Background and History

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this blog, I wanted to give you a little background on me and why I am writing this in the first place.

I was born a skinny baby 39 1/2 years ago, grew up a skinny boy, became a skinny teenager, and went to college a skinny young man. I could always eat whatever I wanted and found it impossible to put on any sort of weight. You could count my ribs up to and past my 16th birthday, and it was always a source of angst for me that I was so scrawny. I tried and tried to put on weight - ate fatty foods, went to the gym and only lifted weights skipping all cardio... nothing seemed to work.

Apparently, at some time that all changed.

My first driver's license had me at a gangly 6' 5" 140 lbs. 16.6 BMI for those of you scoring at home, which puts me square in the "damn son, you got to eat more" range of the scale. For the next eight years I was able to put on about 10 pounds a year, mostly healthy, until I hit a fairly healthy 220 pounds. I say "fairly" healthy because I did indeed have some good muscle structure, but I wasn't a workout fiend by any stretch of the imagination.

For the next ten years I hovered around the 220 mark, still (in my mind) a little undersized, but still reluctant to take any drastic action like go to the gym on a frequent basis. Then came the one word that is the bane of dieters everywhere: Hershey.

Back then, I was a consultant and spent about 4-5 days a week on the road. The life of the consultant isn't easy - you wake up early to beat your clients into the office, you stay until they all leave and later, then you go out with all the other consultants and drink, sometimes a tad too much. Lather, rinse, repeat. Not much there to build a healthy you.

At this time in my life, I got assigned to work on a project at Hershey. You would drive in to town starving from the damage you did to your body the night before and instantly get captivated by the smell of chocolate in the air. Then you'd go into long meetings where there would be giant bowls of free chocolate on the table, and you'd eat it because, well, who wouldn't? At some point everyone would "make peace with the chocolate" but by then it was often too late.

We did have a good, motivated, and healthy crew there that used peer pressure to drag my worthless butt to the gym more often than I ever went in my life. So I convinced myself that when I bulked up to 240 it was good bulk, because partially it was true. I was indeed stronger than I ever had been, but I was also introduced to a new friend - my belly.

"Junior" (pronounced with a Spanish accent) was my pet name for my gut, because if I pooched it out just enough I could make myself look pregnant and get a few cheap laughs at my expense. "Junior" was a new friend, and at first I didn't mind him, but like an uninvited houseguest he soon wore out his welcome. After I left Hershey, my weight went down to the 225-230 range for a number of years, largely due to muscle mass erosion, with Junior following me wherever I went.

Fast forward to 2009. In the missing years my passion for food and wine has evolved to making those a hobby of mine. I love cooking gourmet food, I love experimenting in the kitchen, and I love wine. I met the love of my life in 2000 who has given me three beautiful children, and managed to stay in awesome shape despite the pressures of being a mother and our passion for food and wine.

In late 2009 I turned 39 1/2 and think to myself how great it would be to get in shape by my 40th birthday. I start the usual weak routine of eating whatever I want still but working out occasionally, and don't have many positive results (shocking, I know). People warn me I need to set goals and have metrics and have a plan... blah blah blah, all the stuff i tell my consulting customers if they want to improve their businesses. But I'm the same skinny kid that can't gain weight, so they don't apply to me. I can do this without any of that.

Wrong.

One month in and I realize I'm failing. I'm 243 pounds, not muscular at all. Junior is starting to make my clothes not fit, which is bad. It is time to take the advice of those that suggested goals and metrics.

I sit down and do the math and discover my body fat is in the 26% range. Yikes. I also learn important things about the way a body works. 1 pound of fat = 3,500 calories. So if you want to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat in a day. Your body naturally burns 12x its weight in calories a day just for living.

So my strategy is to burn 1,000+ more calories than I consume every day. That means limiting my calories, and doing at least an hour of exercise every day. Within 120 days I should have a brand new me.

I'm three weeks into this, and this blog will chronicle my journey. We'll get into the details with the next post.