Steve’s Story
I’m a 45 year old married software engineer with no kids.
In my youth, I was perhaps a bit less active than most kids my age, but not by too much. I played little league baseball, shot hoops at the neighbor houses for hours on end and rode my bicycle many miles getting into far too much trouble for my mother.
Even after we moved from California to Washington state, I remained pretty active for a couple of years before the rainy weather took it’s toll on my activities. That was when I started putting on the pounds and kept doing so until I was well overweight by the time I graduated from high school and moved to Arizona to continue my studies.
In Phoenix, I went on the “Just away from home involuntary starvation” diet and dropped several pants sizes until I discovered how to live on my own. Then I met and married my wife. Fat followed happy as I put on many pounds. We moved back to Washington, which only seemed to amplify my sedentary lifestyle. I would come home from work and crash out, napping on the couch. My only activity was doing occasional yard work, which doesn’t burn many calories when it’s not backed up with anything else.
In May, 2000, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. At the time, I figured the loss of mobility that I expected to follow was some sort of fate for not pursuing a more physically fit lifestyle. But I made eating a core competency and ballooned to over 360 pounds.
In 2006, we discovered the South Beach Diet and made a number of substantial changes to our regular diets. My wife lost a few pounds, but plateaued rather early. The elimination of refined carbohydrates as my worst diet offenders proved magical and I was shocked to lose over 100 lbs before hitting a similar plateau. But even with that plateau, I was able to keep most of those pounds off, getting as low as 250 pounds and haven’t been as high as 280 since recently.
Still, I wasn’t happy with where I found the scale stuck at and when Carole started Jillian Michaels’ Making the Cut program, I joined the party. At my reduced weight, the activity increased my energy levels and I picked up Jillian’s 30 Day Shred DVD and had enough fun with that workout that it felt like time for us to try out the P90X program we had seen over so many late night infomercials.
Update: January 4, 2012,
Weight back up to 280.5 due to a combination of less nutritional discipline and side-effect of antidepressants. Now off of the medication and back on plan nutritionally and starting back up the fitness program. Target is to return to my prior weight of 250 pounds by end of May, but not to stop there. The stretch goal is to get to 225 pounds by the end the year.
