A Fat Kid Becomes An Ironman

Yesterday I wrote a post about what I ate during the 3 months I lost 50lbs. Today I’ll share more details about how I exercised during that time.

If you read my last post, you know that up until this time, I had not been very physically active my whole life. I was a hard-core computer geek. I got into computers in 5th grade (way back in 1980). I spent all my free time coding and thinking about computers. Sure I played video games, but mostly I wrote code.

I was also into punk music, so there was an element of anti-jock attitude in my subculture of friends. Once I was out of the house, punk lead me to beer and partying… and in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Seattle we all hung out in baggy clothes and flannel shirts and drank beer and listened to punk rock (ok you guys started calling it grunge)… blah blah blah… the point is I was fat and I didn’t care what anyone thought of it.

Like I said in my last post, I wasn’t really trying to lose weight to look better. I do have body image issues, but I lived my whole life as overweight, and I’d already married the girl of my dreams and I had two beautiful (and more importantly happy) children… so I don’t really need to impress anyone. But I wanted to exercise to get healthy and to become more balanced.

So, I started to go to the gym almost every day. Like I said, I usually dive into the deep end when I take something on. The good news is that although I was busy (full time job at new start-up company and a dedicated family guy) I was able to take advantage of the 24hour nature of this gym.

So my daily routine went something like this… up at 7am, business call at 7:45am, feed the kids breakfast, off to work, arrive by 9am, leave work about 6pm, dinner with family, get kids ready for bed, read stories, good night by 7:30pm, hang out with wife for a couple hours, talk about our day watch a little TV, leave for gym about 10:30pm, work out for 90minutes, sauna/steam room, shower, come home around 12:30/1am, Sleep, repeat!

I worked out at least 5 days a week… but some weeks I would work out every day. I did this continually for 3 months…

Starting in early September, I weighed over 200lbs, with a size 38″ waist. Think about that for a second, I was 64″ tall with a 38″ waist. WOW! By Christmas, I was down to 150lbs, and a size 30″ waist.

One of the funniest things about this experience, is that now three years later (and I’ve kept it off, in fact I am more like 140lbs now with a size 28″ waist), people who met me that September, don’t remember me as being so heavy. These are people who know me very well now. And they think of me as “always being fit”… but when they first met me, I was completely unfit. I still have those 38″ waist pants that I interviewed in before starting that job in September.

More on my workout:

When I worked out I focused 100% on cardio. I was a total overachieving newbie. I picked the machine that looked like it burned the most calories. It was a recumbent bike with “pumping arms” that you could grab and get supposedly “upper body” resistance while you pedaled. I chose this machine because according to the readout if you set it to maximum resistance and pedaled really fast you’d burn 2500 calories and hour. Hell, I was gonna burn more than 3000 calories more than I ate in the day!!! This of course was silly for me to think. But it kept me going back and sweating my guts out every day.

When I look back on this experience, I am really amazed that it worked, and I came out of it with a new healthier perspective. I could have just as easily started myself on the weight-loss yo-yo that my parents have lived on all of my life. But I have kept off the weight, and with changes I’ve made since then (this was three years ago now), I am convinced that I will continue to live my life as a healthier (more height/weight appropriate), happier person.