Newbie

[RussTheAerialist]

I just discovered the site yesterday, and I'm already converted!

My background:

I was the fat kid in school, constantly picked on for being overweight, for not liking sports, etc. Pretty typical story. When I was 29 (5 years ago), I was pushing 200 pounds from a combination of bad eating, stress, and lack of exercise, so I decided to change my life. By carefully tracking what I ate, and spending 30 minutes every morning on my rowing machine, along with taking the bus to work, I managed to drop 60 pounds.

And then a ran away and joined the circus (literally!), but circus training has been very hard for my body because I'm always hungry, and stopped calorie counting, and stopped all other exercise other than practicing on the trapeze. I was eating sugar left and right, and generally just being very cavalier with my health.

Fast forward to last year, when I injured my shoulder and wrist. Bad injury that kept me mostly sedentary for the better part of a year and my weight and body fat has increased to unacceptable levels. While I'm not anywhere close to where I used to be, I'm ready to level up again, and that means being more deliberate in my approach, and finding this website has made me really happy.

My goals:

I need to update my goals to time-box them, but my metagoals are a flat stomach, more pull ups (I can do about 5 at a time right now), and <12% body fat. I'm also planning to balance my strength training which currently only consists of upper body, pulling motions since it is entirely trapeze-based currently. I do a few push ups after each training session, along with lots of stretching, but I definitely know my injury was due to a muscle imbalance.

Long story short, I'm glad this place exists!