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I would say "I'm late posting this thread", but... Even magic space wizards. That said, I'm long overdue to come back home to the NF boards and let this place be the healthy, supportive part of my overall health - physical and emotional - that it was for over five years between 2013 and 2018. 2020 was at least as much a dumpster fire for me as it was for so many others. I have a ton of respect for people who were able to roll with the changes, be productive, and stay healthy over the past year. I'm not one of those people. As of today, I weigh 216 pounds. This is the heaviest I have been since 2013, when I changed my lifestyle (at 45 years old and around 238lbs, down from my 2011 high of 260). I was active, I kept to a schedule, and I had a lifestyle eating change. It was NOT a diet. I got my weight down to 193 by June of 2013, and stayed at or around that weight for five years while becoming the best version of myself. Over the past three years, I've had a couple significant issues come up that have changed my life, permanently. The most significant was the passing of my ex-wife in 2019, which led to my teenagers moving in with me full-time. I've also been dealing with arthritis. Combine those things with a global pandemic and social uprisings against a systemically racist and corrupt police state, and my anxiety levels spiked to occasionally un-manageable levels on a regular basis over the last year. I know how I got here. I also know what I need to do to get back where I belong, which is active and healthy. Goal: Re-establish Healthy Active Habits As recently as last year, pre-pandemic, I was working out at my gym a minimum of three times per week. Prior to that I would also run three to four times per week. I had changed my life from couch-bound in 2012 to perpetual motion when I was not at work. That's not my life now. Now, I work from home and the lack of disconnect has left me sedentary and unhealthy. I'm going to do something, every day. Walk, run, work out, doesn't matter. Do something every day. Log it and report it here. Every day. Goal: Re-establish Healthy Eating Habits For five years, I tracked my nutrition almost daily, and managed to maintain my weight while increasing strength, endurance, and without it affecting my mental health. I learned to track macros and identify good food choices. I need to lose weight - a lot of weight, honestly - but I'm not going to over-correct and try to lose two years of weight gain in just a few weeks. I'm going to set a reasonable goal for calories and macros and track - and report - my nutrition every day. I still won't call it a diet, because I hate that word and its connotations. This will probably be the easiest habit to re-establish. Goal: Re-establish Healthy Emotional Habits After my divorce in 2010 I spent a LOT of time in therapy. This dovetailed with my physical health changes. I established a lot of healthy emotional habits, which helped me cope with the daily stress of life which included an IT job, a volunteer leadership position with my church, and my family (a fiancee, five kids - three adults in various states of independence and two teenagers, a grandson, and two ex-wives). I always have a lot on my plate and stress is constant. Running and exercise were really my outlet. But the pandemic and the resulting isolation has done a number on my emotional well-being. I've fallen out of almost every healthy self-care habit that I had. This will be my hardest habit to pick up because it's a "soft" skill and my brain works best with concrete "I did a thing" goals. I picked up Obstacle Course Racing along the way and I used to have big, main "I'm going to compete in a race" or "I'm going to complete a race" or "I'm going to qualify for" goals. I'm not sure those things are important to me anymore as my life has changed, although I would like to get back to a point where I could do these things again. I know I'm not there now. But the world is round, if I keep moving forward, I could get back there again.

