many faces, fat and skinny [1025.2005]
For the past several years, I've been dealing with a weight problem.
In college, I weighed 180 pounds no matter what I did. I went for long walks every day, ate what I wanted, and I never worried about my weight.
When I started working as a programmer, my lifestyle changed. I didn't take time to exercise and I didn't have to scrounge for food. Slowly the weight piled on and I never even noticed.
In my mind I was forever 180 pounds, so when I stepped on a scale one day and it said 235, I didn't know what to do.My friend Zach introduced me to weightlifting and the Body-for-Life program. Over the next 3-4 years, I started the 12 week program several times. Sometimes I even finished. I never quite got the results I wanted, though, and my weight kept bouncing. One time I hit 250 and promised myself never again. That's when I started hiking up Stone Mountain every day, and I got back down to my baseline of 230 pounds.
In early 2004, my business was doing well, and I spent some money on a mountain bike and a personal trainer. I rode the bike almost every day, and my trainer was amazing. By March 2004 I was a muscular 210 and feeling great.
But it didn't last. I made some small mistakes in the business, and then one huge one: taking on a full time development contract to bring in more money. The contract ate up three months of my life and left me with a backlog that stuck with me for the rest of the year. I was burnt out, depressed, and fat: by Christmas 2004, I weighed 275 pounds.
So this year I decided to fix this problem for good. In February, I started counting calories on my palm pilot and (for the most part) my weight has been either dropping or staying flat ever since.
As of today, I'm back around 235, and expect to reach 220 by the end of the year. I'm not sure what the end result is going to be. I think maybe 200 is the right number: at 180 I was scrawny, and I'd have looked a whole lot better with 20 pounds of muscle on me.