Fitness Plateaus: My Journey

This post has been in the making for over 12 months. Health-wise…my 36th and half of my 37th year of life sucked.

Here’s what I wrote on February 14 of this year when I finally decided to turn this ship around.

At age 37 this is the worst shape I’ve ever been in and nearly the heaviest I’ve ever weighed. (a year or two ago I weighed 199-203 for a while.)

Seven months ago I had had enough. I was sick and tired of being literally sick and tired. So I attempted to change.

Evernote 30 Day Fitness Challenge: Results & Insights

It started on February 15, 2012 with the Evernote 30 Day Fitness Challenge. For my challenge, I chose to do 50 sit ups a day and not eat ANY sweets for 30 days (no chocolate, cake, ice cream, candy, cookies, desserts of any kind, etc – fruits and 1-2 cups of coffee per day allowed). No…I did not “win” that challenge, but at the same time I did. After 30 days, I had lost 5 pounds. It was a start.

From then on I started paying more attention to what I ate and focused more on consuming fruits and veggies. To this day, my favorite snack is a sliced green apple with peanut butter. An apple a day…

Eating that apple nearly every day helped me NOT eat other things that contributed to my health issues. After a while it became a game…where can I swap a fattening food with a healthy food. It was like the old me was replaced with someone new…someone who liked…fruits and veggies? An alien obviously.

Documentary Recommendations

Two documentaries helped motivate me toward this end: Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and Forks Over Knives. I highly recommend them.

February 5, 2012 – 198 lbs

Sept 14, 2012 – 178 lbs

Looking back over my records, I didn’t see much weight loss from March to June. In July I tripled my amount of exercise each week averaging 3-4 workouts per week. You could say that helped.

I’m now seven months into this new journey of simply paying attention to the quality of food I consume and making exercise a priority, and I’ve lost about 20 pounds.  The point in my sharing all this is to say what I posted on Twitter and Facebook on August 27th.

Making good choices, even the small ones, consistently over time yields awesome results.

Sustainable Weight Loss: Nutrition & Exercise

It doesn’t require a fad diet, eating lettuce slushies for 12 weeks straight, or anything crazy like that. It just takes one small good decision at a time. My super secret crazy strategy has been two fold:

1. Eat fruits and veggies often
2. Exercise often

I should write a book.

So I leave you with this. Please eat an apple a day and tell me if it keeps the doctor away.