Weight Wars Episode IV - A New Hope

I wanted to post this one..because it took a long..long time to get down to the weight I really wanted to; which was the weight I was my sophomore year in college. That was the year that I lost 100 lbs using Nutri-system and was at 220lbs.  The picture I kept looking at for my motivation was me sitting on the beach in Daytona.


 I loved this picture of myself and wanted to get back there!  But all along this journey, it started to seem impossible to actually do it.  If you look through the blog posts of the past, you will see that I have went hardcore on the exercise portion and tried to do the same with my food consumption.  It seemed HOPELESS.  That is why I titled this post Weight Wars I - A New Hope! The problem wasn't the amount of food I was eating, but WHAT I was eating.  I had to realize that Carbs and Sugar are my Kryptonite.  Those two things will completely destroy my weight loss plans. 


Looking back, my last entry was around 5 years ago:  April 30, 2012.  During this time I continued to go to the gym 4-5 times a week.  I was taking Spin Classes 2 times a week, Body Pump, and Kickboxing/Turbo Sport and running on the other days.  I also was monitoring my caloric intake.  At one point I was only eating 1700 calories and my weight still didn’t budge. So I continued pushing on...but still felt hopeless that I would drop the weight.  That is why I hadn't really posted anything.  I felt defeated in this aspect of my life.  I couldn't drop the weight like I could when I was younger.


Then around February of last year I looked at a picture of myself and realized I didn’t really like the way I looked.  I know that whenever I looked in the mirror, (I don’t know if it’s just a guy thing or what) I thought I looked pretty good.  The mirror was lying to me!  It was only when I saw a picture of myself that I realized I needed to DECIDE to lose the weight. I had to decide to do it and not wait to see if it would just happen.  So I pulled out that picture of myself when I was a sophomore in college and was determined to get back to that weight again. One day I remembered that I had done a low carb diet at one point and lost 30 pounds.  I knew that carbs and sugar were the biggest challenge for my personal weight loss.  I realized that everybody has to figure out what works for their body type and for me it was the carbs. So I decided that since I had been eating and loved Atkins products, that I would go ALL IN on the Atkins program.  I started in February and I had my 20^th Anniversary trip that following May.  I decided that I was going to go all in with no cheating, all the way up to my Anniversary trip, and if it didn’t work it would have not been on me.  If it didn’t work I was just going to continue going to the gym and just “pay attention” to my eating and I was going to stop trying to lose weight.  I set that end date and stuck with the program all the way down to the minutest details.  By the time my anniversary had arrived, I had lost 35 lbs, so I decided to keep going until I hit my goal weight.  I now weigh about the same that I did in my sophomore year of college.  I am excited! I now have lost 60 lbs.
 

Left side: Me a couple of months ago

Top Right:  Me last year (I am in the burgundy shirt)

Bottom Right: My Senior Year in High School

Me now!