Big ol fattys...

Big ol fattys...

26 x 2.4 k2 Zed low calorie Weight Loss weight loss success

After the swift kick in the ass yesterday I decide to go for a walk to reinforce the message to my body that play time is over, I ended up doing just under two miles with the baby stroller. After I got about a mile out I realized that my son would be home from school in 5 minutes and I needed to be there to let him in so I hustled back for the second mile and just made it as his bus pulled up. If mowing the lawn counts I did that as well as far as exercise and I am coming to the realization that I am going to have to go see a doc about this shoulder pain so that  can start in on my daily push ups again. 

I will touch on the shoulder, nine months ago give or take I started having shoulder pain in my right shoulder, at first it was minor but its since gotten way worse and I believe it to be rotator cuff related. I can do daily life type stuff but anything past that is painful especially if I were to throw a ball, that motion is the worse. I need to look at this go at weight loss as new, when I was 500 pounds I needed to do things a certain way because of where I was then at 300 pounds I was almost unlimited yet now I am somewhere in between and if I think like that 500 pound guy I am in the wrong spot and I am not close to where the 300 pound version of me was so taking it head on as it is a completely new experience is how I need to advance through this. 

Setting goals is going to have to be in my approach because well.. goals help and give a fella something to focus on while turning down brownies and declining the cherry pie. Setting a cycling goal for myself is on the chart and setting weight loss goals will be less prevalent this go around, I mean hell I am a scale addict when I am doing well so I will be aware of what my weight is doing but I have come to the realization that I really don't care what I weigh if I am unhindered in anything that I want to do. This sort of means that if I can do my 25 mile Sunday rides without death finding me on the trail or flattening my bicycle I am happy, currently I am not confident on my bicycles not because I cannot ride them but I worry about breaking something so riding tender will be where I am. 

Riding tender? what the hell does that even mean man? well it means that even being a "clydesdale" rider I am merciless with my bikes, I RIDE my bikes, I do tend to ride light but at my current weight I feel that I may be pushing my luck even while riding light. When I say riding tender I mean literally just getting the pedals turning on easy rides, no standing on the pedals and no off road excursions because "hey that little trail over there looks fun" but I do need to get back out there even if its short trips to get things going again and perhaps gain some confidence back. 

I recently bought some big ol fatty tires for the K2 which is pictured above they are CST Cyclops 26  x 2.4 tires and are extremely ummm rotund so I am using that as a reason to get back onto the bike as well.  My shoulder keeps me from riding as much as I would like to as well, but it is what it is I suppose for now but I am hoping to get things lined back up and having my body begging for mercy again because this me begging for mercy thing just don't fly. 

So with all of that said it is time for me to hit the road and get a couple miles into my day, I am going to try and get a few minutes later for a quick spin around the lake as well because when I am moving the weight typically comes off. I hope that was enough random for your day coming from my direction because that's what I got for today, I have never seen cookies jump into someones mouth on their own before so as long as I don;t pick any up they should stay out of my mouth. 

As Ever
Me

The mental game that is weight loss, a guest post from a good friend.

The mental game that is weight loss, a guest post from a good friend.

guest post new beginning weight loss Weight Loss weight loss success

Today I am going to introduce somebody to you, he will write a sort of guest post and give his point of views, I have only let one other person "guest post" on my blog since I started it back in 2008 and that was my wife. When I started writing in this blog I didn't know how or what it would turn into if anything at all and honestly I believed that I would make it about a week before I stopped logging in to write down my thoughts on weight loss and how things were going but as you know that wasn't the case. I was a 500 plus pound man who had no clue of how many days he had left on the planet because of a whole lot of extra weight and fear was in fact a driving force in how I was able to strictly stick to the plan that I had set in front of myself and I am down more than 200 pounds since Day 1. I wanted to let this person post because of the things that he is finding difficult with his weight loss, there is no fear to drive him its plainly just a lighter weight, he is significantly lighter than I was when I began but a weight loss struggle is at the core the same fight no matter who it is or what they weigh. Here goes nothing, a guest post from someone that I have been friends with for some time now, he struggles as I struggled in the beginning, its usually the case when we press into uncharted waters.



