Immovable stone in the world of the weak.

All right stop, collaborate and listen Zeus is back with a brand new intention, something grabs a hold of me tightly flows like a milk shake makin' me higher.... ok ok so I am NOT a white rapper but what I am is someone that knows how to lose weight and eat healthy. Why then have I stalled? Where is that GO GO GO! Push through it motherfucker! guy that was there for so long? I'm still here, trust me I am! I am not gaining weight but I am not losing either and realistically I have no reason other than I am comfortable where I am these days, that and dealing with some events not related to health but then that last part would sound like an excuse so I won't use it as a "reason" but yeah.

I've eluded to the fact that I was blessed with a new addition to my family and she is here, healthy and doing awesome right now, Wifey is home for a while and the weather is was cooperating so some bike rides have occurred over the last couple days. My plan is to start riding as much as possible to get my arse back into the condition that it was when last years riding season ended. I took a 10 mile ride on the local rail trail last week and learned just how soft I have become over the winter lull and have dubbed my bike Sir Prison sex as my posterior was not exactly feeling good after the bumpy ride down the trail, time to HTFU again.

Garmin ride report from April 8th, a VERY slow average MPH compared to last year. Click the image for a full size look at how my ride went.

I did get a chance to use my new Garmin bike mount for the 305 forerunner and it worked awesome, my Sigma bike computer is almost right on with the garmin and its MPH/Distance which is good! but I still can't believe how soft I got over the winter! notice a trend here? SOFT! Making time for myself hasn't been a big priority lately with all else that's going on but like always it must be made a priority because of what it means. Without making time for ourselves we tend to let things slip that would not be acceptable on any given day, I found out the hard way where that road leads and I don't intend to make a visit back in that direction any time soon so with this new bundle of joy shall come a new time of focus. I know how to focus on me, I've proven that in the last few years but I still have this flaw where I tend to try and fix things happening around me before hunkering down and getting into the meat of my own issues which needs to stop happening.

I have barely had time to shave lately let alone writing blog posts but they are pretty important to me in the grand scheme, I am going to make an attempt to get posts out on a regular again as I have been slipping in that area. I just said how important journaling my efforts is to me and I recently received a message from someone that has taken from my writings the motivation to lose more than 100 pounds and when I got his message I felt awesome. I have said it in the past and feel that its worth mentioning from time to time that I started writing this blog because I didn't know what else to do and it has helped me take and keep off more than 200 pounds in the last few years but I did it for me. I had no idea that so many other people would take from it anything more than just a couple minutes a day of reading a fat guys random thoughts on weight loss but from some of the messages I have received since starting this blog its more than just my thoughts for me. I am humbled every time I hear a comment like "I am an admirer of yours, and your website and advice has motivated me to lose 102 lbs with another 150 to go! Thanks for being a regular guy helping other regular guys/gals! HUGS! God Bless!" and in all honesty I have not been doing my part where my health is concerned but after getting the message above I know that I need to as I've said probably hundreds of times since starting this blog Keep on keepin' on.

I haven't "hit a wall" with my weight loss so to speak, I have simply stopped pusing forward with the unstoppable drive that I possessed in the beginning of my trip to the half. My health is not waning as it was when I tipped the scale at over 500 pounds but I still have unmet goals that need to be addressed with extreme prejudice, a freight train possesses less momentum than I had at one point and I intend to start treating my health goals in that way again.

My life will be lived by my rules..and so it begins.....again.

As Ever
Me

Breaking down walls...

Hopefully I will be able to get back to posting daily VERY soon but for now it shall remain when I have a minute to sit and write a post, busy does not begin to describe my days lately. There are some aspects of my life that do not make the front page of ye olde blog and it is some of those things that have kept me away from it but in spite of that I have been how do you say? Back on the wagon again. I have to admit that for the first time since starting down this path to better health I let things slip a whole fuckin' lot tad bit in the past maybe three or four weeks and am slightly up in weight, I say slightly because its about 6 on a good day 10 on a bad pounds heavier than I have been maintaining for the last 10 months. Its simply amazing how adding piles O stuff to a fellas day takes away from being able to weigh, measure and quite frankly care about the the food that's going down the hatch. I am not in immediate imminent danger because of my health right now so it makes it easy to lay my focus elsewhere and honestly I have been at this for a little more than three years now with this being the first what I would call lapse in caring about my nutrition.

Making my nutrition and exercise my number one priority must remain my number one...um..priority, because having lived on the other side of 500 pounds I know whats in store for me if I let things slide. I don't fear that I will ever slip back into a completely sedentary life again but I want to be as active as possible so that I can continue to excel with my physical self. I find that having something to focus on helps loads! lately its been my bicycling...even though there has been a lack of said activity because of schedule conflicts and weather I find that when I am in "bike mode" I am on point with my nutrition. Bicycling has become my passion, of course after my wife and kids but you get my point, If I am on a bike I am happy, I am unsure if its because I was unable to ride one for so long and now I am free to do so as I wish or if I really just have a love for riding these two wheeled contraptions down a dirt trail looking at the scenery....my guess is the second option.

The new Giant.

My K2 dashboard with the Garmin 305 forerunner on the new bike mount, you can also see my Sigma 906 cyclometer mounted on the stem.

Speaking of bikes I am always on the look out for "bike deals" and last week I found an incredible deal on what appears to be a great bike! its a Giant Cypress lx full suspension hybrid. The woman that I bought it from gave me an indoor bicycle rack and a trunk mount bike rack when I bought the Giant, lets just say that I got more than a good deal on the bike and accessories and couldn't be happier with the deal. Getting ready for the trail I also picked up a Garmin bicycle mount for my 305 forerunner, I installed it and mounted the GPS yesterday so I am all ready for the rail trail! I took it out for a short ride to test the connectivity to the satellites with it in the position that it is on the bike, worked great. This year I will be going for records on my bike, I will have to look but I believe that my longest ride on the rail trail is right around 25 miles and I want to double that this year and have a goal to hit a 50 mile ride at some point, perhaps beyond that even. The weight will come off, I am not too worried about that honestly because the amount of riding I am planning on doing it will have to come off!

