How It Started

When I woke up today, I weighed 193 pounds. I’ve been around this weight for the past month or so. It’s been an exciting, rewarding and sometimes exhausting journey to reach this point of body maintenance. I still plan to drop another 8-10 pounds within the next 12-18 months, but I have reached a relatively healthy place in terms of my body weight. This month marks two years since making the decision to put my full self into reshaping my health. But the process began much earlier as I spent years thinking about the possibility that someday I might actually drop the weight.

For most of my adult life, my weight has fluctuated between 225-250 pounds. I was probably closer to 250 most of the time. There was a brief period while living in El Salvador where I had lost 60 pounds (Down to 188!) due to a nasty adjustment to the food and water, struggling for a few months to digest my food. Once my body adjusted, man…I thoroughly enjoyed Salvadoran food and their version of American fast food! My weight eventually jumped back up to about 220. I stayed within the 220-225 range while living abroad for a few years in El Salvador and the East Africa region. Once I returned the States, it didn’t take long to pack on the extra 15-20 pounds. I made sure to catch up on all the takeout that I missed while away.

Prior to leaving the country, I thoroughly enjoyed life as a 240+ young man who ate at all times of day and night. Once returning from overseas, I was desperate to recapture that joy of eating, but I began to slowly come to terms with the fact that I was aging. My body was beginning to change. I started to have little aches and pains that I hadn’t experienced before. I noticed changes in my breathing when I went for an occasional walk or went up a flight of stairs. I tried hitting the gym, focusing primarily (almost entirely) on chest and arm exercises, but my I never confronted my eating habits. It was completely normal for me to enjoy myself, enjoy my life through food.

Some years back when I was on the cusp of turning 40, the daily aches and pains from walking or mundane daily activities were harder to ignore. I began to feel a quiet pressure of a needed change in my health, but I was far from ready to take any serious steps. I had an annual physical after turning 40 to have a complete picture of my health. My numbers added to the pressure in the back of my mind that I needed to make a change. At some point in the near future, I would somehow need to lose weight, but I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was go on some ridiculous diet! At the same time, I had come to realize that this was another challenge that I had the potential to overcome – eventually.

So, I began to mentally prepare myself for the day when I might seriously work on my health. I actually spent a few years telling myself, my partner and maybe one or two family members that I would eventually lose weight in the future. It was going to be a gradual process because I needed a realistic, sustainable approach to weight loss. I knew that I wouldn’t sustain a dramatic weight loss if I didn’t make significant changes, which I later discovered were more psychological and emotional than physical. The initial stage for me was just talking and/or imagining myself losing 20-30 pounds. Finally, in August 2018 I decided to try monitoring my daily food intake with the MyFitnessPal app. (The above picture was taken in August 2018.) I only lasted two months, but I saw my weight go from 241 to 231 during this period and I had the experience of monitoring my food intake for an albeit brief yet sustained period, which was a nice confidence boost.

After the holidays, I restarted using the app for 2019. My weight jumped back up to 239. By that spring I was nearly 250 pounds. I could feel it, too, with every step that I took. I was enjoying my life, but it started to feel like I was borrowing against my future self to enjoy the present, if that makes sense. I sporadically used the app to log food and check my weight (which remained in the 240s) throughout the year. Then came January 2020. My partner had a health scare and decided to focus more on her health, which was a wakeup call for me to put more effort into my own health. I began tracking my food intake more consistently and saw results.

On January 6, 2020, I weighed 244 pounds. By March 2, I was down to 229.1 pounds. I had reached the point where I would normally begin to relax and gradually return to my normal. Within a week, I was back to 231.4. Then came the news about the loss of my teaching position and the subsequent pandemic shutdown. This would be my point of no return. Life began to spiral out of my control, and this was where I finally decided to go all-in on one of the few things that I could control: What I put into my body. The next few months were amazing. I walked my infant son twice daily, regularly tracked my food intake and saw my weight gradually drop from 231.4 in early March down to 211 by July 1! I might have done an occasional set or two of pushups during this period, but I mainly walked and ate healthy with amazing results!

The most exciting part was that it was just the beginning. That summer, I began to very slowly incorporate bike riding and YouTube workouts into my daily routine. I discovered an entire world of fitness influencers right at my fingertips! I sometimes struggled to understand what took me so long to realize so many possibilities for a better me, but I’m grateful to have finally awakened to these opportunities. As I type this entry, I’m blown away when I think back to those first few months of my pandemic transformation. It wasn’t just the weight loss, but the change in my thinking about food, about health and wellness. Quite honestly, this post doesn’t completely capture what I unlocked from within myself and that’s…okay. I’m still processing this change of mindset, which manifested itself in my semi-obsessive focus on my eating habits and, to a lesser extent, my exercise choices. The latter actually became quite more exciting in 2021, but I’ll touch on that in a later post.

In upcoming entries, I’ll spend more time sharing my experience with the gradual, but stunning changes in my eating habits. In tracking my food, I’ve learned so much about micronutrients and macronutrients including that there’s still so much to learn! This is perhaps the most exciting aspect of this journey: That I’m just scratching the surface of what might be possible! I’ll spend however many remaining years of my life exploring and learning of the varied ways that I can gradually improve my overall health and well-being.