Let me start off by saying thanks to Zeusmeatball for the opportunity to post on his blog, I weigh more than 300 pounds and have for most of my life, there have been times when I was worse off than I am now physically but right now I do believe that I am in the best shape of my life even though the general physical shape of me is round. I do go to the gym almost daily, I lift weights and ride a mountain bike as often as I can but even with that all said I have been over 300 pounds for most of my life and am finding it very difficult to beat the weight down past that mark. I eat mostly whole foods these days but there are times that I feel like having a beer or stopping at a restaurant that I've never been to and sometimes that starts the spiral. I am completely comfortable with my weight even though I know that its too much and that fact gets in my way more often than not.

I have lived healthy for a while now and life gets in the way of my drive quite often and turning to food for comfort is too easy, though I am pretty healthy I don't feel the guy that I see in the mirror matches the fella in the gym. I have about 60 to 70 pounds that I would like to drop, probably more in the long run and am finding it hard to keep built momentum. I drink enough during any given day and I count calories (I learned that from Zeusmeatball) but because there is no death knocking on the door like Zeus had its all too easy for me to justify the extra comfort calories lately. I have goals sure, some of which are pretty important but still I struggle with staying perfectly on track with weighing and measuring every bite that goes into my mouth, I wonder how Zeus did it at times, then I read some of the older posts and the plan is simple.

I am beginning on a journey to get these 60 to 70 pounds off and its very much like the battle Zeusmeatball has fought over the past couple of years but some of the driving forces are a little different. I am not a 500 pound man that struggles to walk more than 50 feet but someone who can go to the gym and work for an hour on cardio machines without too much of a problem, I am not a man that would buckle the rims on a bicycle but someone that can and does ride 20 miles on a mountain bike as often as possible but the food I struggle with. Shifting my concentration to meticulously counting calories, eating only whole foods and making sure that I am getting enough vegetation throughout every day is what I need to do because I have the other stuff down pretty solid. I will take from all of the posts in this blog any information that I can get and use it to my advantage because looking back, if a 500 plus pound man can count every bite that goes in, walk slowly and in pain every day of every week without pause then me at just over 330 pounds can surely follow suit.

Zeusmeatball has written a lot of blog posts over the years, He has saved his life with the changes that he has made in his life and I know that he will be around a lot longer than if those changes weren't made. I look up to him and know first hand how hard the struggle was and is for him, he is the strongest man that I know and I owe a lot to him and because of that I have to show him that I can in fact follow his lead and drop the weight that I need to. Looking down the barrel of having to lose almost 300 pounds and the view of having to lose 70 or maybe even 100 pounds is somewhat different while the cards that must be played are very much alike. Today starts something new for me because I am going to start blogging not as a 500 pound man facing death but as a 300 plus pound guy facing the same kind of struggle from the vantage point of a much healthier version of my former self.

As Ever
Anthony



The guest post is written and a new struggle has begun, You can read Anthony's blog Here, I hope that you can follow along because I have a feeling that it will be a lot like my blog. Pushing through stresses that I have no control over will have to be extremely important in my life because no matter what else is in that life I have to be priority one else I could find myself back in a world of hurt with my health. I can promise myself and the ones that I love this will never happen and to prove it I will become a machine once again with my health regimen because if I can do it at 500 pounds and in constant pain then I can do it when I am physically capable of stopping the world from turning.

The struggles are cut of the same cloth but the mental is much different once you have pushed your way out of the corner.

As Ever
Me

The Human Engine, When did you last change your oil?

The Human Engine, When did you last change your oil?

human engine Weight Loss weight loss inspiration weight loss success

I had an old 1984 Buick LeSabre once upon a time and that car looked like hell when I was through with it, there were dents, broken windows and it had about 200k miles on it, I inherited the car from my mother when she moved out of state when I was about 22 years old. I drove that car for more than a year with about a quart of oil in it right up until the time that I sold it to the scrap yard it never quit on me, it ran in lieu of the treatment that it was getting even if it knocked and dieseled when I tried to turn it off. There was damage to that engine and transmission but it held together just long enough for me to save up and buy myself a 1986 RX7 (yes I fit into an RX7 so zip it!) so it did its job and I didn't have to take care of it one bit in the time that I owned it but it didn't last as long as it could have. If we take care of our cars they will last a long time, sometimes when we beat the shit out of them they keep on going but at some point something will break, it has to because it was not designed to work with extreme abuse and some are better than others at taking the abuse while still performing even if at a lesser standard than it was meant to.

