About

I have had the bar around my face surgically removed, if you're wondering.

For the first six months of this blog, I did not have an about page. It’s time to make one.

This is me in January 2011

I weighed 192 pounds entering the last semester of college. I was following in the family tradition of losing control of my body.  Two months prior, I had taken up a martial art (Taekwondo), as I had always wanted to do. I loved it, but it was a challenge that my body was struggling with.

Getting a 192-pound body to do what it needed to do was a nightmare. One session I had with my coach, I suffered from an insulin crash during a sparring match. I sat down, shaking and crying, and confessed what I had been feeling for so long, but I hadn’t been able to voice: I was at war with my body, and I was losing.

Coach sat with me and talked with me for a while and was incredibly sympathetic. Ultimately, he suggested that I try a radical change to my diet. He suggested cutting out all grains (pasta, rice, breads), legumes (beans), potatoes (uh, potatoes), and dairy (cheese, milk, ice cream). He told me of a student he had coached last year who had lost 30 pounds in a summer following this way of eating, and he thought it could work for me too.

He didn’t put a name to it at the time, but I ultimately found that he was talking about the Paleo diet. It has changed my life.

I started this blog to keep track of my weight loss progress. My original goal was to lose all of the weight in a little less than a year, but I dropped weight like it was hot. I went from 192 pounds to 152 pounds before I graduated, and had 17 pounds to go.

But then something happened. Like most people who lose weight, I began to stagnate. It wasn’t a true plateau that might come from legitimate body adjustment. I was losing my grip on my commitment to paleo, and between May and July I only lost 2 pounds. I was sitting at 150 lbs, feeling content with myself, thinking that I would finish losing the rest of the weight when I felt like it. I would get around to it, eventually.

I'm the one with the boobs

So, this is me today.

July 9th (today), I decided that 150 wasn’t good enough. I was going to get to 135 lbs, or I was going to die trying to get there.  I hit the reset button. On this blog, on my diet, and on my life (again). I was not 80% done with a goal to lose 57 pounds, but rather 0% done with a goal to lose 15 pounds. I have recommitted to this healthy lifestyle, and I am going to do whatever it takes to get to my goal.

But even at 135, I am not yet done. There is still taekwondo to learn, and I will most likely being strength training when I am in a situation to do so. Losing these 15 pounds are the first steps to the rest of the things I will do to stay healthy.

The rest of this blog will catalog the loss of the first fifteen pounds, leading to the rest of my life.

Huzzah!