Greetings from Colorado

[archaicfrost]

Hi all! I've been lurking for a little while and finally decided to join the community. I'm hoping that interacting with like-minded people will help me make that final push into complete awesomeness easier to accomplish. I'm 25 (turning 26 in a couple weeks) and have some lofty goals for myself over the next months and years. There aren't many of my friends and family who understand why I want to change (as I see it improve) and when I talk about diets or exercise I'm often ignored, sometimes mocked, or actively told that I don't know what I'm talking about. Strangely very few want to offer any sort of help or support - so that's why I'm here.

**This ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated, I guess I had a lot I needed to get out and be honest about**

I guess I started this journey to be healthy and fit sometime in 2009. This was before I was doing any sort of tracking, so the details are a little sparse and timing is fuzzy. At my heaviest I was around 230 or 240 lbs. I'm 5 foot 9 so you can imagine what that looked like - I'd have to dig around for pictures. I was drinking tons of soda, eating whatever I wanted and essentially being a pig. My exercise was the less than half mile walk to and from work every day, other than that I would sit around and play video games or watch TV. I think that many of the people on these boards had a similar experience and can relate.

During the summer of 2009 I decided to make some changes. I started making smoothies at home with superfood powder and slowly making changes to make my diet more healthy. My soda consumption didn't go down, but at least I switched to diet soda. I didn't really know what I was doing, and in hindsight it was really all about portion control. I still wasn't working out or getting really any exercise, but I was feeling better and losing weight. Now with time and perspective I think a lot of that simply had to do with cutting out all those empty calories from the many, many cans of soda I would drink in a day. By mid to late-2010 I was down to about 200 lbs and felt better than I had in a long time.

Slowly I started cutting diet soda out and making water my beverage of choice. Exercise was still on the back burner, and I was still eating all sorts of junk, but was trying to be conscious about what I was eating and how much. In January 2011 I read the 4-Hour Body and made some attempts to implement some of his suggestions. I feel like I wasn't successful, but by April I was down to about 180 lbs. At the time I felt like a champ, but I didn't really understand there is a difference between the number on the scale and how you actually look and feel.

2011 has been an interesting year full of all sorts of experimentation, mostly different diets and some exercise. Like I mentioned it's hard to say exactly what happened when because I was doing a poor job of keeping track, but there are some key points. I saw that documentary Fat Head - the guy who goes on a fast food diet - and it seemed to match up with some other information I had come across so I tried that. I read Why We Get Fat and The Primal Blueprint in April and May, which led me to try some different things. I got a WiThings scale to track my weight. I read Ultramarathon Man and Born to Run which inspired me to start running (I guess technically again, I ran for a short period when I was in middle school.) The one thing all these diets had in common was cutting out carbs, which turned more into limiting that cutting. A funny thing happened, though, I started to put some weight back on and got back up to around 210, before coming back down (currently I'm right around 192 give or take a few pounds).

I'm not quite sure if I was talking the talk but not walking the walk, or maybe I would go for a run and reward myself with some delicious treat, but something wasn't working. I basically started over, and got really serious about slow-carb (4hr body) for a while, but the results had mostly stagnated. Also, I noticed I didn't feel nearly as good as I did when I attempted to do the primal/paleo thing.

I don't know how much this had to do with it, but I hated my job. I worked a miserable swing shift where I didn't get off until late and would go out for beers almost every night after work. I slept in and always felt miserable. I never felt like I had time to exercise or worry about my diet because I was at work at such unusual times. I finally got a new job with much better hours August 1.

It seems worth mentioning I was a smoker basically since I was 15 and being miserable at work only increased the desire to smoke. There's also cannabis, which I smoked in high school but had mostly avoided all through college, then roughly 9 months after starting the job I hated I started again very regularly until I got to the point of smoking every day. I had my last cigarette on March 14, 2011 - which might explain the stagnation on weight loss. Cannabis lingered a while longer, but I'm proud to say I'm 2 weeks strong, having last smoked November 13, and unlike the last 2 months I'm not really craving or missing it anymore.

That mostly brings us up to date. I had a membership at a nearby climbing gym for 6 months (expired in October) had fun doing that, and am thinking about renewing it in a few months. A few weeks ago I started taking Muay Thai classes and am thinking about adding Jiu Jitsu next year.

Where I frustrate myself is my ability to dive headfirst into something with tons of passion and heart behind it, only to burn out or fall off the wagon shortly afterwards. I joined a gym for all of 2 months after starting my new job before deciding the gym is not for me. I've tried to do P90X at least 3 separate times, but just can't stick with it. When it comes to changing my diet and eating well, I always try to come up with these intricate meal plans and make attempts to do once a month cooking, only to wind up with uneaten food in the freezer or vegetables that go bad. It doesn't help that I'm not really a fan of most vegetables. It's a viscous cycle where I get to ahead of myself, then once I feel like I've failed revert back to bad habits completely.

I realize it's time to change all that. I can't beat myself up when I don't do things perfectly the first time - it's a learning experience, a challenge, and every time I fail I learn something new. For everything I've ever been successful with I've taken baby steps. Two steps forward then one step back is still progress and that's what really matters.

So here are some of my goals:

• 12% body fat in time for my friend's wedding in the Virgin Islands in May. I'm less concerned about total weight, but 175 sounds like a good number. Not sure if I really care, but six-pack abs do sound awesome.
• 25 pull-ups in a row
• 20 minute 5K
• Complete the 2012 Denver Marathon
• Complete the Leadville Trail 100 (yes, a 100 mile foot race) in 25 hours or less in either 2015 or 2016 (when I turn 30)

I'm working on being more strict about sticking to a primal/paleo diet (mostly by increasing my consumption of vegetables) and trying to be more consistent about working out - finding the beginner body weight workout on NF has been really helpful since I had trouble figuring out where to start. I think combining that with muay thai and my running schedule will help lead to the results I really want to see.

So I know this was long, but there's a lot here I've never really said out loud or put in writing before and it feels good to get it off my chest. I'm really looking forward to being part of the community and can't wait to have results like those success stories I saw on NF that inspired me to join the community.

[Lachy]

To be honest, that was a bit long for me to read while at work, but your goals seem pretty awesome!

Welcome to the forums

[ETFnerd]

Looking fwd to seeing you achieve your goals. Welcome.