That RX7 was WELL taken care of when I bought it, the thing ran like a top and that rotory motor hummed perfectly, I changed the oil regularly, washed and waxed it weekly and drove it everywhere. The fella that I bought the car off of had owned it since new and it had sixty some odd thousand miles on it when I purchased it and became the second owner, this car was my baby...for the six months. In my younger days lets just say that I was known to put after market parts into cars and proceed to beat the living hell out of them, this was starting to become the fate of that once pristine RX7. The car was taken care of all of its life until it met me and ultimately died at my hands and was sold off as a parts car the very next summer, yes I said parts car, so this car had a different life than that LeSabre but did share the same fate. Sometimes when things get taken care of properly they can still end in disaster because of all kinds of different problems or stupid decisions.

Engines work as they should when taken care of properly, change the oil regularly, tune ups help to keep things working and driving the way the car was meant to be driven will most times mean a reliable car for many years. When a car is not taken care of it may last for a while but eventually all of the parts that are wearing down every time it gets driven will fail and at that point the car is shot, we may be able to limp it back and fourth to work while it sputters and chugs along like that LeSabre did but it will be a short lived ride. I recently have been reflecting on some things that were in my life not too long ago and what I may have been doing to my body in the process of those things and the car analogy came to me, at 534 pounds I was beating the shit out of my body just like I did that LeSabre. My heart, my lungs, my bones and muscles, all of my ligaments along with every part of my mental was getting the shit beat out of it on a daily basis just because I weighed more than a quarter ton and was essentially running on a quart of oil and broken windows, I was fucking myself and couldn't see it.

Something was going to fail catastrophically in short order if I hadn't changed the oil when I did, but does it mean that because there are fresh plugs and oil in the engine that it will now be a 200k mile engine? this I am unsure of. Like a car that was beat to hell and then changed owners where the new guy takes care of the car sure it will last longer now because its being taken care of but are there stressed bolts internally that will ultimately make the engine fail? or will that odometer reach 250k and beyond? perhaps I worry about things that should not be as close to the surface as they are, perhaps not. As a once 500 plus pound guy I think that there are worries that are valid and should be monitored and all at the same time I know that the oil is being changed regularly now and the engine is being run properly so it should last a good long while more with this maintenance routine.

We need to take care of our bodies as if they are the most precious thing that we own because they are, we cannot call the scrap yard up and have them tow away the shell of a Lesabre because a shiny new RX7 was bought, we get one go around and that's it and the scrap yard that we end up in has a 6 foot deep hole in it. These days I am a machine, I eat properly, I exercise daily and I live as clean as I possibly can the days of beating the shit out of my cars is in the past and the days of me beating the shit out of my body are over, that is until I get into the gym or onto my bike but that is another story.

You gonna end up in the scrap yard? or pull that oil and wax out and show a little love to yourself? I know which one I choose.

As Ever
Me

You could spend your entire life walking around in the nowhere land of self doubt.

You could spend your entire life walking around in the nowhere land of self doubt.

I lost 200 pounds man loses 200 pounds Weight Loss weight loss success weight loss success story

Or you can get your ass up and do something about a situation that you ultimately do have control over, I mean it, YOU control how you live life and there is only one go at it so why not make it count? In the beginning I was doubtful that I would be successful with this whole weight loss game yet I kept going and upon doing so I found out that as long as I did my part the rest sort of happened, when I didn't do my part, well the rest stopped happening, simple right? sort of.

There are challenges that each and every one of us face on a daily basis and we somehow make it through to the next day each and every time but with weight loss it feels different, the word that comes to mind is impossible. It takes months or even years to put the weight on and we expect it to come off over night and honestly in the beginning it felt like it was! My experience with weight loss and gaining a better place within the health spectrometer has been very eye opening for me. When I was 500 plus pounds and feeling like there was no way out compared to how I see things now I sometimes can't believe that is how I felt after coming to the realization that my health is heavily dependent on what I do to keep it where it needs to be.


