I was sitting in my office, listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on my turntable — I have it in mp3 format, but when you play vinyl, you play vinyl for a reason –, and planning to write a short post about how listening to that record is my earliest childhood memory. It came out one year after I was born, and my parents played it constantly in our tiny little house out in the San Fernando Valley, when it was still mostly farmland and wide, empty streets.
I remember sitting on the gold shag carpeting, leaning against our black and white checkered couch, listening to This Song Has No Title through giant headphones that probably weighed as much as I did, plugged into the stereo with a curly black cord that must have been fifteen feet long.
I was about to write about that, and explore some of the sense memories this particular album gives me, when Marlowe — who had been sleeping at my feet — jumped up, barked, and ran to the front door. Seamus and Riley followed, and I heard the familiar sound of the mail dropping into the mailbox. I got up from my desk and quieted them down, picked up the mail, and opened the front door to see if there was anything on the porch. I saw some junk mail and a medium-sized cardboard box, which I picked up and brought into the house.
I recycled the junk mail, and opened the box. Inside, underneath a bunch of padding, was the replacement FitBit clip I’d ordered last week, to replace the one that Marlowe thought would be really fun to take off my nightstand and run around with in the back yard.
I thought it was kind of funny that the packaging was so inefficient, and that the padding was proudly called EarthAware. I took a picture and put it on the tweetybox:
I know that there are economies of scale for companies like FitBit, so using one basic box to ship things probably makes sense for the company. It’s ultimately not the biggest deal in the world, but the ridiculousness of it tickled the part of my brain that appreciates that sort of thing.
A fair amount of people on Twitter wanted to know how I liked my FitBit, and if I thought it worked, so when I went back into my office, instead of writing about music, I decided to write about how I’ve lost almost 20 pounds since November.
In early November, one of my friends got married. His wedding was wonderful, and it ended up being a sort of reunion for a lot of us who used to write and perform together at ACME, a little over a decade ago. The wedding attire was “1950s Red Carpet”, so Anne got an amazing dress (I’m not exactly an impartial observer, here, but I think every dress she wears is amazing), and I went to rent a classic men’s tuxedo.
I gave my measurements to the lady at the shop(pe), and she got me some trousers and a jacket to try on. I took them to the fitting room, and … I did not fit into them. At all. Not even a little bit.
“I, um, think you need to measure me,” I said. I knew that I’d put on some weight over summer, but I didn’t know how much. I’m not a get-on-the-scale guy, and I’ve always felt like I’m in fairly good health.
I was about to find out how wrong I was.
She grabbed her measuring tape, and put it around my waist. “How bad is it, doc?” I semi-joked.
“It’s, um …” she tugged and looked and tugged again and looked again. “It’s … 40.”
“Forty? Like, ‘hey, let’s bust a 40’ forty?” I said.
“Yep.” She continued to measure around my arms and chest and neck.
“Your neck is sixteen and three quarters, and your chest is thirty-eight.”
“Wow. I’ve really let myself go,” I said. I thought for a second, and said, “So get me what will fit me, and I’m going to start looking after my weight today.”
Before she could leave, I added, “I don’t know why I needed to tell you that. Sorry.”
“It happens all the time,” she said, not unkindly.
She returned with a tux that looked like you could use it to cover a piano*, and it fit me comfortably. I filled out the paperwork, thanked her for her time, and drove home.
“Did you get the tux you wanted?” Anne asked me, when I came into our house.
“Well, I got a tux.” I told her about my new measurements, and then resolved to lose weight. “I knew I was a little tubby, but I didn’t realize that I was incorrectly using the term ‘little’. I need to do something about it.”
