For me, it was honesty that made the difference.

I've never been "really" overweight, never been "really" out of shape. That is how I used to justify it, in clothes I still look "presentable". Truth of the matter is I kept getting bigger each year, and kept the illusion that it was not "that bad".

It was.

I decided it was time to change. I changed. I lost twenty pounds seemingly overnight, it was not that hard. Light beer, chase the shots with water instead of coke, buy pretzels instead of chips. Six months, twenty pounds. My body simply adjusted and found it's balance, at two hundred twenty pounds.

Last year brought the "diet", really for the first time in my life I was going to lose weight. I am a very confident person and once my mind is set on doing something I rarely fail. I failed miserably. Four months passed and I was still two hundred twenty pounds, eighteen on a good day. I could not understand WTF was happening, why was this hard to do? Why would these stubborn pounds not come off? Ten gone, ten come back.

I dug in, started reading everything I could about how to do this. What does it take. The information is all over the place, from how much to eat and excercise, to what to eat and how many times a day. I kept at it, kept reading, quest for knowledge, there is an answer out there and once I found it all this would work and I would lose this flab. Certain things just kept comming back up. Record what you eat, write it down, get a dairy, make a food log, put a thousand different ways... keep track of what you eat every single day. Lift weights, lift more weight, be consistant in your weight lifting, lift heavier each time, lift push pull... gain strenth to increase muscle mass. Those themes came up over and over in almost anything I read.

Hell, I am a good cook and I am certainly no ***** when it comes to physical strength. I thought. I ignored these things although I told myself I was doing them. I changed the way I cooked (minorly) but I did not change what I cooked. I lifted weights but I used the strengths I already had. Months passed, still two twenty.

Enough.

It finally changed when I started to be honest. The beginning of May of this year I started to actually track what I was "consuming". Everything that was put into a pan, everything that made it's way across the grill, every beer, every piece of candy, every tuesday morning pair of kolaches. Tracked with a digital food scale. I was consuming 3000+ calories a day, on average. Half of it being drank.

It was a slow change at first. The t-bone steaks got smaller. The bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches showed up on wheat bread. The whole milk became two percent. The drinking started to slow down. A couple of pounds came off ... and came right back on. Then the vegetables showed up, the fruit, the lean fish and meat. The way I was cooking began to change, the things I was cooking began to change. The calories I was consuming were being tracked, I know what the intake was. As the average caloric intake began to come down due to what I was eating I started to feel differently.

To the next step. The begining of June I found this place and started to use the tools here, but the transformation was already under way. I started to lift weights differently. I squatted, low rep low weight. (lift) I did bent over rows, low rep high weight. (already way strong here) (pull) I bench pressed, low rep low weight. (push). The weight started to move, but that is not what was important.

It is how I feel. There is no doubt in my mind at this point that this is going to work. I know it, I can feel it, I dress differently, I move differently, I think differently. I posted this in the hope that it may help someone out there who is reading this and asking those same questions, How?

Be honest with yourself.
Write it down.
Change what you eat.
Excercise.


It works, you just have to do it.