Its hard when you weigh 500 pounds and almost everything hurts, emotionally and physically to get up and do something about it but if you are wearing those shoes and are reading this trust me when I say that the pain only lasts as long as you let it. We doubt ourselves every day when we weigh as heavy as I did when I started down this road and that doubt will keep us from our goals all day long, know that when we apply a healthy eating regimen along with some movement then follow through with that plan that the weight has no choice other than to evacuate from our bones. There is a lyric that resonates through me almost daily, it goes like this "When you start to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive" in many of our cases where we are extremely over weight while the real world is eating us alive we are eating ourselves to death, its as simple as that.

I am not super weight loss guy and I only know what I have learned in the last couple years about health and weight loss, I hold no degrees in this field and I am not a doctor but I do know from my own experiences that as long as sitting on my ass was my sport of choice that things were getting worse by the day. Losing weight and keeping it off is a full time job and not an easy task by any means, it is a daily struggle and takes a shit load of dedication along with a lot of hard work so when you start down that road don't expect it to be bunny rabbits and baby chicks else you are setting yourself up for a let down. I will say that how you will feel and all of the things that are possible after losing a sizable amount of weight is more than worth the struggle, sweat and pain that needs to be put into the process.

Stop doubting yourself and what you are capable of this very second and get up off of your ass right now, not later, not in a minute and certainly not after you finish your muffin! and do something for your health, for yourself, for your life!....ANYTHING! but do it now because we only get one go at this ride called life and its shorter than we want to believe.

As Ever
Me

Will today be your Day one?

Will today be your Day one?

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This morning I woke up to a ton of email and a lot of messages on my facebook page which I encourage you to add me if it pleases you! that AOL article is to blame and it has put me into a magnificent mood! yes folks I just said magnificent! I have mentioned this before, I started this blog literally as a place to put my progress or back steps in a more public kind of way and it has become so much more than that in the last 983 days which wow! I've been at this for 983 days?? When I began down this road I wasn't sure what would come of it, I did not know if it would be a failed attempt or if I would be down to my goal weight in record time and for whatever reason it stuck this time and here I sit in my plush couch typing a blog and there is an article on a website called "Thatsfit" with me in it! I tell you that I can clearly remember writing my first post titled Day 1 and never did I think that I would be associated with something called Thatsfit, perhaps "ThatsFAT" but not the other.


My Thursday went very well, my calories came in at 1810 which is just about perfect and I went over because of having a pear around 8:30 last night so I am cool with the slightly over. When I was at the gym I decided that I hadn't been on the arc-trainer in a while so I did my 20-20-20 routine for an hour of cardio. The 20-20-20 is 20 minutes on the stationary bike, 20 minutes on the arc-trainer finishing up with 20 on the treadmill, I did change it up a bit because I did 25 on the bike and only 15 on the treadmill but a good solid cardio workout was had either way. My fluid intake was on par with just under 2 gallons of fluids between the H2O and green tea so hydrated I am and as I type I am already down a little more than a half gallon for Friday. I will not have a chance to get to the gym today so it looks like a bike ride around the lake is in my future which is more than ok with me, in fact I have come to enjoy my bike rides more than almost anything that I could be doing, almost.

I enjoy what I have done for myself and for my family, a two hour walk through a virtual world to kill a notorious monster has turned into a bike ride to the playground with the kids. Instead of a sack full of sodium laced processed meats and cheeses on a corn tortilla...er on 7 corn tortillas I eat fresh grilled salmon and sweet potatoes, Mangoes and green tea, the flavor difference is quite amazing if you don't believe me try for yourself! The fact that I can now decide that a walk around the lake or a hike on a local trail would be a good way to spend my afternoon is light years away from hoping that I was going to make it up the stairs before my heart grenaded inside my chest and ending up with a hole in the side of my house so that the firemen could drag me out.

