A Halfway Kind of Guy

In January of 2009 I was at the same place I am now. I was Fat! I had weighed more in the past I had topped out at around 335 lb back in 2004. Back then I new nothing about health let alone juicing. I had a girlfriend that drank soy milk and I thought that was just weird. She had also been a vegetarian for a while before we met and that was just really weird! Like so many people I thought that meat was an essential part of the human diet. By the time 2009 rolled around I had already been vegetarian for a couple years and even vegan for a while but after working my way down to 260 lb in early 2008 I had beefed back up to just over 300 lb. by the end of the year.

I was vegetarian but you can be a very unhealthy vegetarian. A vegetarian can eat McDonalds french fries, Taco Bell burritos, or Red Robin vege-burgers. Non of which are healthy but all are "vegetarian" so along with a lot of other various vege-meats and plenty of fast food I was plugging away at life and health. I started running during the winter of 2008, in Idaho of all places, with some co-workers. I even got to where I could run six miles but in spite of all that activity I was putting on the pounds. It was in Idaho that I first tried juicing. I even tried a juice fast back then. I had no idea what I was doing and didn't last but about 2 or 3 days and those were long hard horrible days. But they are the first steps that started me down the road that has led me to today.

On Christmas night 2008 I purposed to my girlfriend, Lauren, who is now my wife. A few weeks later we set a date for the wedding, June 7, 2009. I had under six months to get in shape for my wedding, but I didn't really start working on losing weight till March. In March with 3 months to go till my wedding I set out to lose some weight. Lucky for me I by this point I had moved to one of the healthiest cities in the country, Scottsdale,AZ. To slim down I implemented a extremely active lifestyle, racquetball  running, biking, hiking. I also changed my diet a bit, I tried to stay away from fast food and be mostly vegan. I even tried that crazy lemonade diet that was going around that year. By June 7th I had fought off 45 lb and felt great. I was riding my bike 20 -30 miles 2-3 time a week. Climbing at least one mountain a week. towards then end of that time I would take off running in to the desert in the evenings for an hour or so. I was in the best shape of my life.

After the wedding I was determined to keep up my activity. There was just one problem. I was not by nature and active guy, my whole life I have only done enough to get by. In high school playing baseball, I was never in really good shape I just cruised through on my natural ability. When that wasn't good enough anymore I just kind of lost interest in it. I didn't want to have to put any effort in to it. My main motivation for losing the weight before our wedding was so that I wouldn't have to look at my fat self in all the wedding pictures. I was still over weight but it was such a big improvement that when I look at my pictures I feel good about how I looked. But not having that motivation anymore I quickly slid back into inactivity. Shortly after we were married Lauren and I move to Louisville, KY. We joined a gym but neither of us knew what we were doing in a gym so our trips got more and more sporadic till we hardly ever went.

From here the scale started back in the wrong direction, fast forward a couple years I had returned to an omnivorous diet and I was back over 300 pounds.  The moment when I realized that I needed to do something was a day or two after a friends going away party when they started posting pictures on Facebook. I was so disgusted with myself I wanted to have them take down the pictures, but I didn't. I even left myself tagged in them so that anytime I looked through my pictures I saw them. That was July 2011, and true to form I didn't make any effort to get healthy. To be completely honest I was horrible depressed during this time, but thats a story for a different time. It wasn't until the early spring of 2012 that I started to take any steps to change my lifestyle. I cut back my meat consumption and started juicing. I also went and bought a scale, I was 328 lb, so at the time the pictures were taken I was probably over my previous record of 335 lb. Through juicing and trying to be a little conscious about what I eat I have been able to get down to 311 lb which brings me to September.

At the end of August my sister-in-law started talking about doing a biggest loser family competition. All of us would like to lose a few pounds and this seemed like a fun way to encourage each other to get healthier. Everyone else lolly gagged a bit but I started into this challenge on September 1. I weighed 311 lb that day. At Christmas we will determine a winner.

I have made it halfway to my ideal weight a couple times over the last 10 years but always end up back where I started from. I don't want to "diet" for a while, I want to change my diet for good. So I have been working towards becoming a true vegetarian, the kind that eats mostly plants, not the kind that just doesn't eat meat. Theirs a big difference. just by making that change along with juicing I  knocked off 10 lb by September 27. I am hoping that by the end of the year I will have developed new lifestyle habits and will be well on my way to putting all this extra weight behind me once and for all.

So thats my goal and what has brought me to this point. I didn't set out to juice fast but here I am. I figure as long as I am doing it, why not blog about it?