Nathan Cumberland: 130 Kilos to a Photoshoot on Two Prosthetic Legs

Nathan Cumberland weighed 79 kilos when he came to the studio on 22 October. A little over two years earlier he weighed 130. He lost both legs in 2009 and walks on two prosthetics.

After the shoot I sent him a page of questions and asked him to record his answers on his phone, so that I could use his voice in the film we were making. He sent back nearly nine minutes. About one minute of it fitted in the film, and I didn't want the rest to sit unheard on a drive.

October 2009

“The day everything changed was a day in October 2009, where I stepped on an IED and lost both my legs. That ultimately changed my life forever.”

He says that when he woke up in hospital for the first time, he knew he had two choices. The first: “I could feel sorry for myself, blame everybody else, and just basically rot.” The second was to look at where he was and start from there. “This is what I've got to do. I've got to learn to walk again. I've got to carry on. I'm very lucky that I'm still here.”

Then came the wheelchair, learning to walk, and what he calls “constant operations after operations”. He has had forty-odd. He describes those years as a rollercoaster: “I'm not going to say it was easy, because it wasn't. It was tough, really tough.”

I asked him what the hardest part of recovery was. Learning to walk, he said, and then: “Not being the person I was before, and accepting the person I am, or who I've become.” For many years he tried to be the man he was before the blast. “And ultimately, I wasn't.”

He has been in pain every day for 17 years. Most amputees would tell you the same, he says, every time the legs go on. “But end of the day, I still breathe. I've still got to get up. I've still got to get on with it.”

Las Vegas, and 130 kilos

The second half of his story starts at 40. At his heaviest he weighed 129 or 130 kilos, “with my legs on”. Coming back from Las Vegas after his 40th birthday, he realised things needed to change. “Nobody should be that big, let alone have two prosthetic legs.”

He has a name for what he did next, and he uses it more than once: the boring stuff. “The consistency, the food, the training, the steps, the walking, the belief. Even when you don't want to do something, you do it.” Earlier in the memo he says: “I know that sounds corny, but it's pretty much doing the boring stuff over and over again.”

Training also became the part of the day that belongs to him. He calls it “an hour and a half, two hours of me time”, and when he walks into a gym he is thinking about “how I can make this session the best session”.

Why he wanted a photoshoot

Nathan is a dad. “Being a dad is the greatest gift that I think any man can have.” His children are a big part of why he booked the shoot. He wanted to show “my birth son and my foster son” that “if you concentrate, you do it day in, day out, you can achieve something great”, and he hopes they look at him one day and think: “If he can do it, so can I.”

He and his wife chose to foster because they felt they could offer “a safe home, a safer upbringing”. In his words: “A lot of children out there are very afraid, and they don't have a great start in life, and we were able to open our home and provide that safe space.” Their foster son is thriving, he says, and will be with them until he is an adult. “We're very lucky.”

He calls Rachel the main person by his side through everything. “Without her I wouldn't be here today. Fact. She's my rock.” Rachel came to the shoot with him, and she is in the last shots of the film.

This is how he describes the day itself: “Two and a bit years later, here I am doing a photo shoot with Christopher Bailey in his studio, sub 10% body fat, and thinking, how did I get here?”

Nathan sums up the shoot himself: “This is one of the goals that I've chased, and I've completed.” I have photographed physiques for 18 years, and if you are partway through a change of your own, a photoshoot in the diary gives you a date to aim at.

The film

We shot a short gym film on the same day, and his voice memo became the soundtrack. It opens in black and white with his legs kept out of frame. The first time you see the prosthetics is the moment he says the line about the IED. The picture turns to colour when the shirt comes off and the training starts, and it ends with Rachel.

The last thing he says in it is: “Nothing comes easy. You've got to work for it.”

What's next

Nathan has a plan for next year. “I've got an itch to scratch, and that itch is doing a couple of bodybuilding shows next year.” He wants to be able to say he has done it, and to show his kids again that “if you push yourself, you can get there”.

I asked him what he would say to someone watching who is at their lowest. His answer:

“Just know that you've always got tomorrow. If you wake up and you get to breathe, you get to look outside your window, then that's a day, another day, that you can start your goals, chase what you need to chase. You know, nothing happens overnight. It takes time, it takes consistency.”