I've told bits and pieces of this here but probably not the whole story.
In HS, I was 6'2" and graduated at 155 lbs. I had absolutely no coordination nor strength. So, my ability to play sports was limited to intramural basketball and training and showing horses in the summers. I did some team roping also.
In college, I found how much fun beer, pizza and women were and at the same time, my body finally developed and I started gaining weight. By the time I graduated, I was a shade over 200 lbs but in horrible shape.
A couple years later, I started a contracting business that was very labor intensive and I thought I needed to do everything myself. 13 years later, I realized my body (back) was shot and couldn't take it anymore. I lived in constant pain but I had been living with it long enough I didn't think there was anything that could be done. I had absolutely no desire to do anything let alone exercise. I got fat. I laid around and ate anything and everything in front of me. My favorite snack was a bag of ruffles potato chips and a tub of sour cream. Yep, I could finish it all in one sitting.
Up to this point, the only thing I had ever done athletically was that I ran triathlons when I was 30. It was totally on a whim and having fun with a friend who had to start exercising for health reasons. He dared me that I couldn't do it and so a dare is a dare and I proved I could. Shortly after that is when my back went to crap.
When I was 38 we moved back to Nebraska where I am around my father all the time. He has always been a guy who eats everything and thinks exercise is stupid and only idiots who don't have anything else to do, do it. About this time, my back was bad enough I was starting to go to more doctors to try to figure out what to do. I finally found a surgeon who suggested steroid shots. I was extremely skeptical but was wiling to try anything. Three days after my first shot was the first time in well over 10 years that I had absolutely no back pain. It was amazing. I honestly never realized how much pain I was really in until it was gone. About the same time, I realized that when I had sex with my wife, I had chest pain. I went to the doctor and ended up hooked up to an EKG machine. Luckily, nothing was wrong but it scared the crap out of me.
I looked around and realized I didn't want to end up old and fat like my father (or dead) and started exercising and eating right. I started at 247 lbs and got down to around 185. People were telling me that I was too skinny so I allowed myself to gain back to around 200 lbs. where I am trying to maintain.
My back needs a steroid shot about every 18 -24 months. I can actually walk straight and not limp. What is weird is that I have friends who are happy I lost weight and got in shape and I have a few who almost act pissed. I don't understand it. I have others who I have actually motivated to get into shape themselves.
Now, it's just a way of life for me. My kids prefer to eat right and be healthy. All of them are much better athletes than I ever was and I am extremely happy that I have been at least a good roll model for them in this department. They love their grandfather just as much as I do but we discuss regularly the difference between living like he has and how we try to live and how that affects his quality of life now that he is 80 years old.
I have two fitness goals. I want to run a half marathon and I want to climb a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado. Someday I will get it done. I haven't done the 14,000 peak because I want my family to do it with me and it just hasn't worked out yet that we can do it.
What were the 3 biggest things that helped you loose that weight?
Good question:
1) Get the app. I can't stress that enough. Get an app on your phone where you log what you consume and the exercise you do every day. The one I have I enter my starting weight and then weigh in when ever I want to. I have a goal weight that is plugged in and it tells me every day how far I have to go to reach it. I choose to weigh myself every day. I know a lot of experts say not to but I find it interesting. I don't get stressed out about it. I simply keep in my mind what I have done each day/week and how it affects my weight gain or loss. It's a pretty good study of your body and how it reacts to various factors. I can bring up a graph of my weight from ever since I started using it.
2) Started exercising and eating right. I put both of these in the same one because I find they are related to each other and my # 3 below is important to include. Like I said earlier, when I exercise, I tend to eat better. It's a complete change in lifestyle. But, I was so sick of how I was living before that i didn't find it hard. I felt better literally every week. People started noticing and that motivated me even more. I also started really enjoying exercising and how it made me feel.
3) This is probably the most important thing....Get the mental thing down. When I get interested in something, I read constantly about it and research it on the internet. Read read read. It informs you of the subject but, it also puts you in a mental state of thinking about it all the time. After a while, that bacon double cheese burger, fries and pop doesn't even look good. It also helps the mental thing to allow yourself a day every once in a while where you can eat whatever you want. Seriously, gorge yourself to the max with your favorite culinary sins all day long. You will love it, then after a while, you will hate it. You will feel so crappy that you want to puke. After a while, mentally, you just don't need to do that anymore. Think of yourself as a healthy person.
In essence, I (along with a lot of Americans) had brainwashed myself over my lifetime into thinking being fat and out of shape is just the way life is as a middle aged male. Problem is, I hated it. So, I had to rebrainwash myself into realizing I didn't need to live like that. Being over 50 lbs over weight is me? No....This is me where I can go out and play basketball with my 15 year old son or go snow skiing and do the half pipe (YES...I actually did that two years ago). I ROCKED it.
What other 45 year old man finds himself accidentally at the top of a half pipe on Copper Mountain in Colorado and decides to say..."f#*k IT" and nails it? Well, at least I'm telling myself I nailed it. I didn't fall down or break a leg.
That's the mentality I try to have and I can't do that if I'm fat. That bacon double cheese burger and fries puts me in heaven for about 30 minutes. It's not worth it for what I can do without it. Heck, I can actually waterski again. I lived on the water as a kid and me and my friends were the best skiers on the lake. I went years where I couldn't even get my fat a$$ out of the water. I lost the weight and now...I pop right up and can do almost what I used to do.
Thanks for asking. I'm a little passionate about it.