When you were once 534 pounds and limited by that fact things look a little different that they do from a closer to normal weight, somehow things seem impossible when simply walking up a flight of stairs is a huge task. For the longest time I was in pain, I don't mean emotionally though that was there too, I had a back injury and 3 disks that were just not the way that they should have been after a work accident and something like that controls the way we feel mentally and obviously physically. Having been through an injury like that left me feeling helpless to get out of my own way and there were times that I physically could not get out of my own way but that has all seemed to change and that happened when I decided to completely revamp the way that I was doing things. I in the last couple years have learned that if a person wants something they need to grab it and make it what they want it to be, no one will hand life to you but giant plates of food and a sedentary lifestyle can and will take it from us each and every time.

Take back what is yours..

As Ever
Me

1730 calories looks just like this right here, yep sure does.

1730 calories looks just like this right here, yep sure does.

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This episode of The 1700 is brought to you by Harvey McDullardsonfengenden and the Jujuberry 7.2 people in an effort to get us in a frame of mind that promotes good eating and more movement in place of miracle diet plans. We will bring you through all the phases of a regular run of the mill day in the life of a fella getting healthy from the inside out. Lets start with an omelet made from 1 whole egg, 4 whites, Jalapeno, red onion, green peppers grape tomatoes, turkey pepperoni and some Asiago cheese with a side of a multi-grain english muffin. If you think that this dish is anything but a big ol pile of yum and more filling than almost any breakfast you need to rethink how you look at food.


Next we have a Zone perfect bar and this was the pre-gym snack? meal? whatever you call it, it had pecans, chocolate and caramel and let me tell ya, yeah let me tell ya. These little beauties run between 190 and 210 calories depending on which you choose and give me the boost that I need to make it through my trip to the gym. This is the point of the day where I am starting to feel like I am a tad hungry and honestly this is the only time of day that I get that feeling but after that omelet I ate it just because I knew that I was going to bust arse in a bit so down she went.

And then there were none...


Post gym meal looked a lot like a Turkey sandwich, an apple and a Yoplait yogurt, oh wait...anyways I am trying to eat bigger lunches lately and saving less calories for dinner ie: later in the day so that I give my body a chance to burn off the calories in the day. Harvey would have eaten this from a blender with 7 scoops of the miracle powder and subtract the apple and yogurt but wait! if you order right now you can have 12 weeks worth of meetings and a workout video that will shape your buns into a perfect rump O steel for free!


Nothing special here, just a few ounces of baby carrots to keep something processing in the gut, Sponge Bob square pants plastic kids bowl $1.45, Bag of baby carrots from the market $2.99, Having those baby carrots taste sweet like candy? Priceless!


Dinner I indulged in something that though I don't eat it often I do eat plenty when I do eat it, that's my chips, choosing something to say that I am addicted to it would be chips. This meal was a can of Tuna with red onion chopped into it served on whole wheat bread with some lettuce and 2oz of Lays light potato chips and I love these because they are cut super thin so it feels like a lot and really helps with that salty urge that I get. This portion of the 1700 is brought to you by the Storm trooper cows as no bovine were hurt, injured or cloned in the making of this post or any of these meals.


There always seems to be a grip of something in my day, its sort of um a tradition? sure, lets call it a tradition. This was 1/2 oz of Turkey pepperoni as I made a pass by the fridge and heard it calling to me, honest I did! and when I opened the door it was being held hostage by a a couple of bad apples and a cornish game hen so I did what I needed to in order to make sure it was safe.


The end of the night came and there was 70 calories left in the daily budget and this Blueberry pie was staring me down so I asked mommy if I could borrow 30 and bamn! I was set to have a nice treat to end my evening by and my day came in at a total of 1730 calories.


Once again I would like to add that 1.25 gallons of green tea went down the hatch throughout the day as well as 1 gallon of H2O, I think that I have again shown that a person CAN have a good amount of food on a budget of around 1700 calories. I will restate that this is a lot of food and if you don't think so you may just want to reconsider the way that you view food because it is merely fuel for our bodies to function on a daily basis.

That's all I got for today.

As Ever
Me

I lost 225 pounds to date?? when did this happen? New low weight for the weigh in!

