About

I’m a 58+ year-old guy who’s overweight and in the worst shape of his life. In my younger days I was active and played a lot of sports which kept me in fairly good condition. Over time my activity level dropped but the amount of food I ate didn’t. Not a good combination.

I really don’t have a good excuse for getting to this point. I know more about diet and exercise than most. I’ve been at it since my high school wrestling days when cutting weight was the norm. Then I moved on to weight training, where my goal was to add strength and muscle while minimizing any extra fat. I studied and learned what worked and what didn’t. I was pretty good at it

Then at some point I stopped. Not sure exactly when or why. Only that I stopped going to the gym, I ate things more out of enjoyment than for a purpose, and the quantities started to increase. I never worried about my weight being high. I was used to weighing more than average for my height due to my weight training and I carried it well. But somewhere along the way, that guy was replaced by someone I didn’t even recognize. Literally. I was walking into a building with full-length glass doors that perfectly reflected the image of the guy walking into the building – me. And I didn’t like what was staring back at me. That dude looked obese. That was 10 years ago.

Like most, I’ve tried various diets over the years with varying levels of success – success in that I dropped weight.  Keeping the weight off, well, I wasn’t quite as successful with that. I could get in a groove for a while and then I’d veer off the path, thinking no big deal; I can get right back on. But I couldn’t. It seemed to take me 2–3 years every time to get back into it and have some “willpower” to stick with it and make real progress.

But every failed attempt was a learning experience. Much like those side-scroller video games where you meet the big boss at the end of a level. You have to start that level over and over until you finally figure out what you can and can’t do to defeat that big bad and move on to the next level. Right now, I’m feeling pretty confident and feeling like I can really finish this level. It feels doable.

So here I am, at it again, with a plan and an outlook that are working for me. I’m two months in as I write this, and to paraphrase an old cliche, I’m enjoying this progress more than any food temptation that’s put in front of me.

So part of my plan is to journal what I’m doing, write about some of the things that I’m thinking about, and maybe even share what I’m eating and those recipes.

So welcome! I hope that you find my ramblings helpful in some small way and maybe we can finally take down that big boss.