It's Time to Get Serious...

Let me share a bit on how I got here.

When I got married back in 2010, I weighed around 145 lbs. I greatly enjoyed my size, which allowed for small t-shirts and pants with either a 30 or a 31 waist. Growing up I was always a smaller dude, which I liked. I was fast at sports and agile enough to escape the hands of bullies and would-be pursuers (young girls included—elementary school was a strange time). In college I put on minimal weight, but it was nothing I was afraid of.

*Notice how I ignore the lame-o rule where you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. Rules were made to be broken, right?

Moving on…. Shortly after I got married I took a job in a call center. I never imagined I’d find myself working in a cube and sitting down for 8 hours at a time (sometimes my shifts moved up to 12 hours). The hours were insane. There were times when I’d go in at 3:30 pm and not head home until 2 in the morning. Talk about brutal. Working in a call center is incredibly painful: the hours are horrible and the stress makes you eat the kinds of food you wouldn’t even find in a prison. I became self-destructive, and my body started showing it. I was simply trying to survive the 50-60 hour work weeks that eventually became the norm. I remember breathing a sigh of relief when I saw an 8 hour shift on my schedule. That’s crazy.

After a year working in that cube, my weight was around 167 lbs.—quite the change. And how was my mindset? Miserable. I hated what I saw in the mirror. Sure, 167 lbs. is still small, but you have to understand, I hadn’t added healthy weight, only fat. I no longer looked like a small guy in a small shirt, I became the large guy who still wears his high school t-shirts. Add to that the fact that my pants had become tight. Snug doesn’t even describe it. I was so unhappy. I can’t properly convey it.

In August of 2011, I decided to make some efforts to get this snowball under control. My company made a deal with a local gym which provided all of the employees with a serious discount. I hopped on that. Also, I downloaded a calorie counter application on my phone. I tried my hardest to get my butt in that gym. The problem was that I didn’t know what I was doing. I would basically do cardio for 20 or 30 minutes and then walk around the rest of the gym, using random machines that didn’t seem too complicated. Utilizing the calorie counter proved useful, as I was gaining knowledge into just how terrible all the food I was eating actually was. This encouraged me to start dropping pointless stomach-fillers and begin striving towards healthful alternatives.

My calorie counting/random “gym-ing” proved unsuccessful. I wasn’t seeing any results. By the time January 2012 rolled around, my weight had dropped to around 163—not exactly the success story I was hoping for. By March we were sitting pretty at 162. It’s in this same month that I became 28. Oh man…28 and unable to wear my “go-to” dress pants or my favorite band shirts. I hit a new bottom. I knew this couldn’t go on. I made a decision as March came to a close to take my “gym-ing” seriously….