I’ve always considered myself a fairly active person, certainly throughout high school I couldn’t sit still and was always doing activities whether it was riding my BMX, mountain bike, motorcross bike, swimming, running, tennis or martial arts. At that time I was very lean and weighed in at a fairly svelte 89kg.
Fast forward to university and it look a clear downward trajectory, a whole lot less activity, limited structured sport, poor food choices and the addition of alcohol. I think everyone would agree, not a great combination. Between 1998 and 2004, I was going to the gym regularly and put on a lot of muscle but my overall health wasn’t in a good place with my weight ballooning to about 115-125kg at my heaviest.
Once leaving university, over the next 10 years it came down a little and plateaued at 110kg but I had some other health issues (more on that in another post) to contend with.
When I moved to Seattle at the beginning of 2018, I’d committed to myself that I was going to get my general health in order. Since I wanted this to be a forever change, I was going to make small, incremental adjustments that I felt I could sustain long term.
With that in mind, I used the most basic of plans:
- Remove or dramatically reduce obviously bad food from my diet
- Start moving again
For the first point, that meant I was going to remove things like soft drink – I’d been regularly consuming Coke for as long as I could remember but it just needed to go. For the second point, consistency was my main initial goal – I picked running because you can do it any time, you don’t need a partner or team and you don’t need to get in a car to go somewhere to do it.
That basic plan got me from 108kg when I moved to Seattle down to 93kg. I certainly feel a lot healthier than I did was I was 108kg or worst yet 115-125kg that is for certain. Despite removing some obviously bad things from my diet, don’t for a second let me convince you that my diet is clean because it isn’t – I still eat a lot of food that I probably shouldn’t such as pizza, burgers, Thai or Indian.
Good progress but there is more to do, so will keep experimenting to see what works for me.