I've struggled with weight for most of my adult life. Once I hit my early 20s my metabolism basically kicked into granny gear, and driving for a living in one form or another didn't help. By my early 30's I was over 300 lbs. At my heaviest I weighed in at 315. I'm 6'4" and carry the weight well - I didn't look rotund or like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers but it wasn't muscle mass I've been packing around!
Back at the tail end of 2018 I was hitting a low point in self esteem - I was at my heaviest, I was not making what I wanted to with my business, and we struggled financially and I just in general felt like shit. I started reading and watching motivational shit, business insights, etc. I sat down and made a written plan - two actually - with a goals list that I printed and tacked to the wall in the living room of the shitty little townhouse we were renting. You couldn't help but miss it. 72pt print, bold, at eye level. The top goal - weight loss and improved health.
Around that time my kid started expressing interest in martial arts. A few of his friends in school were all taking taekwondo lessons. He wanted to learn too. I'd studied martial arts - taekwondo primarily since I was 9. I hadn't actively practiced in a few years - the last time I'd trained regularly was when kiddo was still barely a year old, but I'd earned my 3rd degree black belt years before, and I still knew all the techniques even if my fatass body couldn't execute high kicks or jumps very well anymore. I tried teaching him - an exercise in futility because like his mom, he doesn't take instruction from *me* very well. SO we went to my old TKD school and sat in and watched a class, to see if it was really something he wanted to do. He said he did. So we came back two nights later when my instructor was actually there instead of the substitute. He started right then and there, and I jumped back on the mat too, with him.
My uniform (gi / dobok) I'd worn just a few years before was too small, and 3 classes in I blew the ass out of the pants in front of everyone during the initial warm ups - did that class in my 5.11 pants and gi top. 5.11 needs to make a karate uniform, because their pants have a lot of room in the thighs and crotch! After I was convinced the kid - and myself - were in it to win it and it wasn't a passing fancy, I talked to my instructor about testing for my 4th degree black belt. It'd been 20 years since i got my 3rd - I was way behind my old training partners in progress but I was getting back on track there too. My old sparring partner actually tested for his 7th degree not long after I started training again - he and his wife own their own school today, which was a goal of mine a long time ago. My instructor said he'd test me in January 2020. I worked my ass off - and I started teaching again after knocking some of the rust off. I even competed in a few tournaments and took a few medals home.
Here's a comparison shot I got last year - a months' difference with regular exercise and a low carb meat & veg diet. Same uniform. 15lbs difference between mid Feb and the end of March that year.
I could see my progression, increased leg strength and flexibility, and between regular workouts at TKD, and going on a low carb diet (not exactly Keto, but I called it dirty Keto) I lost over 60 pounds - and on January 4th this year I got my 4th degree black belt. We'd even gotten my wife involved so all three of us were training together.
I'm at about my lowest Pre-COVID weight here, this was taken after my partner and I were awarded our 4th degree BB's.
Some of my other goals were (and are) still unmet but my weight loss was on track, and I hit a big milestone. I was feeling the best I'd felt in a damn long time, I had gone from a 46" waist to a 42" waist, and figured by the fall of this year I'd have met the goal of getting back into a 38 - which is where I was when my wife and I married. Then fucking COVID hit.
My boy and I actually got sick - pretty sure with COVID - at the tail end of January. We ticked off all the boxes we'd read about, but they weren't doing testing in Oregon at that point unless you were on your death bed. No worried - 2 weeks laid up on the couch then I was back to feeling good, back to working out, eating well. Then March comes and everything went on lockdown. No gyms, no karate schools, no more in person schooling (they pulled this shit during spring break - kids went out for break and never went back!) - my business was already hurting from the worse-than-usual seasonal downturn post Christmas but when lockdown hit, everything dropped like a rock. We laid off our employees. Just my two partners and I working, scraping by. I had already been stress eating at that point, and not working out. Add to the whole mess, my wife and I were cleaning my hoarder mother in law's house out as my FIL died the day before Halloween in 2019. If we weren't working, we were at my MIL's place cleaning shit and trying to get her to decide to fix or sell the place.
I gained a lot of the weight back. Then in July about a week or so before we were set to move here, I injured my left knee walking across the parking lot of our old apartment. Literally just walking along and then POP - something in the back of my knee let go and it hurt like a mother, and I was limping and gimpy. No time to see a doc before we left, and my health insurance went away on my last day of work. Knock on wood - the knee has felt fine for about a month now but for 2 months it felt like it would get re-injured or just pop and loose strength randomly.
