I Took a Wrong Turn and I Just Kept Going (With Pic)

I Took a Wrong Turn and I Just Kept Going

I’m 52 years old and have been overweight for a long time but in the last couple of years it ballooned. My wife of nearly 30 years died as a result of breast cancer and I became very depressed. I only left the house to go to work and some days I didn’t even open the curtains. I even had my groceries delivered so I didn’t need to go out and I just moved very little and ate a lot. I kept saying I would start a diet and lose the weight on Monday, but there were a lot of Mondays and it didn't happen. However, Monday the 5th of March was the Monday things finally started to change.

At work on the night of Friday the 2nd of March this year I got into conversation with a work mate and that conversation and that workmate changed my life around. He had recently joined a gym and was looking for a training partner. I said I would join and train with him, and to be honest I think he was more than a little sceptical but we agreed I would meet him at the gym on Monday morning. On the Saturday I went and bought some training clothes and shoes and as agreed I met him at the gym on the Monday and joined up. He also pointed me in the direction of My Fitness Pal and I downloaded the app to my phone. I weighed myself that morning and the scales reported a starting weight of 332 lbs.

Since that day I have been eating healthy and Danny, my workmate, and I have been going to the gym 5 times a week. I have also done the C25K program and am now running 5k three times a week. We run, row, cycle and do weights along with a lot of core exercises and I’ve started doing regular Spin classes. I log everything in the MFP app and that keeps me on track.

Today, the 8th of July marked the end of the 18th week since I joined the gym and at my weekly weigh in this morning I hit a bit of a milestone when the scales showed my current weight as 257 lbs and 75 lbs lost over the 18 weeks. I haven’t felt this good for a long time and I love life and living it again.

Thanks to Danny I have now taken a right turn and I will keep on going. I have plans to enter a couple of 5k races, then a 10k and I have a half marathon pencilled in. If that goes well I may even attempt the full 26.2. I may be slightly mad as before I did the C25K I hadn’t done anything that could be called running for about 30 years but I am going to do it because I don’t want to reach a weight I’m happy with and then just go home, eat cake and put the weight back on.

This picture below shows the difference from the 5th of March to the 8th of July. I did a similar picture two weeks ago when the loss was at 65 lbs and the people at my gym saw it and asked if they could use it in publicity stuff to maybe encourage others to join and do the same. I said they were welcome to, if it does encourage someone that’ll be paying it forward and I’ll be very happy with that.