So, I've been coming here for almost ten years. In that time, I've done more than a dozen challenges with the Monks, a few with the Adventurers, one or two with the Warriors, an Assassin run or two, a Ranger run or two... but always coming back to the Monks, due to my interest in MMA, boxing, kickboxing, and all sorts of combat sports. And after ten years, I'm in pretty much the worst shape of my life, and the least parts of me that I never even considered have started breaking down. In no particular order: My beard is more white than black now The old hairline has been thinning slightly for a couple years, but it's now starting to retreat Ear and nose hair jokes are no longer funny, but a sobering assessment of documented reality Dry skin has stopped being periodic and easily treated and is now just my life I can GAIN weight faster than ever before My joints below the waist don't start properly working until I've already been at work for an hour My carpal tunnel wrist brace doesn't seem to be working anymore My left elbow just kinda hurts all the time What the hell seems to be growing next to most of my fingernails? I can't handle spicy food and hot sauce the way I used to, which is perhaps the saddest of all I've been eating my problems lately, and there's a few of them. I stopped going to MMA last summer because I just wanted to have SOME time during the week where I had some time to myself. I stopped going to the gym around the same time because my gym partner (my son) absolutely would not wake up in time to go, and if he didn't go I didn't have motivation. I stopped going jogging, because my dog becomes EXTREMELY upset if I accelerate to anything faster than a walk (she's a husky / German shepherd, but has some deranged urge to try and herd me if it looks like I'm escaping). I set up my weights at home in the garage when it was OK to park the van outside, and all of my weights immediately became covered in home renovation equipment and power tools (thanks, sweetie). I set up my punching bag in the basement once it became too cold to keep it in the garage, but the only time I can use it my daughter is asleep about ten feet away, and it wakes her up. I know this is basically a laundry list of lame BS excuses. I'm owning that. But I just turned 37, and it seems like I've aged more in the last six months than I have in the six years previous. Or more. Without any goals, I don't have any motivation to keep on top of my exercise or diets, and it can't just be the goal of "Weigh X by Y date". My previous goals were all major events. Amateur boxing events, kickboxing events, the Tiger Balm Internationals, road run events, things like that. I missed every road run this year, and I haven't felt remotely capable to actually fight again (and that was BEFORE I stopped training). My first few fights gave me an inflated sense of my abilities, and my last four kind of drove home that I'm clearly not at the level I would like to imagine. I think the final straw this week was my wife's friends all posting "before and after" collages of their significant others, mostly on Facebook, chronicling their weight loss and fitness and how hot they are now. My wife posted two identical and unflattering pictures of me as MY "before and after". An apparently random but related aside: my son has made the decision this week that he wants to try out for football at his school in April. Now, my son is... not sporty. He has (or at least had) a really good excuse for this: idiopathic ANA-neg rheumatoid juvenile arthritis. His legs have never really 'worked right'. He is also a 15 year old who is six feet tall and a solid one-ninety. He is not a runner, he's barely even a sprinter, but he's big and he WANTS to do sports, there's just so few that play to his strengths... but football has some great spots for him, and the football coach and some students have told him that he can pack on a lot of muscle between now and April. Therefore, I'm setting up the weights again, SOMEWHERE, so he can try and build muscle at home, since he acknowledges that there's no way he can wake up in time to go to the gym in the mornings. He barely makes it to the bus in the morning to go to school. He needs sleep... but when he's awake, I want to support him in this. So, there's a lot of stuff happening around me right now. This isn't the right time for me to start to let my health slide. This is around the time where it starts being irreversible. I've managed to avoid any major health problems throughout my life, and my family history is replete with men living to their 80's and 90's. Then again, they were all police, soldiers and farmers, and tended to actually take care of themselves. I sit for ten hours a day for work, then try to sit at home so I can write, and occasionally walk/drag my dog through the snow. I wake up early every morning because there's stuff that needs to be done, but available downtime tends to go towards writing, or more recently, just doodling around on my Minecraft server. If I'm going to be honest with myself, I want to be healthy FOR ME, but I want to look good purely to change how other people see me. My wife laughs anytime I say anything about fighting again, or doing anything interestingly physical. My daughters poke my stomach and laugh and run away. The rest of my MMA gym keeps winning buckets of medals at every west coast competition they go to, but they ask when I'll be back just because they need a heavyweight they can train 'against' for practice (IE, they want a punching bag that moves around). The people in my office make far more food-related jokes and comments to me than they do with anyone else. I've made the commitment (and PRE-PAID) to return to my MMA gym in January. My wife says that she wants to go to the gym at the university, where she has a free membership, but she'll only go if I go with her, so in January we'll be starting that too. She wants to go a few times in December while it's still not very busy, since in December admission is just one can of food for me, and she's still free, so she can try everything out. Food is still going to be the biggest problem, and I am currently checking out intermittent fasting which is something that I think will allow me to eat the things that I CRAVE, but not in enough quantities to pose problems. I am going to figure out some smaller goals, and lay out some benchmarks to help me get there. Small things. A pull-up. A hand-stand. Small, physical things. I just wanted to get this all down here, so I can come back and read all about my failures, and remember why I'm doing this.

