At Goal & Successfully Maintaining. So Why Am I Doing This All Over Again?

Lietchi

@springlering62 apparently there is an update for the sharing issue, but since answers are pinned to the top of the thread (first page) the message is not as visible.
I quoted it just now in the relevant thread, to improve visibility in the thread.

nossmf

Phew! Found this thread 3 days ago, been reading it between work meetings, took a while to get through several years of posts!

I admit, I initially opened the thread on a whim, just because I know @springlering62 other posts are worth reading, and here's a thread which she started? Once it became apparent she was going to make repeated posts, I bookmarked to read the entire thing.

What can I say, the author in me enjoys reading good prose.

Lots of kudos to BL and others who shared their successes and frustrations in this thread. Only real frustration I had was seeing a conversation from two years ago, and knowing I couldn't contribute my two cents, lol. Well, now that I've read the entire thing, here's a few inputs I would have made at the opportune times...

*****

When I joined the military, I was a very fit and trim 160lbs who could run like the wind. (Earned my letterman's jacket in both track/sprints and cross country/5km.) Fast forward a decade of a sedentary office job (yes, those exist in the military), getting married and having four kids, and I'm staring in the mirror at a guy weighing 220lbs, my six-pack was now a keg, my knees ached too much to run, and I just got shown the door by the military as part of their down-sizing. No job, very little savings, young family asking when's dinner, out of shape and hating my mirror image...not a very good head space.

With no job prospects in sight and my world feeling like it was spiraling out of control, figured the one thing I could control was my own fitness. Couldn't run any more, but a buddy introduced me to lifting weights, something I'd detested as a kid but now for some reason just *clicked* within me. He also recommended MFP, which fed my inner geek to manipulate numbers (calories) to achieve results. (A month later I got hired to the job I still hold to this day.)

This was fifteen years ago. From that first day until now, I'm still logging every. single. day. (My login streak is less, because there was no wifi when I went camping with my son's Scout troop.) I also pre-log A TON. Started out by getting sick of my kids constantly asking my wife "what's for dinner" while I (the family chef) was at work, so I bought a dry-erase board, stuck it to the food pantry door, and every morning wrote out "dinner tonight is...". This soon turned into listing out the next week's worth of dinner menu. I found this to be unexpectedly immensely helpful to ME, as I could plug in the expected dinner for the next week, which told me in advance what my probable calorie level would be, along with how much protein I would consume. From this I could then plot which of my Tupperware leftovers to take to work for lunch to sync up with dinner...high-cal dinner, take a low-cal lunch; low-protein dinner, better take the high-protein lunch.

You can probably already guess that I don't do much weighing and hyper-specific measuring of ingredients. When I started, I would divide meat packages from the store into 4-oz or 8-oz sizes (take a 32-oz package of chicken breasts, split into four equal-ish parts). Memorized about how big they were, and that's been my gauge since then. Same with a "cup of rice" or "two cups of milk". If it's close, and my weight trend is steady, I figure that's close enough. Helps that I don't care for tons of extras, like cheeses or sauces...just salt and garlic and I'm good to go. (My wife of 21 years has been leaning on me to expand my seasoning repertoire, and spices are calorie-free.)

My initial goal upon joining the gym and MFP was to lose weight, which I did, about 30 pounds back to 190, but then for years my weight stalled there. Weight stalled, but inches kept dropping, or rather relocating, from my gut up to my shoulders and arms. (Never my chest, much to my weightlifting chagrin.) Weight naturally floated from 190-195 and back, over and over, figured I was just in a natural status-quo for my body and stopped trying to change it. This scene lasted for well over a decade, until a lifting injury prevented me from lifting, but not from doing cardio. Somehow got a burr under my saddle that I wanted to try to lose as much weight as possible, so when I was allowed back in the weight room I could simultaneously try to ADD muscle, rather than what happened before when I transformed fat into muscle. (Yes, I know that's not what happened, but it sounds better for the story, so hush.)

By the time I could lift again I'd dropped another 15 pounds down to 179, which according to BMI standards said I was borderline healthy for my 5'9" height, but I felt looked too bloody skinny. So I gleefully jumped back into lifting along with increasing calories to actually GAIN weight ON PURPOSE.

Turns out, it's not as simple as just stuffing your face with whatever sounds tasty at the moment, and not just because of wanting to gain weight "intelligently" by maximizing muscle and minimizing fat-gain. I could do the math in my sleep (I am an astrophysicist, after all). But I discovered something completely unexpected:

After a decade and a half of trying to control and reduce my calories consumed, flipping the switch to go the other way was a total mind-*kitten*. The first few days of hedonistic eating were fun, sure, but after that my appetite tried to go back to what it's been doing for years, and I actually had to exert willpower and force myself to eat more. I'm now eating breakfast for the first time in decades; I keep a jar of peanut butter at my work desk as an afternoon snack when my pre-logging says I'm short calories for the day.

It's taken about a year, but I've finally gotten accustomed to this level of eating, and the results in the mirror have been VERY gratifying. Not to mention the increased weights I've been able to throw around in the gym, weights at age 46 which would make age 31 me blush in shame. I tell you what...if I could combine the willpower and knowledge I have now, along with the natural testosterone I had then, the result would be something special. Not Arnold Schwarzenegger level, but special. For the guy who still vividly remembers being the scrawny geek who got zero attention from girls all through school, I can only dream of what could have been.

(I have ZERO interest in straying from my wife of 21 years. But a guy can dream of a different history from before I met her, can't I?)

*****

Ok, I've hijacked the thread long enough, sorry about that, lol. Move along, citizen. Nothing further to see in this post; return to your normally scheduled activities.