My Story

So who am I?  I am a lifelong gym rat who found out after almost fifty years I didn’t know a heck of a lot about fitness, nutrition, or what it meant to be “healthy”. Don’t get me wrong, I thought I did, I was just delusional. At the age of 48 I found myself in a position all too common today in America. I was about 80 pounds overweight, I had metabolic syndrome, and I didn’t think I had a weight, or health problem.
In the spring of 2010 I had a lightning bolt hit. I was a drilling Navy Reserve Officer, and had been for 26 years. I was told I was too close to retirement to be mobilized to deploy overseas. They told me that right up to the day I received my orders to deploy overseas. It was a bit of a shock. I knew that the obese old guy staring back at me in the mirror was never going to pass the pre-deployment physical. If I couldn’t pass the physical I would have had to retire immediately. I didn’t want to end my career with this embarrassment.
I was depressed and angry with myself for letting things get so far out of hand. I didn’t know what to do. Obviously what I had been doing wasn’t working. I thought I ate pretty well. I worked out fairly regularly. I was generally active in my daily life. I thought I was healthy. I was wrong. How did I get so far in this hole?
I continued on dazed and confused for a couple of months, not knowing what to do. In July of 2010 I was at my heaviest and I only had until November to lose a major amount of weight before deploying. A friend of mine had just lost a lot of weight using one of the nationally known weight loss programs that provides prepackaged food and some guidance, so I thought I would give it a try. In three months I lost FIFTY pounds. Although I was still overweight and relatively out of shape, I was able to pass my pre-deployment physical and was sent on an all expenses paid year long vacation to exotic Djibouti, Africa.
During my year in Africa I was able to maintain my weight loss and I started working out regularly. I was doing a lot of cardio, because that’s all I really knew. When I returned from Africa In December of 2011 I was still thirty to forty pounds overweight, but I was working out almost every day. I would do two to three hours of cardio, but I wasn’t losing weight. The old tricks just didn’t seem to work. In January of 2012 I decided to try the weight loss program I had used before. In two months I shed another thirty plus pounds. I was at the same weight I graduated high school, 200 pounds!
The problem was, I realized that I couldn’t go back to the way I was working out and eating as before, that plan just wasn’t working. In the early spring of 2012 I started my journey of knowledge into health, nutrition, fitness and wellness. Right from the beginning I realized that I had been living under a rock when it came to actual knowledge about those things. I realized almost everything I thought I knew about those subjects was wrong.  I have learned that health is an effect of the accumulation of your daily lifestyle habits.  The more of these habits you have that create a positive effect on you, the better your health will be, and vice versa.  It’s never any one thing.

In the eight years since then I have been on this journey to figure out what it means to be Healthy and Fit. I have been a passionate student of nutrition and movement, and I have learned what the word wellness means. I started this blog to help others, who like me, are lost and need help finding their way. My goal is not to make you healthy, but it is to show you the way to get on that path to life long health and fitness.