Good day to you all!

[SimonTemplar96]

Hey All, 

 

I've been a reader of Nerd Fitness for quite a while and I finally decided to actually involve myself in the community. 

 

I'm proficient in many areas of geekdom and nerdery. The word "fan" doesn't really do justice to my abiding love for J.R.R. Tolkien. I like both Star Trek and Star Wars, though I probably like Star Wars more. I've been a gamer for years, including computer games, pen and paper RPG's, and military miniatures historical war gaming. 

 

I'm also a student of history, philosophy, and theology. 

 

I have been a computer programmer, by career, for the last 5 1/2 years, but starting in August I will be transitioning to education and will be teaching programming at a local technical college. 

 

 

My fitness problems began in my early teens. I was always a pretty active kid but my parents decided to home school me starting in 5th grade due to the demonstrated poor quality of our local school district. Homeschooling was a relatively new phenomenon at the time and I didn't have many outlets for activities, and I didn't make my own. As a result I developed a sedentary lifestyle from that point on. I have gradually gained weight since that point, with a few exceptions. 

 

In my teens I developed the identity that was fat and just accepted that as who I was. Family members occasionally tried to motivate me to do something about my weight gain etc. They were always nice about it, but it always amounted to "you know your getting overweight, you should do something about it". The problem was I didn't know what to do about it, and I convinced myself, because I didn't want to diet, that there was nothing I could do about it. 

 

Looking back at pictures now, I really wasn't very overweight. At the time I thought of myself as fat but I wasn't nearly as bad off as I perceived myself to be. 

 

My first experience with fitness really began in my college years. My sister started dating a guy who had been a body builder and football player (he eventually became my brother-in-law). He talked me into training with him and he introduced me to the weight room. He trained me how to weight lift and also started kicking my butt with jogging. 

 

I still remember those workouts as the toughest I have ever done. There were times when we got done squating that my legs were so spent I could barely walk up or down a stairway. During that time I saw a lot of results and started to get down close to healthy weight. 

 

Sadly, not long after he and my sister got married they moved away, thus ending our workouts. I immediately fell back into my sedentary lifestyle and started the upward trend of weight gain again. 

 

A few times after that I started trying to lift weights again but I never got on a regular schedule until I started working with a guy who lifted regularly. I started lifting with my co-worker and doing Strong Lifts 5x5 routine. I saw a lot of strength gains over a couple years but I never got my diet shaped up and I didn't do cardio at all, so I never really saw any weight loss. 

 

Eventually after getting tired of not having the weight loss results I decided to do a bunch of research and figure out what I was doing wrong. I started trolling the interwebz looking for all the good fitness info I could find. Because I was specifically looking to lose weight without losing the strength I had gained, I stumbled across Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto. I read that book and decided to follow the basic program outlined. In about 3 months I lost 30 lbs. At the time that was a drop from 336 lbs down to 306 lbs. I was feeling great and starting to look much better too. Also, for the first time, I was pretty much doing the program on my own, other than occasionally having a lifting partner. 

 

Then, when summer hit I stopped doing the program and started vacation. I kind of had the mentality that I had revved up my metabolism and now I could do what I wanted without consequence. The result was that I didn't really gain much weight over the summer, but once fall hit I started packing on the pounds again. 

 

Eventually, after hitting my highest weight at 366 lbs, I started to try and get back on track again. That was probably about two years ago. In that time I have gone through the same cycle of following a routine for a while and then falling off the wagon. In general though I have gradually tended to make working out more and more my default lifestyle. 

 

For the last year or so I have gone back and forth between 330 lbs and 342 lbs a few times. I have done Starting Strength and Strong Lifts 5x5 most of the time. For a few periods I switched to doing body weight circuit training. Most recently I switched over to doing weight training circuits focused mostly on upper body lifts combined with cardio and I've been doing that for a couple months. 

 

When I combined that with good diet initially I lost about 12 lbs in 3 weeks dropping down to 330. Then I had an old injury flare up (heel injury from softball several years ago) and I fell off the routine. Now I'm at 338 and starting up again.

 

I had never really paid attention to the NF 6 week challenge idea before, but I came up with a plan of my own that was basically the same thing. I started to realize that the idea of just changing something forever, like thinking "I'm going to work out for the rest of my life" or "I'm going to eat this way for the rest of my life" was just too daunting and overwhelming. I also realized that the more I did stuff like that in the short term, the more it became "normal" (ie habit building). So I came up with the idea of setting myself challenges over a more manageable amount of time, initially I set 8 weeks. The intention being that I had an end in sight, which would make the discipline easier, but also that as i did these challenges I would transform what was normal in my life and build the right habits. Then I was reading Nerd Fitness one day and I realize.. oh, I just re-invented the NF 6 week challenge. 

 

In my first 8 week challenge I quickly found out that I would probably do better with a shorter time period. So I was thinking for my own personal use I drop it down to 30 days. I got through the first 21 days of my first challenge really well, but then my injury flared up and things fell apart. 

 

I also plan to participate in the NF 6 week challenges as they come up. 

 

So that's my fitness story to this point.

 

 

[HeyLookABlueRose]

Good day to you too! I'm also going to be starting my first 6 week challenge when the next one comes up, I'm sure you'll do awesome! I'm looking forwards to the extra accountability.

Welcome

[Jakkals]

Anybody with the username Simon Templar has got a lot to measure up to.

 

Good luck with the future, look forward to stalking you on the forums.

[SimonTemplar96]

Thanks for the welcome guys

 

 

Jakkals, are you actually a blacksmith? (judging by the picture you are) That's something I've been interested in. If you are, how did you get started?