“Your stomach has been looking bigger to me,” she said, “and your face is a little heavy. And I don’t care about how you look, but I do care about how healthy you are, and if you’re carrying extra weight around, that’s going to be hard on your internal organs and the rest of your body.”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” I said, and remembered an exhibit we went to at the museum years ago, that featured plastinated bodies. It was a fascinating experience, but something that stayed with me long after we left was a very obese body. This person’s internal organs were just crushed by fat deposits. I don’t recall the specifics, but it made an impression on me: if a person is carrying a lot of extra weight that you can see, they’re also putting a whole lot of stress and pressure on their heart, lungs, and other vital organs that you can’t see.
“So I need to think about how I got here, and how I’m going to get back to my fighting weight.”
“Do you know what you weigh now?”
I shook my head. “But I can find out.” I walked into my office, pulled a scale out of the closet, set it to zero, and stepped on it. The numbers spun around, shook a little bit, and settled down at about 182 pounds. I stepped carefully off the scale, like it would bite me or something if I moved too fast.
“I. Um. Wow.” I said. Last time I checked, I weighed 165.
“Okay,” I said with resolve. “I know what to do. It’s just math, right? Use more calories than I take in, eliminate junk food, and exercise every day. I can do this.”
I did an inventory of what I liked to eat and drink. I don’t drink sodas, I don’t like sweets, and I never have fast food. Those are the easiest things to cut out of a diet for a person who is looking to lose weight, and they were already out of mine.
But.
But.
But … boy do I like burritos, and boy do I like beer.
I did some math.
“I know how this happened, and I know how to undo it,” I said to Anne.
“Does it rhyme with burritos and beer?” She said.
“It does. And not just that, it’s also the midnight cheese.”
Aside: Midnight Cheese is a phrase Anne and I say to describe something that’s a very bad idea. For example, eating a lot of cheese at midnight may taste delicious, especially if you’ve had a few drinks and you’re staying up late to play tabletop games with your friends — just to cite a totally random example that I most certainly did not pluck from my personal experience** — but it’s not the best idea, ever.
“So I have to cut out the midnight cheese, literally and figuratively, and seriously cut back on burritos and beer. I also need to increase my exercise by, like, a million percent.”
Anne’s brother used this nifty little app on his smartphone that let him track how much he was eating, not just from a caloric perspective, but from a nutritional perspective, too. It let him input his meals and snacks, and also his exercise. It was free, so I downloaded it and installed it on my phone. (I’m not going to identify it, because I don’t want to sway people in one direction or another. Just know that there are a lot of them in the App and Play stores, and they’re incredibly helpful). I gave it some stats, like my age, sex, height and weight. I told it my target weight, and how aggressively I wanted to lose weight. It did some math, and gave me a simple plan.
So far, so simple, but this only works if I’m committed, and I think you have to do something for about a month for it to become an ingrained habit. I wasn’t sure that I could make it — one of the super awesome parts of depression is that it can suck all your motivation away from you — but I would just go one day at a time, one meal at a time, and see what happened.
I immediately cut down my beer consumption to one pint a day. I reduced #burritowatch to maybe once a week. I started to enter my meals into my app, and after a few days, I started to see that it really wasn’t that difficult to make healthy food choices, once I knew what was going into my body. Notably, there were things that I thought were okay, but turned out to have tons of sodium in them, or had way more calories than you’d expect. I started to walk every day. It was just a mile or so at first, and by the end of the first week, I was up to two miles a day. I started to notice that, if I wanted, I could do X amount of exercise, to earn Y amount of beer.
I was having a lot of fun, I was starting to feel pretty good, and — here’s the thing that blew me away — when I got back on the scale at the end of the first week, I’d lost almost 6 pounds. I’ve heard from lots of people that once you start watching what you eat and exercising, if you’re carrying weight that your body really doesn’t want, it tends to fall off pretty quickly, but I didn’t think that would really happen to me (Dear Penthouse …) but it totally did!
This gave me a huge motivational boost, and it carried me through to the end of the second week, which was good, because that’s when Thanksgiving happened. Boy, was it challenging to not go nuts at dinner, but when I started recording what I was eating, I felt pretty good about what I had eaten. And I also noticed another thing: I wasn’t overeating. By that, I mean that I wasn’t stuffing myself until I felt like I was going to drop into a food coma. I ate until I was full, but I ate slowly, and really savored my dinner.