I'm fairly certain that I ended up here at this respawn point, because I stumbled into a PVP area and was shanked in the back by an Imperial Operative. So while I sit here and let the medical droid tend to my wounds, let me consider how I got in this mess in the first place. I think it's important to acknowledge what went wrong without fear of being told you're just making excuses or complaining. The fact is, the situation is what it is and now that we're here it's time to dust off and get ready to move forward. So let's start where it all started getting derailed... In June I was doing well. In all honesty, I had gotten in a good routine, making sure to stop at the gym on the half-way point on my daily drive home from work. And after every workout I was logging it via IG to keep myself accountable. I was doing well, even with the impending move on the horizon. Once July hit, we had to hunker down and finish packing without knowing where we were going to go before August. In truth, the housing market is tough right now for renters. Prices are super high and places are getting snatched up in the blink of an eye. A huge truckload of stress came slamming down on me and my family (and extended family) during this time. My wife and I, by the grace of God, managed to find a place through a friend, and began moving. The majority of the move was my wife and my parents moving over the course of the course of the last two weeks of July. In addition my wife and I ended up with strep throat during this time. We eventually got everything moved and no one got injured during the process. Now, aside from the expected un-boxing, things were looking good. It took us about two weeks to recover from the sickness. My drive to work also shifted and lengthened by about 15-30 min each way, since we moved to a different city. That also put the gym out of the way rather than en route. Since the move I've been out of sorts and been struggling to get into a routine again. In short, it's been hard. Now, I feel like I'm back to my old higher weight again (can't find our scales amidst the myriad of boxes left), but regardless what my weight IS, I certainly feel it. It's time to dig my heels in and stop losing ground. I'm certainly not getting any younger. (Had a birthday in August, yay!) TL;DR 1. Was doing good, logging workouts via IG. 2. Stress of finding a place and moving hit. 3. Moved to a new city further away from work. 4. Got sick and recovered. 5. Had a Birthday. 6. Lost old routine. 7. Need to get back on track. I haven't decided how I'm going to go about really getting back on track yet. I just know that I need to take that first step mentally, and this is it. Funny how it seems when you fall off the wagon, you forget all the things you got situated and settled in with in the past run. I do know that I really want to avoid counting calories/carbs if I can help it, but that won't be a deal breaker if I have to do some sort of number crunching along the way. Anyway, it's good to be back...

Hey, BRHemp here (my name, not my hobby.) 44 yr old Batman wannabe. LV1 and 2 CF instructor who makes most of his own stuff. I have a family and child support so I'm not exactly rolling in the dough. I am one of those guys in green who run around in the desert looking for people and drugs that shouldn't be here. You might have seen me on Border Wars. Anyway, I'm always looking for people who want to get fit and have fun. Me??? I was 245 lbs two years ago with a 40 inch waist. Not the image of law enforcement that I should have been. I started doing Crossfit and loved it. Dropped 35 lbs, and 6 inches off my waist. Got a ton of certs. But wasn't real happy with how some of the things were promoted i.e. pay lots of money for things that you can make on your own (sand bags, bulgarian sand bags, tires, etc.) So I started researching on my own and lo and behold found Nerd Fitness. WOW. People like me who want to get healthier and not spend their entire paycheck to do it I have my own garage gym where I train and train family and friends, The Old Bastard's Gym. Come and get your snatch fixed at the OB GYM heh heh heh. Most of the stuff I started with I paid handsomely for. Now I try to make as much as my own stuff as possible. I look forward to hearing from like minded people. And yes I am a nerd, or at least I'm told on a daily basis by my fiance, kids, co-workers and students. Yeah, I said it, so there. and Yes I really do want to be Batman. Always have, always will. Hope to hear from my nerd fitness brothers and sisters.