Fast forward to moving here - things have been better. I wasn't eating great, but I was eating a bit better. Back at the end of September I turned 39 and decided I was sick of feeling fat and lethargic again. I don't have a TKD school down here close by, the kid and wife have both lost the steam there - but I had to do something. I already had a couple dumbbells laying around so I snatched a 30lb kettlebell from Wal Mart - the last bell on their rack - damn exercise equipment has been as scarce as guns and ammo since COVID hit. Academy and Walmart in Tomball and Conroe were both out of adult bikes for the longest time, along with dumbbells and kettlebells. I made a new daily goal of 20 minutes / day of working out with weights minimum, plus warm up & cool downs. I quit eating carby foods again (which fuckin sucked because that was about a week after we got some good sourdough starter from one of our new friends, and we'd only made two small loaves with it - now wifey is enjoying the stuff while I abstain)
I stepped on the scale the other day to see how badly I was going to be disappointed - I'm at 274lbs, 22lbs heavier than my pre-COVID weight. I don't know how heavy I was when I stopped the carby foods again, I'm sure I lost weight. I've noticed small improvements in my conditioning too. I've been doing squats, lunges, reverse lunges, plus dead lifts and rows with the kettlebell or just body weight, being careful not to injure my knee(s) again. I've gotten to a point of doing more and more reps so I've had to change up exercises to keep the difficulty up - but my conditioning is improving.
I fixed up a free bike I got from a neighbor and I've been riding 3X a week just in the neighborhood. Today I decided I needed to really track my real progress, beyond just "feel" and what the scale tells me. I created a spreadsheet with 44 different exercises - mostly with the kettle or dumbbells - but some cardio stuff including 60-second max sets of punches and kicks, push ups, sit ups, etc. I'm tracking how many sets / reps I can do with the weights I have. I'm trying to increase the intensity and duration of my routine slowly but i definitely want to track the raw data.
I've been doing a stretching routine at the end of every workout session too - I've suffered chronic back and hip pain for years - that whole driving for a living thing without exercising properly again. I need to get some 15 or 20 lb dumbbells and a 40lb kettle to help keep the strength gains going, and at some point I want to get a proper weight bench with barbell and plates.
Back at the tail end of 2018 I was hitting a low point in self esteem - I was at my heaviest, I was not making what I wanted to with my business, and we struggled financially and I just in general felt like shit. I started reading and watching motivational shit, business insights, etc. I sat down and made a written plan - two actually - with a goals list that I printed and tacked to the wall in the living room of the shitty little townhouse we were renting. You couldn't help but miss it. 72pt print, bold, at eye level. The top goal - weight loss and improved health.
Around that time my kid started expressing interest in martial arts. A few of his friends in school were all taking taekwondo lessons. He wanted to learn too. I'd studied martial arts - taekwondo primarily since I was 9. I hadn't actively practiced in a few years - the last time I'd trained regularly was when kiddo was still barely a year old, but I'd earned my 3rd degree black belt years before, and I still knew all the techniques even if my fatass body couldn't execute high kicks or jumps very well anymore. I tried teaching him - an exercise in futility because like his mom, he doesn't take instruction from *me* very well. SO we went to my old TKD school and sat in and watched a class, to see if it was really something he wanted to do. He said he did. So we came back two nights later when my instructor was actually there instead of the substitute. He started right then and there, and I jumped back on the mat too, with him.
My uniform (gi / dobok) I'd worn just a few years before was too small, and 3 classes in I blew the ass out of the pants in front of everyone during the initial warm ups - did that class in my 5.11 pants and gi top. 5.11 needs to make a karate uniform, because their pants have a lot of room in the thighs and crotch! After I was convinced the kid - and myself - were in it to win it and it wasn't a passing fancy, I talked to my instructor about testing for my 4th degree black belt. It'd been 20 years since i got my 3rd - I was way behind my old training partners in progress but I was getting back on track there too. My old sparring partner actually tested for his 7th degree not long after I started training again - he and his wife own their own school today, which was a goal of mine a long time ago. My instructor said he'd test me in January 2020. I worked my ass off - and I started teaching again after knocking some of the rust off. I even competed in a few tournaments and took a few medals home.
