THE BEGINNING

Do not get confused by the title of this post. I am not talking about the beginning of my life here.

No, I am talking about the day that I made the decision to change my physical existence. I want to point out here that I am referring literally to my physical existence; weight, pants size, health, heartbeat, breathing, etc. I am not talking anything spiritual just yet.

Ok, so let’s get on with this then.

The date was December 23^rd, 2011. My lovely wife randomly brings up that starting in the New Year we need to start eating healthier and lose some weight. This made me very happy. It hit me on several levels.

Over the last several years I have brought up several times that I wanted to lose weight and get back in shape. Perhaps even quit smoking. My wife would say, “Great”. Over time I am sure that every time she heard me say that she thought, “Well, let’s see if he does it this time.”

This is due to a pattern I began to create where I would see someone that looked like they were really in shape and I would admire them for it. I would decide that I wanted to get back into shape and announce it. However, a couple of days would go by without me really doing anything about it and the idea would just fade. Early on, my wife would even buy some healthy food for the following week but I would get “bored” of it quickly and the rest would go to waste. So, I fully understand why she may feel the way she did about my “announcements”.

For some reason though, when she brought it up to me on the date mentioned above, I ran with it. Being that it was just two days before Christmas and we were planning to go to her parents for the Christmas weekend there was no rush on our part to get started. We knew there was going to be lots of food and candies for the next 4 days easily.

I however, began to secretly plan my escape route out of the hole I had dug for myself by gaining so much weight.

Now, I have quite a bit of knowledge from the past regarding weight loss, eating properly, working out, etc, to work off of. I was just choosing to ignore it up until now. However, I really wanted to take advantage of her origination on getting healthy and make it happen this time. Somehow I knew I could make it work this time.

So, we leave for her parents which is a good 4 ½ hour drive. Of course on the way we stop to snack and I am smoking like a train on the boring ride. But in the back of my mind I am really taking a look at everything I am doing and consciously remembering each moment of it. I wanted to somehow confront what I have been doing to my body.

We do the Christmas thing and the day comes that we are leaving to come back home. This is December 26, 2011. I happen to go into Best Buy and I see a video game for the Playstation 3 system. The name of it is UFC Personal Trainer.

Now, I am not someone who regularly watches UFC fighting but I am aware that it exists and I have seen a few matches and did find it somewhat interesting. I decide to buy the game and see what it has to offer.

We arrive home late on the evening of December 26 and we are both exhausted and so soon go to bed. The next morning when I wake up, one of the first things I do is pop in the game to see what it is all about. It seems that the workouts would be a good starting point for me since I am so out of shape. They were basic enough and did not require any extra equipment.

I go back to work at that point and after dinner I pop the game back in and do one of the kickboxing workouts. Holy smokes was I totally fried. It was only about 16 minutes and I was sweating from head to toe, could hardly breathe and my muscles were aching and on fire. I was so ashamed of myself! However, instead of going into some apathetic state of mind I firmly decided right then and there that I was going to beat this state that I had allowed my body to get into and rise above it no matter what that takes.

I noticed there are several 30 day and 60 day challenge type programs that could be done. One was for gaining muscle; one was for cutting weight and one for endurance. I looked over the one for cutting weight and I selected the beginner level. Excellent, I can start the actual program on January 2, 2012 and do some of the quick workouts until then to get my body back accustomed to being physically active again.

So, once again, the next night I did the same quick workout that I had done the night before. Much easier this time since I knew what to expect but still just about killed me. This just illustrates how out of shape I really am. It also gave me more fire to continue and get out of this rut.

So, here I am on day 3, December 29, 2011 writing this blog. I did the same workout again tonight and again, while somewhat easier than that first night, it was still difficult to complete. But, I did it. One little accomplishment at a time I guess.

My next post will go over my next workout again and then we will continue from there. Goodnight.