Hi, I'm Blake. I googled 'body weight exercises' and this website was the first thing that came up. I started looking through articles and was thoroughly impressed by this site and have decided to join it and harness it's power to get me fit. I'll talk a bit about my fitness past. When I was in High School I gained a lot of weight. There was a time where I was 220lbs at 5 foot 9 inches. This is pretty fat. I had virtually no muscle, and the only muscle I did have was leg muscle from snowboarding. In gym class I didn't do very well at any sports except for ones where all I had to do was kick stuff hard. I drank crazy amount of Dr Pepper and Coke and ate pizza every single day. I kind of just assumed I'd be fat forever and never thought much to working out. Occasionally I'd curl the 15lb dumbbells we had a couple times and then proceed to eat gratuitous amounts of junk food. HOWEVER in my senior year I realized this was absolutely terrible. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I was a greasy, foul-smelling, obese, troll of person and shouldn't have to see myself that way. I started with cutting my hair. My terrible bowl-cut-ish thing was carefully removed from my head and I learned about things such as hair product and showering every day. To sum up this segment of my life I just cleaned up. Not really fitness yet, but this was a very clear step towards changing. I joined wrestling. I was always too embarrassed to join sports teams because I wasn't too popular at my school and I didn't want to set my image as the fat kid who was bad at football. The wrestling team was across town at the Catholic School however, and I knew the 3 or 4 kids there my age from Halo meet ups many years previous. They were in no way athletes but they enjoyed their sport and were very welcoming when I asked to join. Wrestling was the first sport I'd ever seriously enjoyed and the only thing I didn't like was how my weight got in the way. I was thoroughly frustrated at how exhausted I'd get having to move my 220lb form across the mat and this inspired me to start going to the gym. I wasn't too interested in weight loss, as much as I wanted to be strong enough to throw my weight around with ease. I started doing lots of lifting. My bench press went from 110lbs to 205lbs over 6 months. I had 2 friends on the wrestling team I'd work out with 5 days a week. It was phenomenal. I didn't lose a single pound though. I remained at 220lbs. I obviously gained muscle and lost fat but from afar I still just looked like a chunky guy. I was content though because I knew I was strong. After school ended and wrestling stopped I stopped working out. By the end of the school year I was sitting at about 210ish. I started working a job waiting for University to start. I still didn't lose any weight as I was working in a kitchen and ate tons of pizza. When University started everything changed. I was never quite aware of when it happened, but my friends from my hometown started looking at my facebook photos and saying, "Wow Blake you've lost a lot of weight!" At my new place in the city I didn't have a scale and was very busy with school so I didn't notice my weight-loss for a while. It turned out that since I had to buy my own groceries I started eating considerably less. This mixed with going to school every day at 9 in the morning until 10 at night with theatre rehearsals I developed a very healthy rhythm. I dropped to 200lbs over the first month, and then down to 190lbs over the next two months. I had dropped 30lbs without even knowing it just by eating less and getting the right amount of sleep. Over the next year or so I changed schools, gained back some weight and then over the summer started doing activities like Rock Climbing and occasionally running. I've dropped down to 177lbs from 220lbs and am ready to get in shape. I want to knock off the last 20 or so pounds of fat and start gaining enough muscle where people look at me and say, "Hey. That guy is fit." And this site seems like the perfect place to talk about it as I do it. SO IF YOU READ ALL OF THIS THANK YOU. TL;DR: I WAS FAT, NOW I'M LESS FAT. I HOPE I GET FIT Me currently at 5 foot 10 and 177lbs.