I think it was around this time that I asked some of my friends about FitBit, and if it worked as well as people said it did. Every single one of them said that it did, and one of my friends told me that their digital scale was super helpful and effective. It also integrated with the smartphone app I was using, so I didn’t need to manually enter my walks. I ordered one, set it up with my goals the same way I configured the other app, and added my friends to my dashboard.
And this is where it became a game for me, and this is how and why I’ve been able to lose almost 20 pounds just by being smart about what I eat, and getting exercise every day.
I’d see that one of my friends had walked 8000 steps, and I was at 7200 steps, so I’d go for a walk and try to pass him. I’d see that one of my friends was catching up to me, so I’d make sure I parked as far away from the entrance to wherever I was going, so she couldn’t catch me. After a week of this,I saw that I’d walked close to 50 miles in seven days! One day, I was doing lots of stuff around the house and yard, and didn’t even realize that I’d walked close to two miles without ever leaving my property. Little things started to add up, and I started to look at every time I went somewhere as an opportunity to get steps.
And the badges! Oh, the badges. I got a badge for hitting 10,000 steps in a day, then 15,000, then 20,000. I got a badge for losing my first 10 pounds, and I got one for climbing the equivalent of 50 stories of stairs. I know they don’t really mean anything, but it’s fun to get achievements for things like that, and it’s incredibly motivating for me.
But I have to tell you what the best thing was. The best thing, ever, was getting a T-shirt out of my drawer that I loved but could never fit into because it was a skinny medium, and realizing that I could put it on without any difficulty. It was just amazing when I put on a belt, and instead of using the notch I’d been using, went all the way past it to the narrowest notch on it. A lot of my T-shirts and dress shirts are just too big, now, and boy does that feel awesome.
A few days ago, I went to get some measurements taken, because I’m having something special made to wear on the JoCo Cruise. I was pretty excited to find out what my waist was, and I may have let out a little yelp of excitement when I found it it was down to 35 inches, just about 85 days after I’d committed to slimming down a bit.
I don’t know if this will work for everyone. I don’t have emotional or biological issues related to my weight. I have a lot of freedom in my schedule to walk pretty much whenever I want to. I live in a place where the weather is usually pretty great, and I’m lucky enough to combine all of those things into something that works for me. I also have a fantastic certified personal trainer, who happens to be my son, who comes to my house three days a week to train me.
But, mostly, I have motivation, commitment, and a way to gamify fitness that works for me. This morning, I weighed in at 163.2 pounds, down from just over 180 three months ago. (And I can’t believe it’s been three months, because I really do just take it one day at a time.)
Anyway, since a lot of people asked, there’s my story. And because it’ll probably be a FAQ: I’m not going to add people I don’t know to my friends list, because that’ll be weird for me.
In the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve listened to all four sides of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. Maybe I will write that story about being a little kid experiencing music for the first time after all.
But now I have to go get steps, because I checked my dashboard and Eric just passed me.
*this may be a slight exaggeration
**this may not be entirely true
First 2-3 songs on the album are one of my all time favs. I shall go listen now…
Good luck on the exersize.
Despite what the multi-multi-billion dollar weight-loss industry would like us all to believe, being fat is not inherently unhealthy. We all do have a general set point that our body is happiest at and for some that is slim and for others it isn’t.
I’m glad you mentioned that for others there are other factors coming into it as well, such as health issues and emotional issues. In general, as long as one eats generally healthy, and does exercise that one’s body can do and that one enjoys, wherever you end up then is probably the right point.
