Initial Weight Loss...and the Weight Loss Plateau

In last week's rather long post, I left you with me having been off of cigarettes for a couple of months while simultaneously seeing my weight go back up into the 270s, which really wasn't that far above the "standard weight" with which I had lived for quite some time.

But right around New Year's Day, I made the steadfast decision to go back on the South Beach Diet with a total commitment to putting into practice the weight loss methods that had worked (temporarily) some eight or nine years earlier. Not wanting to do the resolution thing, though, I decided to wait a week before getting on the weight loss train.

So on January 7, 2012, I stood on the scale and took the weight measurement (my first "official" weigh in), and I wasn't very proud of the reading: 275.6 pounds! Really!?! Oh no! Not Again! But after that initial shock, I put myself on a mission to "lose weight" and get down to "around 200" again, which (by the way) is still in the "overweight" category for someone of my height and build.

At the outset, I was pretty diligent with the diet (sorry, lifestyle change) and made a commitment to have regularly-scheduled weekly "official" weigh ins. Also, the food was okay because after the first two weeks, South Beach does allow for a decent variety of food while eliminating "bad carbs" (white pasta and bread, some high-starch fruits and veggies, etc.) in exchange for "good carbs" (whole wheat pasta and bread, some fruits and veggies, etc.). That said, though, the biggest problem with my implementation of any diet (sorry, lifestyle change) for the preceding decade was that I didn't have an exercise program to go along with the eating adjustments. Oh, I went to the driving range and hit a lot of golf balls, I got out and played golf every couple of weeks, and I did my own yard work; but at the end of the day, I really wasn't undertaking any cardiovascular activity...and in the past, I know this is why I didn't keep the weight off...ever!

So looking at my stats for the first six months, here's what my weight loss looked like...

Jan 7 - 275.6 Pounds
Feb 4 - 261.0 Pounds  (Total Loss - 14.6 Pounds)
Mar 10 - 257.7 Pounds  (Total Loss - 17.9 Pounds)
Apr 7 - 251.8 Pounds  (Total Loss - 23.8 Pounds)
May 12 - 248.5 Pounds  (Total Loss - 27.1 Pounds)
June 9 - 246.9 Pounds  (Total Loss - 28.7 Pounds)
July - No Weight Recorded...WHAT???

See what was happening here? I experienced the typical huge weight loss that new dieters experience ("Woo Hoo!" "14 pounds in a month!" "Yes!"), and then things began to "normalize" because my body got over the shock of the initial change. Then I settled in to that "okay...one pound a week" mindset (which is a healthy weight to lose every week). But after maintaining that through May, I guess I started to rebel and to push the South Beach envelope.

I hit the plateau. Yes, I had lost just under thirty pounds, and that was nothing to sneeze at; but the motivation and excitement of those first couple of months began to dwindle just a few months later, and that becomes obvious when you look at the numbers and see that I lost just a pound and a half between May and June...and then decided to avoid my "official" weigh ins during the entire month of July.

The truth is that I stood on the bathroom scale during the weeks, and I knew I wasn't gaining ground. Thus, I decided not to weigh in "officially" on the weekend. I had officially stepped on the plateau and was in danger of moving back in the wrong direction.

But, although seemingly insignificant at the time, in late June, a very life-changing event unfolded when I purchased the following two items down at the Saint Augustine outlet stores...

We'll talk more about these next time. Until then, enjoy your journey...

Get Busy Living...or Get Busy Dying

On November 1, 2011, as my mother-in-law was undergoing a surgical procedure to repair the arteries that transport blood to the brain, I spent the day working, smoking cigarettes, and probably overeating...since I weighed around 260-ish at the time, it was certainly probable that I was overeating. Although my mother-in-law had suffered through a series of minor strokes a year earlier, and although she had had a similar surgical procedure at that time, I still hadn't seen the "light" and didn't feel a pressing need to change my condition. Oh, I thought about quitting smoking, and I thought about losing weight. But I hadn't done either. Yes, maybe I lost a few pounds here and there, or maybe I had cut back to ten cigarettes a day from fifteen or twenty; but those changes were short-lived and not at all reflective of a genuine effort on my part.

But all of that was about to change.

My wife, Michelle, texted me that the surgery had taken much longer than anticipated and that the doctor looked exhausted when he came out to speak with them. At the end of it all, my mother-in-law suffered a massive stroke while undergoing the surgery, and her life was about to look completely different than it had just a day earlier. She lost her ability to walk, to speak, to use her left arm, to eat, and to take care of herself...and at 75 years old, she was now about to take on some very difficult physical therapy, which she still has to take on to this very day.

