness. But that hasn’t always been the case.

“When I was growing up, I was the fat kid,” he says. Josef remained chronically overweight as an adolescent and young adult. He says he spent the first 22 years of his life in a constant battle with his body.

Following all the conventional advice, Josef thought that in order to lose weight, one must exercise more and eat less. He tried every reduced-calorie diet in the book, regularly restricting himself to fewer than 800 calories per day.

While these routines did bring Josef some occasional short-lived success, the minute he stopped dieting or took a break from exercise, he would gain back every ounce he’d lost, and then some. By age 22, he was 236 lbs. – 25% of which was pure fat – with a 40-inch waist.

“When it comes to genetics, there’s no question I got the short end of the stick,” Josef explains.

At age seven, his pediatrician told him that he was overweight, and by age 11, at only five feet tall, he already weighed 180 lbs.

“At summer sports camp my nickname was ‘blubber thing,’” he says. The turnabout came for Josef in 2002, when, frustrated after years of yo-yo dieting and fleeting results, he decided to try a different tactic.

Instead of starving himself, Josef began eating small meals every two to three hours, never going hungry.

Instead of swimming and running on the treadmill every day until he was about to collapse, Josef cut back on his gym time from three hours per day to three hours per week, and began performing functional weightlifting routines and interval training instead of aerobics.

Many of Josef’s workouts don’t even require him to set foot in a gym. Josef performs his interval sessions at several locations near his Brookland home, including the track at Turkey Thicket Recreation Center, the 14th Street hill (Josef runs between Randolph and Quincy Streets), and the alley behind his house on Randolph Street.

People on the cutting edge of exercise and fat loss now say that spending hours on the treadmill or elliptical machines won’t do much to help you slim down. Lifting weights, in contrast, boots your metabolism for hours – in some cases, even days – after each workout, and builds muscle, which in turn burns fat round the clock, even when you’re not exercising.

Ten months of following these simple principles brought Josef from the obese young adult he was in 2002 to the lean, athletic man that he is today.

What’s more, he now enjoys a much higher quality of life, with time to focus on his education (Josef is working towards his degree in Dietetics from the University of Maryland) and his fiancée.

After completing his twelfth round of sprints on the stairs, Josef does a brief cool-down and then heads to his car. Even though his workout this morning only lasted a total of about twenty minutes, he knows that’s enough exercise for today.

“You don’t have to spend long, mind-numbing hours at the gym to build the body you want,” Josef concludes. After hearing the story of his personal transformation, I know I can trust him on this one.

Erin Finley is a personal trainer and fitness writer. Go to www.selfignite.com for more information.