Yo-yo dieting and starving oneself are guaranteed to raise that set-point and are worse for you than being tubby, and since 95% of dieters gain back the weight and then some within 5 years, it is definitely not a betting game I would want to take on any more! Anyway am glad you feel better and yes i know the pleasure of fitting into stuff that didn’t fit, but i also know the crushingly crap sensation when they stop fitting again. I hope you just had to get back to your set-point and it stays off, and if it doesn’t, just remind yourself you are one of the 95%. 🙂
this boy’s too young to be singing the blues
I’ve had my fitbit for 2 years. Wanna be fitbit friends? 🙂
Wil, I could have written this exact same story. The Fitbit literally changed my life two years ago. So much so I’m on my second one having broken the first through constant use. Between Feb 2012 and Nov 2012 I lost 40 pounds. I went from a 38″ waist to a 31″. The harder part was keeping it off. I managed to keep it all off for a year, and gained 5 pounds during the last holiday season. The terrible thing they don’t tell you is that as you lose weight, its harder to burn the same amount of calories, so to get back to my pre-past-Nov weight, I’ve upped my step goal by 2k more steps and just started to melt off the pounds again.
The most important parts are I feel better about myself, I can keep up with my kids, and as I’m in my late 30s, I’m in better shape than I have been since I left college.
Whenever I heard about anyone taking the step and having the same tool that worked for me, and in much the same way it worked for me in the gamification and metrics way, I can’t do anything buy say “hell, yeah, brother! Welcome to the club!”
Good job, very inspirational. I’m in pretty much the same situation now as you were in 3 months ago. Doesn’t Burritos qualify as fast food though?
That is pretty fucking awesome, dude! I went through a similar experience last week (although not for a wedding; I just noticed that a particular pair of chef pants that used to fit me very comfortably had a button pop off while I was trying to put them on). I promptly weighed myself, and realized that, holy crapbaskets, I’m sitting at about 30 lbs heavier than when I last did this! So, I immediately made the same commitment to watching what I eat and exercising more, and a friend of mine pointed me to the Nerd Fitness site (which also “gamifies” fitness and nutrition into the same delightful little RPG style tropes that your buddy Chris Hardwick talked about in The Nerdist Way that I used to help get other parts of my life in better order), and as a result of signing up for that site, and doing some of the stuff they recommend, I’ve not only discovered that paying attention to what I eat and exercising more is actually more awesome and, dare I say, fun, than I ever thought it was, I’ve managed to shed 7 pounds in the last week! It feels pretty good.
My point? Well, whenever I have periods where my resolve might waver, all I have to do is open up my bookmarks, load this post, and say, “Hey, one of your heroes went through the same thing and is doing pretty all right by it, therefore it’s worth doing.” So, thank you for this. And keep at it! Like my fellow friends of Bill W. are fond of saying, it works if you work it, and you’re worth it.
I used to use a food tracker app, but I hated that it wanted me to weigh myself every day. I started to do that, and started obsessing when I went up even a tenth of a pound, started obsessing when I would get close to my calorie limit,…and I was always so HUNGRY. I started realizing that it wasn’t right for me, and instead started looking into Health At Every Size (HAES). My husband and I are both fat, but our numbers are good. That’s good enough for me. We all have to do what’s best for our bodies.
Good for you, Wil! And thanks for sharing with us. Please do write about your childhood memories — we’d love to hear about them.
Nicely done Wil! In 2011, I had a similar experience involving my own version of “midnight cheese.”
I decided I’d had enough, and started walking 3 miles every day with my wife (amongst other dietary adjustments). She lost over 45 lbs, and I lost almost 70 lbs in 12 months.
Keep it up man.
Awesome job Wil! I’m in the same boat as you kind sir! I got my Fitbit One about 3 weeks ago. And you’re absolutely correct. I make a game out of it as well, and it works. Of course I have LONG way to go, but since I’ve been dieting and such all my adult life and nothing has stuck before. I’m taking it slow this time and doing something right for myself everyday. Even if it’s a minor thing, such as driving past a fast food chain when I am really hungry, or taking that flight of stairs instead of the elevator. Little things count! Anyways! Best success to you! And to all of us in the forever fight to get healthier!
Cheers Wil!