As Michelle was listing to me the outcomes, she also shared with me that the sign in the hospital elevator indicated one of the leading causes of strokes was cigarette smoking...and it was at that moment that the proverbial "light" went off and I knew that it was time to get my life and my health back on the right track. It was at that moment that I realized that my weight and my smoking was leading me down a path of heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease. It was at that moment that - with all due credit to Stephen King, Morgan Freeman, and the script writers of Shawshank Redemption - I knew it was time to make the choice to "get busy living...or get busy dying."

Fortunately, I chose the former, and on that day I picked November 11, 2011 (11-11-11 sounded easy to remember) as the day to quit smoking. So for the next week I mentally prepared myself for the date, I purchased Step 1 of the nicotine patches, and I kept reminding myself that it was time to change my life.

So on November 10, 2011, I sat on my back porch and smoked what is still the last cigarette I've ever smoked (smoking dreams don't count, right?); and the next morning, I jumped on Facebook and announced to 200 friends old and new that I had quit smoking and needed the assurance and support from both my ex-smoker friends, as well as my "never smoked" friends...my "still smoking" friends stayed silent (as I would have a couple of weeks earlier). The good news was that I received overwhelming support from all of them...and that was so needed.

Another key element to letting everybody know, though, was that I forced myself to be accountable to a group of friends and family. I opened myself up to the "are you still not smoking?" question, and hindsight tells me that being open and honest (with everyone) about quitting is one of the reasons why I was able to get through the toughest smokeless days. Telling people I had fallen off the non-smoking wagon just seemed more painful than the moments of craving nicotine.

Over the next couple of months - very tough months, by the way - I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted to eat (couldn't get too health crazy all at once), but I had it in the back of my mind that I was going to undertake weight loss after the "give me a cigarette!!!" moments subsided.

Well, on January 7, 2012, weighing in at 275.6 pounds, I decided that the cravings had subsided and the time was right to start the South Beach Diet for a second go round, as it had been the most successful weight loss plan I had experienced in my decade and a half of obesity...but this is already a fairly long post, so let's get into the weight loss next time.

Until then, enjoy your journey...

Obesity

Sorry I didn't post last week, but traveling for work and staying ahead of blizzards and snowstorms kept my focus on other things...although I did get my training in for the week, but I'll talk more about the importance of that after I get through these last couple of catch-up posts.

So where was I? Oh yeah...I was talking about the Fall of 1996 and the last time a scale I was standing on had a reading of under 200 pounds. As you might recall from my last post, I had ventured over 200 pounds for a brief spell but then lost about ten pounds over the course of a semester I spent walking around a campus overseas. Unfortunately, the dip below 200 didn't last long.

Over the course of the next fifteen very sedentary years, I watched the numbers on the scale go up consisently and drastically. After a couple of years teaching English, I was still hanging around 215, so I had yet to find myself in the "obese" category (around 220 for someone my height and build), but I was gaining on it (literally). In 1998, I walked into corporate America, sat down at my desk, and within two years I was up into the 230s. By the time my daughter Mary was born (three years later), I found myself at around 260.

Prior to Mary's birth, I did have an "I am going to be a dad and need to do something about my health...right now!" moment, and I quit smoking about six months before she arrived. Then, about six months after she was born, I came to realize that I also needed to lose weight (still hovering in the 260 range), and I actually got myself back down to about 210 pounds again...208 to be exact. This was the result of strict adherence to the South Beach Diet for about a year. That said, though, somewhere in the middle of the weight loss, I thought it would be wise (it wasn't!) to start smoking again (but "just for a little while"). I actually justified smoking over being obese, and I had the intent to quit smoking again "once I found myself back in the 100s" again. Pretty good logic, no?

At the end of the day, my trip away from obesity was short-lived, and to be honest I can't remember what triggered me back to my old eating habits...which, basically, was something like "I'll eat as much I what, when I want it" while hiding from everyone how much I actually ate and how often I was eating. Between fast food places, candy machines at work, bags of chips at home (these were a few of my favorite things), coupled with the days' "normal" meals (yes, fast food sandwiches became snacks), I once again journeyed back to the 260s and then actually surpassed them to find myself in the high 270s. In fact, in June 2009, after returning home from a cruise, the scale read 278, the highest number I've ever seen reflected on a scale on which I was standing.

From that moment, I panicked and then found myself on crash diets here and there, but nothing stuck...or, more appropriately, I stuck with nothing. I would lose fifteen or twenty pounds here and there, and then they would come back...and this was the cycle for the next few years. The reason why there aren't many pictures of me from this era is because I guess I was hiding from cameras when I saw them...and I would always seek cover (either consciously or subconsciously) behind people or objects in the photographs that managed to capture my now rather large (okay, obese) frame. Here are a couple of shots that somehow got by the goalie, though...