Here's a comparison shot I got last year - a months' difference with regular exercise and a low carb meat & veg diet. Same uniform. 15lbs difference between mid Feb and the end of March that year.
I could see my progression, increased leg strength and flexibility, and between regular workouts at TKD, and going on a low carb diet (not exactly Keto, but I called it dirty Keto) I lost over 60 pounds - and on January 4th this year I got my 4th degree black belt. We'd even gotten my wife involved so all three of us were training together.
I'm at about my lowest Pre-COVID weight here, this was taken after my partner and I were awarded our 4th degree BB's.
Some of my other goals were (and are) still unmet but my weight loss was on track, and I hit a big milestone. I was feeling the best I'd felt in a damn long time, I had gone from a 46" waist to a 42" waist, and figured by the fall of this year I'd have met the goal of getting back into a 38 - which is where I was when my wife and I married. Then fucking COVID hit.
My boy and I actually got sick - pretty sure with COVID - at the tail end of January. We ticked off all the boxes we'd read about, but they weren't doing testing in Oregon at that point unless you were on your death bed. No worried - 2 weeks laid up on the couch then I was back to feeling good, back to working out, eating well. Then March comes and everything went on lockdown. No gyms, no karate schools, no more in person schooling (they pulled this shit during spring break - kids went out for break and never went back!) - my business was already hurting from the worse-than-usual seasonal downturn post Christmas but when lockdown hit, everything dropped like a rock. We laid off our employees. Just my two partners and I working, scraping by. I had already been stress eating at that point, and not working out. Add to the whole mess, my wife and I were cleaning my hoarder mother in law's house out as my FIL died the day before Halloween in 2019. If we weren't working, we were at my MIL's place cleaning shit and trying to get her to decide to fix or sell the place.
I gained a lot of the weight back. Then in July about a week or so before we were set to move here, I injured my left knee walking across the parking lot of our old apartment. Literally just walking along and then POP - something in the back of my knee let go and it hurt like a mother, and I was limping and gimpy. No time to see a doc before we left, and my health insurance went away on my last day of work. Knock on wood - the knee has felt fine for about a month now but for 2 months it felt like it would get re-injured or just pop and loose strength randomly.
Fast forward to moving here - things have been better. I wasn't eating great, but I was eating a bit better. Back at the end of September I turned 39 and decided I was sick of feeling fat and lethargic again. I don't have a TKD school down here close by, the kid and wife have both lost the steam there - but I had to do something. I already had a couple dumbbells laying around so I snatched a 30lb kettlebell from Wal Mart - the last bell on their rack - damn exercise equipment has been as scarce as guns and ammo since COVID hit. Academy and Walmart in Tomball and Conroe were both out of adult bikes for the longest time, along with dumbbells and kettlebells. I made a new daily goal of 20 minutes / day of working out with weights minimum, plus warm up & cool downs. I quit eating carby foods again (which fuckin sucked because that was about a week after we got some good sourdough starter from one of our new friends, and we'd only made two small loaves with it - now wifey is enjoying the stuff while I abstain)
I stepped on the scale the other day to see how badly I was going to be disappointed - I'm at 274lbs, 22lbs heavier than my pre-COVID weight. I don't know how heavy I was when I stopped the carby foods again, I'm sure I lost weight. I've noticed small improvements in my conditioning too. I've been doing squats, lunges, reverse lunges, plus dead lifts and rows with the kettlebell or just body weight, being careful not to injure my knee(s) again. I've gotten to a point of doing more and more reps so I've had to change up exercises to keep the difficulty up - but my conditioning is improving.
I fixed up a free bike I got from a neighbor and I've been riding 3X a week just in the neighborhood. Today I decided I needed to really track my real progress, beyond just "feel" and what the scale tells me. I created a spreadsheet with 44 different exercises - mostly with the kettle or dumbbells - but some cardio stuff including 60-second max sets of punches and kicks, push ups, sit ups, etc. I'm tracking how many sets / reps I can do with the weights I have. I'm trying to increase the intensity and duration of my routine slowly but i definitely want to track the raw data.
I've been doing a stretching routine at the end of every workout session too - I've suffered chronic back and hip pain for years - that whole driving for a living thing without exercising properly again. I need to get some 15 or 20 lb dumbbells and a 40lb kettle to help keep the strength gains going, and at some point I want to get a proper weight bench with barbell and plates.
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