#61: Lean and mean
No sub sandwiches and carb-counting, just good old diet and exercise.
I had taken a long break from the gym since there was a billing error with the YMCA and I canceled my membership in frustration, so I sat at 250lbs for quite a while during 2003-04. But when I reclaimed my masculinity, I was reinvigorated to reinvent myself so I signed up with 24 Hour Fitness to push it further. This worked out well for me since I was a night owl and I wanted to get active at strange hours of the night. If the television sucked on a late Saturday night, I went to the gym. Bored? I went to the gym. Pissed off at work? Went to the gym.
By 2005, the scale told the story. My mom was shocked. Clients couldn’t believe how I looked. The anti-carb crazed people (the fad diet going on at the time) asked me if it was that fucking Atkin’s diet. (“No, a far more effective plan…exercise,” I responded.) I had tossed out all of my 2XL and 3XL shirts and now has M and L clothing hanging in their place (the only downer about weight loss is the subsequent expense to replace everything). I looked even better than I did in High School as a teenager. I could even get into my old clothes from my teen years again, but they still didn’t fit right. They were now too big.
Around this time I had to renew my drivers license and had a brand new photo taken. The new photo didn’t make me smile as much as one single line on the license…Weight: 185lbs. I had dropped over 100lbs. I still wasn’t lean enough to grace the cover of Men’s Health, but it was a considerable, considerable improvement.
I now had “health” in the triangle, but what about “wealth?” Little did I know that these changes in my life served as a magnet of sorts: big things were forthcoming on the horizon for me.
The Dateable Dork Says:
June 11th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Wow, congrats! That’s a huge accomplishment!