And thanks to that post, I just ordered one for myself and asked a few friends to do the same so that we can motivate each other. Sometimes, it really is a little thing like reading that someone else was in the exact same situation to help. I don’t have a trainer, a lot of time, and have some unhealthy habits to break, but I just got the jolt of motivation I needed. Thanks Wil.
I lost a large amount of weight – about 60 pounds – over the space of a year and have managed to keep it off. It turns out keeping it off has been more difficult. Less than 20% of people who have lost weight still have it off five years later. I find I have to monitor, watch my eating and exercise religiously, but it works.
Here are some notes on tactics to lose
http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2011/06/recommendations-for-losing-weight.html
Also you have to compensate for a changed metabolism. Unfortunately our metabolism has a diode nature to it. It wants to gain weight, but not lose weight. I find my normal metabolism is lower – about 15% to 20% lower than it was at the same weight before I had gained and then lost. Sadly this is very common and appears to be permanent.
Good luck!
So happy and proud for you, Wil! Keep up the good work. My best friend has lost 40 pounds in the past six months after just having enough of knee pain and not being able to do things, and it’s so inspiring. Like Anne with you, I don’t care about her weight, but I do care about her health, so I’m happy all around here.
I’m fortunate enough that weight hasn’t been a struggle for me (yet) in my life, but this whole running thing is totally new to me (the biking and the swimming I can handle, but running – ugh) and I have found that apps help so much. There’s no way I could do it without them. Making it a game, having something keeping track of things, and having that little reminder on my phone keeps me honest. 😉
PS:
My latest project is another charity fundraiser – this time a half marathon (OMGWHUT?!) for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to honor my friend who died this past November, and I’m so grateful for all the help apps have given me. And to Twitter, of course, where my tweeps donate more than I could even imagine. (By the way, my goal for this one was $1701, and yes, they did pass that magic number. *grin*)
Actually, funny story. I’m only running because of fandom and a crazy idea another fan had a few years ago. Geeks and fitness and charity. It’s a good combination. Go, geeks, go!
This is awesome! It excites me as an idea to try to get my weight back under control, too. The scariest part of this, to me, is that I have a lot of friends who don’t have something like this and would never do anything like this. Finding other people to be friends with to trigger my competitive-gamified-motivating drive sounds difficult. What should someone like me do?
This is awesome! I’m in a similar situation to you 3 months ago. I’ve always had to find “hacks” for myself to exercise, because I generally get super bored while exorcizing for exercising’s sake. Since right now I’m in the Frozen North, my current hack is to queue up an episode of Tabletop while I ride my indoor bike. It’s worked great so far!
I have always talked about getting healthier and wanting to lose weight, but it’s only been just that: talk. Today (V-Day), my husband delivered a salad from my fave restaurant (while on his lunch break, no less!), because he said today is all about my heart and making it healthy!
Dogma it, Wil, now I had to go out and get fit it’s for the mrs and me (I need it a heck of a lot more than she does). I am at a 42 inch waist and am the heaviest I’ve ever been (nearing 300). I used to think I carried it well, but not anymore. Several years ago, though diet and exercise, I dropped 45 lbs (from 285 to 240) and was looking good and feeling good. But, life changed and I fell off and regained it back and more. I have to drop it and keep it off, and your note is a good inspiration.
I do have one question, though. You did not mention the app as clearly you do not want to endorse one over another, but….there are a slew of them out there. Please, what app is it?
Wil – what you’re doing is how I lost 70 pounds 4 years ago. I regained 15 pounds this past year, so today I renewed my commitment to eating right. Changing what I ate made all the difference.
You are an inspiration!!! Thank you!!
Wow. I seriously could have written this post, although I started at about 205 pounds, and am now down to, as of today, 169. You’re describing pretty much my exact mindset — got up to a weight I knew was “heavy”, but didn’t know quite how bad. Started using an app to track calories, exercising regularly (in my case I go to the gym for 30 minutes, 4 days a week. 2 days cardio, 2 days very simple weights circuit). And holy shit, I feel about a million times better today than I did back in October when I started. But yeah, it just takes commitment, finding a routine that works for you, and, for people like us, finding a way to gamify definitely helps.
