A Bit Of History

How it All Began.
I am Tony. I have always been a big guy; I'm told that I've been this way since the day I was born, and over the years I guess I just held true to that reputation. I remember weighing myself when I was probably ten or twelve, and my parents were shocked that I was up to 220 lbs. I really only went up from there.

It never really hit me until about a year ago, well the beginning of January 2008 to be exact. I stepped on my scale and the only thing it said was “ERROR”. I promptly turned it over to see a label which said “Max weight 350 lbs.” That was the shock of a lifetime. I knew that I had been hovering around 330 maybe 340 for years, and I had tried most of the fad diets, and plans before, but when the scale actually told me I was too heavy to be weighed, that hit home. It was that day, 7 am on some random weekday that I decided something HAD to be done, that failure was no longer an option.

I had already been going to the gym for about a month before that, just doing what most overweight and embarrassed people do there… trying to make it look like I knew what I was doing, trying to make it look like I wasn’t such a fat ass as I was. The day after D-Day as I call it I decided to step on a scale at the gym, 345 lbs. Three Hundred and Forty Five Pounds… WOW, I had some work to do. Over the next six months I continued to go to the gym with my friends, and it became almost more of a social thing than anything, sure I lost weight, but I was never really happy. Eight months after I started going to the gym, a few days before my 25th birthday I weighed myself again to find that I was down to roughly 315 lbs. I was still a heavy ass mofo if you ask me, but I’m probably the only person who’d complain about losing “only” 30 lbs in such a short time without having any idea what I was doing.

Shortly after my 25th birthday I started helping out a friend of mine, he was renovating his basement and I loved to play with power tools, so I stopped going to the gym. That lasted about four months, until I came to the realization that I had to get back into it, I had to do something as my weight was continuing to rise, and I really didn’t have a plan.

I started reading, learning, empowering myself to learn everything I possibly could. I have never faced a battle I could not win, so why should this be any different? Well, half a dozen books, and hundreds of websites later I finally realized it really wasn’t as hard as it had seemed at one point. It’s a simple mathematical formula. If your calories in exceed your calories exerted, you gain weight. If they are less, you lose weight. Too simple I know eh? Well, I’m sure all of those books and programs would have you believe something else, like there’s some magical fat blocking gene that can be activated with the pill of the moment… reality is, there isn’t one.
With knowledge under my belt, I realized the only thing I needed to do was put in place a plan. One week later I had a start date set, a plan in place, and a goal in mind. I had put together a program, what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, what I needed to buy for groceries and when. In addition to that a fitness schedule that told me when I needed to wake up, when I needed to work out, for how long, what to do etc. A Little bit of knowledge goes a really long way I guess.

On January 29th I weighed in at 329 lbs and on January 30th I started the meal plan portion of my program. Four weeks after my meal plan was implemented, I started the weight lifting portion of my program, and every week I have been tracking my progress, body measurements, weight, body fat percentage etc.

At the beginning of this week (Saturday is my weigh in, and today is only Friday) I weighed 310.6 lbs. That means that in a short 6 weeks I’ve lost roughly 19 lbs, or 3.2 lbs per week on average. Now you know the history, hopefully the future will not be so… summarized.