Not new to MFP, but new to the Boards

Hello Everyone,

I'm 27, about to be 28. I am not new to MFP, I have been using it for a little over 2 years now, but I have not been posting on the forums until recently. I tend to be pretty shy and reserved, especially with personal goals.

To provide a little background on me, everyone in my family is overweight and I have pretty much been overweight my whole life. However, I have basically been slowly gaining weight since 3rd grade. When I decided to get serious about losing weight on July 31st of 2015, I weighed 407lbs (!). I was really unhappy and decided that I need to turn my life around before I either gained more weight or wasted more of my youth being really overweight and unhappy. I set an arbitrary goal to get down to 250, which I am still working toward, but so far I have lost 117 pounds "the old fashioned way" with diet and exercise. (Set points and plateaus are a *kitten*...)

I started with mostly diet and light exercise, but then hit a plateau after about 50lbs lost and picked up a gym membership and started going about 4-6 days a week doing cardio and weights. Then I hit another plateau at about 80lbs lost and I started doing HIIT workouts and working in some light cardio during the day at work by going for brisk walks with coworkers (that's still "working" right ).

When I get to my goal, I am going to re-evaluate it and see if I think I can go further... I don't think I can ever get "skinny" but I'd like to try and get as close as possible.

Since I am in California, my short term goal is to do the full Half-Dome hike and one day in the future I'd like to work up to doing a marathon or something.