As a side note, I scratch the same “gaming” itch with budgeting, much to my wife’s pleasure, because it means she doesn’t have to worry about it. Hitting targets on spreadsheets rings the same bell that leveling up in an RPG or winning a tabletop game does for me 🙂
I love hearing health recovery stories. I myself have gone from 360 pounds (165kg for us Aussies) to 285 pound (129kg) in 5 n a half months through watching my intake and walking. I don’t have walking friends but I do try to beat my previous days’s walk where possible 🙂 Keep it up, it’s easier to keep going than to have to recover again!
I have been contemplating getting a Fitbit for a while now, but I have been worried I will not use it well. I have recently developed a… tenuous relationship with food due to a medical problem so dieting doesn’t seem like an option. Needless to say, I have been considering it more seriously lately. I thought maybe general better health (aka not being so overweight) could help my other condition. Greatly timed post!
Great work Wil. I’ve recently lost about 12 kg (25 pounds) from walking and modified diet. Lower carbs has been the key for me. Down from size 35 to 33. 32 is the goal so not far to go. Feel awesome too. Keep it up
Inspiring stuff. Quite interested in trying a FitBit now, I walk a lot at work and it’d be interesting to track exactly how far. My wife does the food tracking thing and keeps nagging me to do the same, and I think the combined arguments from you both have me convinced. I’m at 230lbs currently and training for a season of triathlons this summer, so need to get that right down to get the strain off!
Similar to my story (tho inheriting the family type 2 was the trigger–we come in two shapes, round and skinny, and we all get it).
Other tips
I monitored my cals for two weeks before starting the diet to find out what I was actually eating. In my case it was useful to know I was at weight maintenance.
I switched to smaller plates. I get to eat what I want, just less of it. I already have to deal with coeliac and lactose intolerance so more restrictions would have really hurt.
I’m a snacker, and skipping the snacks just left me dreaming of food all day. So using the calorie app I split my food into 5 meals instead of three. I get to snack without stress.
Finally a word of warning: for some of us adding in the exercise doesn’t work. I’ve been doing 10-12k steps a day for years, and working out 2-3 times a week, but if I set my exercise rate at anything other than “totally sedentary” the app gives me too many calories and the weight goes back on. Metabolisms are funny things.
That was very good advice and yes the key is commitment – thanks for sharing
Thanks Wil.
Thank you for bringing this up, I had never heard of a Fit Bit before reading your blog. I ordered one and it is out for delivery right now. I need some kind of motivation to get my walking up and this sounds like the way to do it. I’m excited to give it a try. I would say “Hey, wanna be Fit Bit friends?”, but given the fact that you’re a bit more popular than mundane me, I won’t. It would be cool, though. Keep up the great work and thanks for influencing me to look into this crazy new gadget.
Great job! LOVE my Fitbit! Such an awesome tool! I agree that it IS fun to compete with friends 🙂
I love my FitBit! Before April, I didn’t really exercise all that much and absolutely never ran. I was never overweight, so I felt like I didn’t really have to exercise. Then I got a FitBit and the competitive part of me wanted to find ways to get more steps than my friends. I first started walking around my neighborhood but I soon started to run/walk around my neighborhood (along with the Run Zombies app). Less than a year later, I’ve finished 4 half marathons! It all started with my FitBit! ♥
For folks who would like a Middle Earth tie-in to their walking progress, there is the Eowyn Challenge – track the miles you walk with the corresponding waypoints in The Hobbit and/or Lord of the Rings:
http://home.insightbb.com/~eowynchallenge/
Hi Wil, good to know that you’re doing the same things I’m doing to lose weight. I’m trying to lose 30 lbs by my 30th birthday (March 5) – only 14 to go!
