TLDR: The meat & potatoes. By eating more meat & potatoes, as well as exercising, I've lost 95lbs over the last 8 months (310 to 213 at the moment) and 150ish over the last 5 years. I went from 4x shirts and 42 pants to currently L shirts and 34 pants.
I last posted my progress around 240/230ish a few months ago, and have kept losing pretty steadily. Through March and April I kept my average of ~10lbs a month, but Mays only seen 2lbs so far but I've also kicked up the weightlifting over the last 3 weeks - the number slowed but I just just tightened another belt notch and I'm starting to see much more definition in my arms and legs. Slowly but steadily.
One glaringly obvious lesson standing out over the last 8 months – it’s simply about choices in my life. I can choose to drink too much, eat too much, and be a lazy video game playing couch potato. I can also choose to be the person who gets up and goes for the run they planned. Or the hour gym session they told themselves they wanted to get in. So many times I chose to sit on the couch for 3 hours after work and watch tv or play video games, instead of putting an hour or even a half hour in the gym. So many times I woke up hung over and picked sleep over working out. The sad thing, a majority of those nights it wasn’t like I was out with friends. I wasn’t at the bars. I was home, alone, drinking and playing video games. Usually playing the video games by myself.
Admittedly, I’ve traded booze for weed, and I’m pragmatic enough to realize it’s not the healthiest thing. But, whatever I was drinking for, I got the same from something that wasn’t ruining the next morning. I’m also not poisoning my entire body as much. My blood pressure has dropped to a normal range and my GERD and diabetes are gone. That allowed me to make the better choice of getting up with the alarm clock, and going to the gym. The gym lets me start making the better choices of food. Mostly.
And the kicker, the really painful thing sometimes? I still sit on the couch at night after work and watch tv and play video games for 2 hours a night. That’s not exaggeration or hyperbole. It hasn’t been so much losing weight as adding health. I get that buzz, that little relaxing escape. I get to keep up on my tv shows and play video games when a good one comes out. Everything I enjoyed before. I also still enjoy food. Not only just cooking my own meals, and cooking is another skill I can say I’ve added over the last 8 months, but I still enjoy pizza, occasional beers, greasy foods and sweets. I also, like today, get a different buzz from knocking out a 2000m rowing PR (2:13 split) and had a decent lifting session. Last week I hiked Chautauqua and the 1st and 2nd flat irons and I could barely make it half way in September. I can’t complain how I feel now, and I feel amazing and love being able to do this; but there’s a huge hole of regret knowing now how “easy” it finally ended up being and I could have been doing this for the last 20 years instead.
I learned a lot about myself anyway, and all those former bad decisions culminated in the person who could make the right ones today; I obviously just needed to take this long to learn the lesson. It’s a hard pill to swallow, though, because deep down I knew what I wanted and always knew how to do it. I just never chose to stick with it. I can’t claim that in 2009 when I went from 360 to 330 I “plateaued”. Hell, when I was 18 and a freshman in college, my university had (at the time) one of the largest gym/sports complex in the nation, open and free to students. The first couple months my buddies and I (3 of us were from the same high school) would spend weekends in the gym. Lift weights, do some running, play ping pong, then some basketball, maybe some racket ball. It was awesome. Then we just got into the college life. The last 8 months, I followed the EXACT plan I did in 1999. I didn’t plateau in 1999. I just chose beer rather than do anything active, and in boredom came sweets.
My next goals are getting my lifts to a 200 bench, 300 squat, 400 deadlift, and I want to get my 10k pace to sub-10:00. I'm going to do these by the end of summer. So many times I showed myself I could do it, and so many times I just decided to hide in myself. I’m choosing to be done with that. I’m going to set goals and achieve them, because honestly there’s no reason not to. Why set the goal, make the plan, and then give up? Maybe I never really asked myself that question, because I can’t really answer why I always did that. Since I’ve never done it before, might as well see what happens when I keep going, right? Good luck to everyone out there! It's worth it to see what you're made of, you won't be disappointed.
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