I lost 225 pounds to date?? when did this happen? New low weight for the weigh in!

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I was not expecting much this week because of Easter and my date with some Cadbury creme eggs, I should actually say egg because I only had one but I ate a considerable amount of Easter colored M&M's and some marshmallow peeps. I decided that I would play mister strict this week and weigh, measure and basically be perfect with my calories as well as getting to the gym daily and apparently busting my ass all week has paid off. Last Friday I weighed in at 314.6 pounds and that was up from my lowest ever weight but down from the previous week and I needed to drop 3.7 pounds to stay on course for my under 300 pounds by May 1st goal and I am just going to say that I am more than happy with what the scale said to me today. I will get right to it and say that the number that I saw first was 309.4Lbs, THREE ZERO NINE??? ok lets try this again, 309.4Lbs, I say to Wify "I am going to move the scale to a different part of the floor because that can't be right" into the kitchen and 309.4Lbs so it would appear folks that I have a 5.2 pound drop this week and a new low weight! I am now down a total of 225 pounds, or 42.13% of my total body weight, saying that out loud is nuts to me.

It says 309.6 but I promise it said 309.4 before I picked up the camera! my new low weight!!

This 1969 T250 weighs in at 309 pounds just like moi!

Finally this Zero S electric bike comes in at 225 pounds which is of course what I have lost to date.

With today's weigh in I am a mere 34 pounds from my initial goal of weighing 275 pounds and I have to say that honestly it does not seem right to me that the number is only 34 pounds. Staring down the barrel of having to drop 259 pounds and now that number is only 34 pounds and clearly remembering the feeling of "Oh shit, there is no way I am going to be able to do this" to being 34 pounds from that goal is kind of surreal if I am being honest. I was once this guy that said "its time to do this the right way and not stop until I get there" all while thinking in the back of my head "You know that's just some bullshit to try and keep you motivated Tony" but here I am 225 pounds lighter than I was when I began this whole trip to the half.

When I started writing this blog I literally did not expect to be writing it past maybe the first month and now I write in it just about daily and I have 674 posts including this one to date. I called my blog "One mans trip to the half" because I literally had to lose half of my body weight to be even remotely close to a healthy weight and I adjusted my goal to that number which is 267 pounds, at a 267 pound loss I will weigh 267 pounds and be at 50% total body weight lost. I am 42 pounds from having lost half of my total body weight and again that seems fake to me, it feels like it was someone else and I seriously cannot believe that I am accomplishing something of that magnitude because this has been one of the hardest things that I have ever done in my life.

I have changed my life as well as everyone in my families lives by making the decision to get healthy and there is more to that than I write about here in this blog. I did it with pure determination and discipline, I researched weight loss like it was my job, like my life depended on it mostly because it did and I believe that I have changed more than I want to admit in the way that I look at things in general. I did not pay thousands of dollars to some drug company for weight loss pills or the next new thing, I did not go the route of Harvey McDullardsonfengenden and do the jujuberry 7.2 thing, I simply applied what I had learned to my daily life and over the last 2 years changed everything for myself. Today's weigh in caught me by surprise, I was honestly expecting to edge just past 314 pounds and maybe hit 313 but coming in at 309 lbs really put me into a mood this morning. I need to drop about 3 pounds per week from now until May 1st to get to my 300 pound goal on time and I am going to do everything that I can to get there because I honestly feel like once I get there that I will sort of explode into some kind of insane hyper kill every cell in my body workout mode because I never thought it was something possible to do for myself.

I want anyone out there that might be reading this to know that you can lose whatever you need to where fat is concerned with nothing more than hard work and bust assedness yes I just made up a new word because that's what its gonna take to convince you! I am down 225 pounds and I have done it without any miracle plan by just eating less and moving more and I started off at 534 pounds so if I can do it anyone can! after all I WAS voted laziest in my high school year book you can read that post and see the high school picture that proves it! Here. Another week down and 5 more pounds gone with the wind, keep on keepin on, drink that H2O and make sure to tune in again for more mind blowing action in the next episode of Fat man and Blobin!

That's all I got for ya today.

As Ever
Me