Challenge 14 I turn 40 during this challenge so this one will be about reinforcing some healthy habits and putting some structures in place to cope with entering my middle years. Some things are getting harder as I get older, recovery in particular so I'll need to focus on mobility more. I still have a bum wrist which does rule most lifting out but I'm getting around it with lots of leg work and it's slowly improving. Goals: 1. Don't look into the light...[DEX 3] I spend way too much time on computers and TV. - Maximum 1.5 hours a day of either surfing the web or watching TV. Using PC for work stuff doesn't count. 2. Lift [sTR 5] - 3 times a week 3. Eat (well) [CHA 2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ctTQeTPILI8 - Full Paleo 3 days a week 4. I like the way you work it [WIS 5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KL9mRus19o - I'm working on a plan for a small side business to earn some extra cash and keep me sane, goals for this -- Finish prototype -- Finish cost model -- Launch website

Introduction: Greetings! I've been lurking around Nerd Fitness for the past few months reading articles and learning as much as I can and enjoying the nerd references. I'm an oldschool nerd and I spent about the last 10 years living an unhealthy lifestyle that revolved around a career that required a lot of travel and poor health choices. Since switching paths a bit over a year ago my fitness quest has been on again off again so I thought its time to commit to a 6 week challenge. In the past year I have lost 35 pounds but I can't seem break past the current plateau so some consistency over the next 6 weeks should do the trick. Age: 40 (and feeling 50) Gender: Male Height: 180 cm (5'11'') Weight: 118 kg (260 lbs) Main Quest: I want to be fit again. I was fit a long time ago and I remember what it felt like. I'm aware this is a poor goal to have because its neither measurable or definitive. But that's it. I don't want to feel old and sluggish anymore. I know I am no longer 25 but I should feel better than this at 40. To feel my age, or better! Quest 1: Do a work workout a minimum 3 times a week for the duration of the challenge. Keep the workouts intense and measurable so I can track progress. I'll probably start with the beginner body weight workout and occasionally change it up with some running and cycling and weight lifting. Quest 2: Work on my flexibility and mobility so that my right side is not so much stiffer than my left (old car accident). I think with some better mobility I should feel much better, less stiff and sore. Quest 3: Defeat my nemesis Dairy Queen and limit ice cream and other treats to 2 times a week. Life Quest: Help turn my family into a fit and active family. I would like our family to be healthier, sick less often, and be able to attack life. To do that I have to lead by example and level up myself before I can help them. Motivation: I want to provide a good example to my 3 year old daughter. I want her to grow up fit, healthy, active and confident she can do whatever she wants to try.

BlamedCat Wars Episode 5 "The Return of Three Dead Nigh" This time around, I've identified a bad habit creeping up in my person. As I jump from challenge to challenge, I'm slacking on previously dominated goals. This challenge is going to be me revisiting three key goals from my past challenges and implementing them. I know we're suppose to have four, but I feel my life goal would be best served to establish these three "old" goals once again and fashion them into something stronger in my life than just a pat on the back and an A on a challenge goal. In church today, the pastor brought up a very good quote that I'd like to share as my motivator for this challenge. The quote he shared was thus... I found a similar quote online and it's equally as inspiring and true. For those of you who are curious... Either way you look at it, now is the time to stop sowing laziness and "instant gratification" into our lives. Otherwise we will continue to reap the poisoned fruits of our labors (bad health, bad habits, bad examples for the next generation, etc) I'll put up my goals tomorrow at work.