Last year I worked on my endurance on two wheels and the year before that was getting use to how being perched up top of a skeletal aluminum frame with skinny wheels between me and the pavement felt, this year we are going for distance. My first bicycle ride was about a mile and I had to pull over because of the prison sex like feeling on my plump posterior...not that I have ever experienced prison sex but I do have an imagination and its how I would imagine it feeling. Now that a 20 mile ride is par for the course I feel ...dare I say... Normal? no longer a 500 pound guy rooted to a couch looking out the window wishing he could join in the fun that is life but a 300 pound man doing what he wants when he wants to but I am far from done with my health journey.

I have more goals that I have not reached yet with my health and weight, there have been times when I doubted that I could get there but when I think back to the 500 pound version of me I doubted that I could lose even 100 pounds. I have done double that figure to date and kept it off for the better part of 3 years now, for whatever reason breaking through that barrier of sub 300 pounds has been a task for me, more mentally than anything else and I can't for the life of me figure out why a mental barrier could stop me. Enough is enough with letting an imaginary line in the sand stop me because if I take the whole number factor of my weight out of the equation its just that... a number. I have lost as much as 229 pounds since starting and have bounced around in that 200 to 229 pounds lost zone for like I said the better part of 3 years now and it would seem that every time I get close to going below 300 pounds it slams into that wall....this time I am bringing a sledgehammer with me, I have to finish what I started.

As Ever
Me

A Weight loss story 3 years later, oh yeah and a weigh in!

So here we are and tomorrow is the day, you know the one where I weigh in for the blog again, its been about a month since I last stood on the scale and reported here and its been a decent month in lieu of Christmas being involved. I have again adopted a strict version of my plan, I eat my allotted calories, workout each day and drink enough to cover all of that not to mention getting enough sleep each night and its been decent to me. Addicted to the gym once again am I but its worth mentioning that I am really missing my bike rides out on the trail and to make matters worse Wify got me a new Garmin 305 forerunner for Christmas! I still need to get the bike mount for it because she said "I wasn't sure if you would want it so I didn't get all of the accessories to go with it" You what??? its exactly what I needed to make my rides more than just rides.

My new Garmin Forerunner 305 on my wrist, yes its huge! fortunately for me it will be on my bike more than most of the time.

I have been writing my thoughts on weight loss in this blog for three years now! Man does time fly! and I have changed myself physically in that time but maybe more importantly I changed the way that I think about certain things and I believe that is the key to living healthily. When I began down this road I weighed 534 pounds and was unsure that there was an alternative to getting a surgery to help me get the weight off of my bones but I decided that taking things into my own hands and forcing a change was what I needed to do. I am not even close to the same person that I was back in Jan 2008 when I started writing here, when I began I looked at food as more than what it is and it was a pleasure item, now I look at it in a way where for the most part food is fuel and nothing more.

There will be hundreds if not thousands of people scouring the internet for dieting help in a few days, tis the season I suppose and many of them will find a TON of information on how to lose weight along with some ads for Miracle pills and plans like the Jujuberry 7.2 plan. Some of the lucky ones will find out that changing the way we look at food and exercise is a great place to start with a new regimen of balanced eating and getting more movement into each day, there is no miracle pill! none, Zero, Zip, Nada, Zilch! Perhaps someone will find my blog and read a few posts and see that it is possible to drop the weight that literally holds us back from doing what we want to and need to do in life and maybe they will start down a path to better health themselves. I can't tell anyone what will work for them, I have no written out plan with step by step instructions for weight loss but I really do like the fact that there are things written in my blog that can help people out that are in a situation similar to the one I was in when I began writing my thoughts here.

There he is, the guy that so many months ago decided to make a change with how he lived.

I have completely changed...wait I said that already, but its so true I thought that I would say it again! I actually get excited when I find a new exercise to try out or when I realize that I picked up speed on my bike or the workout in the gym got easier, there is so much that I do these days that i was unable to do back when I weighed 534 pounds. There was a time when I literally loathed random people that would walk down the street that I lived on "Who would want to go for a walk just to do it? Morons" seriously! that thought actually formed in my head. I am still just above that 300 pound mark with my current weight yet I am seemingly unlimited in what I can do, I mean I ain't the fastest fella out there but I can run if I so choose right now and that's not something that I could have said when I first started. This coming year will be the year that I hit that mark in the sand, yep 275 pounds here I come, the plan is to go beyond that figure and the way that I feel right now I have a feeling that I will get there.

My world has changed in more ways than even I believed it would with the weight that I have lost and the whole ride is right here in plain sight which is one thing that I know has helped keep me on track over the past couple of years. I don't beg for people to follow me (though I do enjoy seeing that number grow!) and I have never fallen into the whole game of trading posts for posts on any of the more popular blogs to drive traffic, My blog is for me first and foremost, call me selfish if you must! all of the people that I get messages and emails from is an AWESOME bonus of me writing. I have made friends along this journey online as well as in real life and again its something that I never would have expected when I sat down that first day and typed out my very first post on a blog that I never expected to make it past a month maximum and that is what you call cool folks!

Tomorrow morning will show in a poundage number what I have done this month for my weight, whether it is up or down it will be posted for anyone who cares to take a look and the band shall play on, this 275 pound line drawn in the sand is getting crossed sooner than later if I have anything to say about it.

That's all I got for today.

As Ever
Me