Tracking My Progress in Race Photos

Hi Everyone!

I suddenly felt like sharing my weight loss progress, so here I am. Last year, I trained for and ran a half marathon. Doing so was truly life changing. I now believe I can do anything because I did that. It wasn't the race itself that gave me that. It was the discipline to follow a training plan and run through the summer, when I least enjoy running, that demonstrated I could have goals and follow through with them. Let's not talk about how it took me 35 years to figure this out.

While I always thought it would be nice to lose weight, I never really did anything about it. I'd watch my mother follow Slim Fast, Deal A Meal, Atkins, and a bunch of other diet and fitness routines throughout my childhood. I'd watched her have weight loss surgery, get very thin, and then gain a bunch of weight back over the past 15 years. I wanted no part of this madness. The few times I had gone down in weight rather than slowly up were driven mainly by changes in circumstance (more active when I moved to a city, more active when I initially took up running) rather than a deliberate effort on my part. The running didn't help with the weight loss for long given that I had no interest in eating less food and tons of interest in cultivating a love of high alcohol craft beer.

So, after my half and then a vacation filled with great excess, I decided it was time to reign myself in. My main motivation for doing so was to be a faster runner in the laziest way possible. More training miles? Nah! Just drop some weight. And I did! And I'm faster!

I started tracking my weight and my food in October 2015. My starting weight was 230. I am currently hovering at about 175 (I'm 5'7). I'll probably stay there for a while because I increased my calories to what seems to be a maintenance level (hard to tell exactly since it's only been about 2 weeks here) for the month of June because I have a difficult race coming up this weekend and I want to be at my best. Plus, it was time to take a break. I can tell because I was getting lax about going over my calorie goals more often than usual. I don't have an ultimate goal weight because I have no idea what a normal weight looks like on me. I'm doing this in small steps (under 200, then out of obese range). The next mini-goal will be to reach a normal BMI.

So, running races is my main hobby. I race pretty much every weekend. Most photos of me are race photos, anyway, so it seemed like a good way to demonstrate my progress.



I was 220lbs in the first photo, 198 in the second, and 182lbs in the third.

Also, I want to thank all of you who post on the message boards. I'm not an active poster, but I am an active reader. I have learned so much from many of you.