June 2009 - At my top weight of 278
(Time to Start Crash Dieting)

December 2011 - Around 275 Pounds
(Not much Progress with the Crash Diets)

So at the end of this fifteen-year period (from 1996 to 2011), I didn't recognize the guy in the mirror as a former college and professional athlete. Instead, I saw an obese man who lacked power over food and cigarettes, who was too lazy to get out and exercise, and who was ultimately dying a slow, unhealthy death for which he would be deemed the primary cause.

But on November 1, 2011, an unfortunate event finally lit a spark under that obese guy, and he decided right then and there that it was time to change his life...but we'll get into that in the next post.


Until then, enjoy your journey...

Still Athletic, but...

As I began my last post, if you're wondering who that skinny guy is in the picture...it's me again! In fact, I think at this point (early 1990s) I was even lighter than I was back when playing college baseball. I'm not sure because I never thought about my weight in the past, but I would guess that I weighed somewhere between 150 and 160 in this shot.

 

So what had I been up to since the shortened college baseball "career" ended? Well, it turned out I was a pretty decent golfer,  and I actually left Rollins College after my sophomore year to pursue a career in professional golf. To transform a ten-year story into a couple of sentences, in short, I eventually came to find out that I wasn't quite decent enough to make it on the PGA Tour. Yes, I knocked around on the minitours (golf's minor leagues) for a number of years, and I held some decent golf club professional / instruction jobs; but at the end of it all, I wanted to compete. As we all know, though, a very elite few get to compete on the biggest stages, and it just wasn't in the cards (or in my driver) to make it with the big boys.

During this decade, however, I still kept in relatively good shape physically. Walking a golf course (roughly five miles) a few times a week and hitting literally thousands upon thousands of practice balls will certainly keep the belly relatively flat. That said, though, during this stretch, I drank a little too much - which can be counterproductive to one's flat belly (as well as one's putting stroke) - and in 1987 I started up the worst habit I ever started up...smoking. Yuck!

Needless to say, although it wasn't immediately apparent, my downward slide to terrible health progressed steadily. With smoking added to my repetoire, any chance of getting out and running again (although I had no desire) was gone. I tried playing in a basketball league for a while, but I couldn't even get up and down the court without wheezing with my smoker's lungs. So even though I weighed less than I had in 1985, I was actually in worse shape because my ability to undertake true cardiovascular exercise had disappeared.

And then things started getting even worse. Although I stayed in the golf business part-time until 1996, I went back to finish my last two years of college in 1993 (finished in '94) and then went back for my Master's Degree in 1995 (finished in '96). As an English major, my life became a bit more sedentary (with the reading...and reading...and reading some more), and little by little, my weight increased at a slow and steady pace. The picture below - taken in 1996 at the beginning of a semester overseas - is probably the first time I was photographed weighing over 200 pounds.

 

I weighed about 205 when I left for England (a couple of days earlier), and my recollection of this is solid because I was shocked about the scales tipping over 200 for the first time in what had been my previously fairly skinny life.  What's strange is that even though nobody even knew I had gotten this heavy, I was also embarrassed about being over 200...how can one be embarrassed about something that nobody knows about? Those of you who are or have been heavy know exactly what I'm talking about. Those of you who aren't or have never been heavy, just be thankful...trust me.

Interestingly enough, even though I ate like a horse when I was there, because of the incredible amount of walking around the university during the semester, as well as climbing up and down three flights of stairs to get to and from my room multiple times per day, I actually returned to the USA at 195 pounds; and that I remember because 1996 was the last time I stepped on a scale that told me I weighed less than 200 pounds...but we'll get more into my trip to obesity in my next post.

Until then, enjoy your journey...

The Finely Tuned Athlete (No, I'm Not Kidding)

So if you're wondering who that guy is in the picture below...it's me! No, I'm not kidding...it really is! What really grabs me when I look at this picture is not how young I look or how that skinny-faced guy doesn't look much like the guy I saw in the mirror this morning. What really gets me is that I weighed 165 pounds and stood at the same height I stand today...Wow! Even now, with very aggressive weight goals, I'm still not aspiring to get back to 165...heck, I don't even know whether I can spell "one hundred and sixty five" these days...oh, okay...I guess I can.

The thing about it is, though, is that I wasn't just a skinny, scrawny kid. I was actually in shape. This picture was taken during the Rollins College baseball team's "Spring Training" in January 1985. Two months earlier, in order to earn the practice uniform I was wearing, our coach stipulated that any NCAA athlete (even a Division II athlete) should be able to run two miles in twelve minutes...yes, two miles in twelve minutes...and he required us to do so before he handed us our Spring Training uniforms. Well, I'm sorry to say that it took me a couple extra weeks because I tweaked my knee on my first attempt - with just two laps to go, too - but I got to try again in early December; and I actually completed the two miles in 11 minutes, 27 seconds.

