About Me

Like many, I've never been thrilled with my physique but I'm closer now than I have been in a long time. As a child I was pretty scrawny and I estimate that I weighed about 160 lbs. when I graduated from high school. I was never particularly strong or athletic but could eat monstrous quantities of food, especially during those high school years when I was running cross country and track. Oftentimes my mother cooking me a pan of lasagna, separately from what she made for her and my father. I would eat 3/4 of that for dinner and finish off the rest before I went to bed.

When I got to college I kept eating like a machine and stopped exercising. I wasn't really aware of the weight gain until I stepped on the scale two years later and registered at 220 lbs. Part of me was enjoying the feeling of not being so scrawny anymore, but I was rapidly becoming obese and still have stretch marks from gaining 60 lbs. in two years. I singled out sugary sodas (which I was consuming at the rate of 12 cans per day during that time) as the primary culprit and switched to diet sodas. My weight remained relatively stable for a few years after that.

At various times since I turned 20 I've weighed as little as 185 and I've weighed as much as 250. On my 6'2" frame, I've mostly lived on the edge between "overweight" and "obese" according to the BMI charts. My various weight loss attempts over the years have always worked while I stuck to whatever plan it was, but I never stuck to those plans for much more than a year. Here's a picture of me in 2005. I think i was approaching 240 lbs at that point.



My most recent attempt started in December of 2008. At 228 lbs, I started counting calories using Calorie King and joined a local gym. I followed the traditional diet advice given by the Calorie King site and worked out 5-6 days a week alternating between weights and cardio. All in all, in was a successful campaign and in November of 2009, I stalled out at 188 lbs and rebounded up to 195 by December, even though I was sticking very faithfully to the regimen that had gotten me that far. Between the plateau, moving houses, needing to find a new gym and being tired of being hungry, I gave up and regained most of that weight over the course of the next year.

Around March of 2011, at the age of 38, I watched Fat Head and it inspired me to give this whole weight loss thing another shot. I started at 217 lbs. and by November I broke below 200. That was all without doing any exercise and living an extremely sedentary lifestyle. During that time I became increasingly interested in the dozens of low carb and paleo blogs and have been reading them voraciously ever since.

During December of 2011 I plateaued for a while but I was pleased with how far diet alone had taken me. I wasn't feeling fatigued by the limitations of the diet but I was beginning to feel very restless. I needed to move about and lift some heavy stuff so I signed up at East Valley Crossfit and joined their weight lifting club. I'm not terribly drawn to metabolic conditioning or chronic cardio, but I find myself looking forward to the twice weekly weight lifting sessions.

Continuing the diet and lifting twice a week, I broke through the plateau and broke below 190 lbs. in April of 2012, which at my height finally brought my BMI into the "normal" range. Since then I have upped my calories to prevent further weight loss so that I can focus on building more muscle mass. My ultimate goal is to get down to 10% body fat and maintain a normal BMI. Hopefully for life this time.

To make it a bit more visual, here a graph of my weight eating low carb/paleo from March of 2011 through May of 2012. There were a few ups and downs but the overall trend is pretty encouraging.

The goal of this blog is to share some of the lessons I have learned along the way and share some of my thoughts about what is going on in the low carb and paleo worlds. I am also hoping that it will keep me accountable and motivated to keep the weight off for good. This is me in 2001 (left) vs. me in 2012 (right). No more pudgy face, double chin and gut flopping over the belt line.

While I may express my opinions on what works for me and may even share my strategies for weight loss and fitness, note that I am not a doctor, biochemist or a nutritionist so nothing I say here should be construed as qualified medical advice.