Thought it'd be nice to have a separate discussion for introductions, so here's mine.

I'm a 5' 6" 45 year old father of three, ages 10, 12, and 14. Two girls and the oldest a boy. My wife and I just celebrated our 18th anniversary.

In September of 2013 I went to a wedding with my wife and we had a photo taken there that really shocked me. I was around 205 pounds. My wife looked better that day than she did when we got married, I thought people must wonder what she was doing with me.

So I got serious about tracking what I ate with MFP, which I heard about from a friend. When tracking became a habit, I started using the treadmill we had sitting in our basement for the previous seven years. When that became a steady habit three days a week I added two days of weights.

By July of 2014 I ran a local adventure race. I weighed 145 and finished ninth in my age group. I was running three miles a day at a 7:30 minute mile average. I maintained this weight and running pace for a year.

I'm in construction and found that I was starting to struggle with things that used to seem easy. I realized that I had lost quite a bit of muscle mass during my weight loss. So I decided to try to gain around ten pounds of muscle.

I did some research and got some good advice from people here in the gaining weight forums and last July I began a serous bulking effort. There were some struggles and I had to make some changes to my thoughts and plans but the summary is that gaining muscle was far more difficult than losing fat was. At least for me.

I am currently at 175 pounds, with some of that being fat. I'm ready to start a slow and careful weight loss to shave the fat off and see how much muscle I put on.

With the increased calories needed to gain, I've been struggling to get back in the weight loss mode, hoping to get some help and encouragement here. And done accountability.