That's a long way of saying (or bragging about how) I was a pretty good athlete in 1985; however, that well-conditioned young man didn't stick around much longer. As you'll notice in the comment under my picture and life statistics, I was "hampered" with arm injuries; and unfortunately, because I was a pitcher and because those injuries never fully healed, what I hoped would be a nice career in baseball was pretty much over before it really got started.

So, in a phrase, I really didn't "have" to run anymore. I really didn't "need" to keep my legs strong (which, for pitchers, is critical). I really didn't need to be as finely conditioned as I had been, as there was no game to train for, no two miles in twelve minutes to run. So, in retrospect, the day my baseball career ended was really the day I started heading down a slippery slope to a less healthy life and ultimately to a pretty darned unhealthy one. It didn't happen overnight, but it happened...I'll tell you more about it in my next post.

Until then, enjoy your journey...

January 11, 2012 - Disney 5K

I know that I owe all of you some "background" blog posts to get you caught up on the first year of my journey, as well as a little bit of my personal history; but I have to interrupt that scheduled programming to let you know that, just last week, my nine-year-old daughter (Mary) and I ran in the Walt Disney World 5K down in Orlando.

This race was part of the 20th Anniversary Marathon Weekend at Walt Disney World, which includes Kid Races on Thursday, a 5K on Friday, a Half Marathon on Saturday, as well as a Full Marathon on Sunday. While I have run a few road races in my life (more about that in the background posts), I can tell you that Disney does a great job treating all runners like Boston Marathon qualifiers. I mean, in how many 5Ks do you get the chance to start the race with fireworks and then finish with a run through a marathon finishing chute with Katy Perry blaring in the background? By the way, to close the circle, the song was Firework, so we started and ended with fireworks!

I took some video of the race and will be getting that up on YouTube, as well as this blog, but I need some time to edit out some of the wobbly footage. In the interim, here are some photos from the race...

Running through EPCOT

Just a Half Mile to go, Mary!

Hello, Camera Person!

Just a Couple More Feet!

Crossing the Finish Line!

We did it!

As a final note (and a teaser for future posts), I signed us up for this race quite a while ago (I think it was in August), and at the time I was really nervous about whether I could actually be in good enough shape to make it (at the time, I was run/walking about 1.5 miles and hurting every time)...but as you'll find out in the upcoming posts, our bodies can certainly surprise us.

Until next time, enjoy your journey...

How did I get here?

Before I answer that question, I guess I should tell you where "here" is. The title of this blog might lead one to interpret it as an individual's fond recollection of how he moved, or rolled, or fell off of his couch and subsequently transformed his life and completed his first marathon.

Well, if that's your interpretation, you're probably going to click away from this page in a couple of seconds because you are about to find out that I have not yet completed nor have I attempted to complete a marathon. In literary terms, you are joining my story "in medias res" which is to say that you have stumbled upon the middle of the action...and, as you'll come to find out, if all goes as planned, you're pretty much smack dab in the middle of what is turning into a two-year journey of a 45-year-old (now 46), obese, pack-a-day-smoking middle-aged man who in the last fourteen months decided to get up and embark on a journey from his couch to a full marathon.

So where the heck is the "here" to which this blog post refers? Well, for the time being, let me just start by saying that I've made some pretty good progress on the journey; however, at this very moment, the "here" would have to be defined as that place where I felt a need to start a blog to share this journey with the world (or at least anyone willing to read or listen), particularly with those of you who think you can't change your own physical fitness for the better. I'd be lying, though, if I were to deny that this blog will serve to help me as much as anybody who might stumble across it...it's that whole accountability thing, which I'll be talking about in my next post, as well as in many others beyond that.

So, in a nutshell, what's this blog all about? At the end of the day, I've gotten to a point where I'm feeling good about myself physically for the first time in quite some time; and what I really want people to know - and you'll know more after reading my "background" posts - is that if I can do it, certainly anybody (without major physical limitations, of course) can do it. And it is my sincere hope to inspire others to take the same steps that I've taken to get off my couch and start living life again.

So it would probably be wise to end with a disclaimer (would anybody reading this actually sue me?)...I am not a doctor, a nurse, a health care professional, nor am I an exercise or physical therapist. As such, if you're not certain about your health or your ability to start an exercise or running routine, please consult a doctor if you are looking to implement any of the exercise or running schedules that I'll be mapping out in future posts.

Until next time, enjoy your journey...