Greetings and Salutations

EDollah

Greetings all. I joined a few days ago but have been only lurking to get a feel for message board culture here; I’m still learning your lingo and acronyms. I've found the food logging on this site to be very helpful. Exercise logging not as much, that I can tell, but that's ok, it's the calories, sugar, etc. that's most useful.

A (hopefully very) brief history. I'm a 47 year old man, 6'0" tall, who has had a very consistent weight gain over the years. I'm not one of those "heavy my whole life" people. In fact I was downright skinny in high school, exercised a lot in college (18-22) and was in very good shape, then got lazy after college, except for several brief efforts to exercise over the years. Bottom line, I tend to gain 10 pounds annually when not exercising. When I stepped on the scales on April 1 (about 5 weeks ago), for the first time in 5 years, I was shocked to see I had gotten to 340 pounds. I knew I was extremely overweight but was thinking it was more like 300, certainly not 340, even though 340 fits into my "gain 10 pounds a year" rule of thumb.

Since that fateful April Fools Day, I've been very consistent with regard to diet and exercise and my weight is a smidgen below 325 and I've gotten much stronger with respect to both weight lifting and cardio. I recognize that I'm literally fighting for my life this time around so I'm extremely focused. I can't yet pinpoint my goal weight because I'm actually shooting for 15% body fat more so than any specific weight, so I'm not really sure how long this is going to take. I just know I've got a slog ahead of me and many, many days/weeks/months to go.

I've got questions about the validity of my workout and diet strategy, which I'll save for the appropriate forums. Since this is the "Introduce Yourself" forum I'll just do that here and say "cheers!"