I was just wondering which app you used? I’ve tried MyFitnessPal and Noom for Android, and I like Noom a lot better on the android platform.
Thanks!
Good to hear about your success on living healthier!
I’m on a similar quest at the moment, also in preparation for a wedding for which I want to fit in a suit I already have. I also use a technical gadget to help me with it. I use a Wii Fit Meter to count my steps (surprisingly accurate) and have Wii Fit U recommend additional exercises to achieve my daily energy burning goal.
The part I have difficulties with is not eating certain things. I love pastries and there are a lot of decent and one especially wonderful bakery right around the corner, so there’s always the temptation. It also doesn’t help that there are 10 breweries here for about 70,000 people and over 100 more in the county. So I try to ride my bike to some of them on the weekend to earn my beer there.
Thanks for sharing this – I’ve been wearing a fitbit flex for just over a month and have lost 10 pounds! What a difference a little accountability can make in one’s life. And now off to listen to Yellow Brick Road on the turntable in my husband man cave!
I just got my Fitbit yesterday. Dare I ask to be your Fitbit buddy? You probably have hundreds of people “friended” on Fitbit already and are thinking “why ‘friend’ one more person?” I dunno. I thought it would just be fun to have someone my age to share the Fitbit journey. 🙂 I promise not to to judge or taunt you on days you don’t get all of your steps in, or on days when you go on an all out beer binge. Hope to see ya in Fitbitville. Peace in your ‘hood! -R
Thank you for this; it is really inspirational. I have had issues with being overweight for years. (I blame processed and artificially preserved foods as well as south Florida necessitating cars to get anywhere… I was a healthy weight when I lived in London, UK.) Any setback really kills my motivation. I resolve to restart almost weekly only to feel like I’ve failed by week’s end. Your story really helps because you are a normal guy who also happens to enjoy a good beer 🙂 Thank you again.
You did a great job, I remember when I had a 40″ waist. I stepped on the scale and it from 0 all the way to 0, I weighed 300 Lbs at that time, but in a very abusive marriage. I finally left and eventually lost the weight got down to 190 Lbs and was skinny as can be, I put on 15 Lbs a few months after still had a 34″ waist, right now I guess I am at about 250Lbs @ about a 36″ waist. Been going through too much stress lately from plenty of different things.
But good for you it is difficult to lose weight, when you have someone in your corner to support you in your endeavors helps so much, that is what makes the difference, that truly care about you.
Keep going, keep working out and above all be happy.
Nice! Must feel fantastic. I lost 40 lbs a few months ago, but to be fair, about 12 lbs of it was baby. Can’t wait until snowpacalypse is over so I can fucking see the ground again and go for a walk.
Man, I wish the weight I lost was turned into adorable kids.
Oh, you mean these guys?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbecker70/12648796914/
OMG SHUT UP WITH THOSE TINY FEET.
Great post! I worry about that one pint of beer every day thing, though… Sorry, not trying to criticize. Well, I guess I have way too much sugar to be healthy, so I can’t say anything.
At the intersection of gaming and fitness, I highly recommend “Zombies, Run!” I am such a “Zombies, Run!” fangeek… I wore my Runner 5 tech shirt to my last con (and got surprisingly many positive comments from fellow fans.) My Abel township has >750 population ;P
I knew you were a super geek and I LOVE tabletop, but browsing your blog I see that you homebrew too! I hope your fitness goals don’t prevent you from continuing this great hobby. While it’s true that DIPAs pack some serious calories, there are great low cal styles too. Scottish 60 Shilling is my favourite recipe. There’s a great recipe in Brewing Classic Styles and it beats the hell out of a Bud Light.
So what would a fellow Fitbit user need to do to be your Fitbit buddy? I literally have 3 friends, one is mu husband and one is my mom. The competitive motivation is sorely lacking. I feel like all the cool kids have jawbones. 🙁
Not too sure about the X amount of exercise to earn Y amount of beer ?Never the less Well Done and keep it up.