I walked in the evening today. I lasted an hour and 5 minutes before I quit. I wanted to do 90, but my back was giving me some trouble, and I don’t want to exacerbate things, so I headed home. There’s no shame in walking an hour and five minutes, of course. It may not be 90 minutes, but it’s still pretty darn good. Especially considering I weigh about 338 pounds. It’s also about an hour and five minutes more than the average American exercises every day. By the way, that’s another nice benefit of shooting for a 90 minute walk every day – even on your bad days, when you only manage an hour or so, that’s still a really good workout.

I think I’m officially on a roll here (and, no, I don’t mean a cinnamon roll). I’ve walked six days a week for the past 2 weeks. I’m re-establishing my walking habit, and laying the groundwork for a complete life makeover. (I know it sounds ambitious, but that’s what I’m shooting for!) I’ve also been below 340 pounds for a good week now, so I have definitely lost a few pounds. My scale was fluctuating between 340 and 344 pounds; now it fluctuates between 336 and 338.

So I’m getting there. Slow but sure. And, while no one seems to have noticed, I have also quietly started blogging nearly every day again. Hopefully soon I’ll have a growing number of readers and we can encourage and inspire each other in our weight loss and life goals.

Losing 100 pounds… can I really do it? Boy, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? On the one hand it’s easy to say that thousands of people have lost 100 pounds or more, and if they can do it, there’s no reason under the sun that I can’t do it. Heck, some people have lost 500 pounds or more. So, if the question is simply ” is it theoretically possible for Greg Todd to lose 100 pounds?”, then obviously the answer is a resounding yes. I mean, it’s not like I’m suffering from some terrible, unique handicap that somehow prevents me from expending more calories than I take in on a regular basis, which is what losing weight boils down to. There are 3500 calories in a pound, so to lose 100 pounds I simply need to expend 350,000 more calories than I take in over the next year, or two years, or whatever time span I want to use. To do that in a year would require using 6731 more calories per week than I take in, or about 962 a day. I can eat 962 fewer calories a day than I’m eating now, or I can burn off through exercise 962 more calories than I’m burning now, or I can obtain the desired result by some combination of both methods.

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s simply this… Read the rest of this entry »

Woke at 6 AM and was wide awake, so I decided to get my walk in early today. I was out on the pavement by 6:30, and walked for a total of an hour and 18 minutes in. Last week I could only manage about 8 or so minutes before I’d have to sit down and rest because of my back. Now it’s no problem for me to walk 30 minutes without stopping. My goal is to walk 90 min. a day and I’m almost there. I think I’ll probably take Sunday off to give my legs a rest.

Mine hangs waaay over my belt and onto my lap when I sit down.

Trying to get back in the habit of walking every night.

Did an hour and 9 minutes last night.

An hour and 3 minutes the night before that.

An hour the night before that.

Of course, this isn’t straight through. I walk 15 minutes or so, and then sit down for 3-5, to give my back a break.

Tonight I could only manage 18 minutes. But that’s OK. I’ll be back out there tomorrow.

Back in the early 2000s, I had a far right wing blog. I would get home from work every day around 3:30, and, except for hourly cigarette breaks, I would research and write all night, until about midnight. On the weekends I blogged even more, because I didn’t have to work. I kept up that pace and output for over three years. I wrote well over a million words during that time, if not two million. But now, even though nothing has changed as far as the amount of hours I work at my job, I can’t seem to get back into the groove of writing every night, not even for 15 minutes, let alone 8 hours. Granted, back then I was on a mission to save the world (which I’ve since abandoned), but still…I mean, if you think about it, I’m now on a mission to save my life, and writing on my blog every day will help make that happen. But it’s hard to find the motivation to write.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

That’s not much. At least for me.

Plus, I had to stop and sit down twice.

But, I did it.

I’ve got to get in shape. My gut is so huge it’s unbelievable, and it bothers me constantly. It’s time to either get in shape, or just give up, and get ready to die. You don’t see many 330 pound 50 year olds. And, believe me, there are days when I wonder why I’m bothering. I’m way past my prime, and and it’s hard to lose weight or make any other lasting changes at this age. I’m not going to get married and have kids or grandkids, and who wants to live to be 80 years old and all by himself? So really, what’s the point?

But I always come back to wanting to fight for health and for life, even if I can’t think of a good reason why. Maybe that’s just the way God made us. I don’t know. But I do know that even when I go weeks or months between efforts, I always come back to trying again, hoping that one day something will click, and after scores of attempts to get started on the road to health, this time it will work.

Which is what happened with cigarettes. I’ve tried to quit, and made it 2-7 days without cigarettes probably 50 times, but kept going back. But this time it looks like it took.

Why?

I have no idea.

But I’m glad it did, and I’m hoping that one of these days the same thing will happen with my quest for physical fitness.

This is a blog about several things.

Weight loss primarily.

But also about rebuilding a life, recovering from my middle aged right wing hermit blues. Which I’ll have more to say about down the road (a lot more).

It’s about trying to make the next 20 years of my life the best ones.

It’s about trying to build a writing business of my own on the side, including copywriting and creating Private Label Rights articles for internet marketers.

It’s about seeing if I can stick to a goal for more than a week or two.

It’s about recovering from years of depression, and trying to avoid getting depressed all over again when I think of all the years I’ve lost.

It’s about eating right, and exercise, but also about having fun.

It’s a place where I can write about what I want to write about, and if others find it interesting, that’s great. If not, that’s fine, too.

It’s about helping others who are dealing with depression and/or obesity, and helping them build a happy, healthy life.

It’s hopefully going to be about making some new friends from all over the country and the planet.

It might sound crazy, but I hope it’s all these things and more.

It’s been a whirlwind couple of months. I got a great job offer and wound up moving to Beaumont, Texas.

I still can’t believe I’m no longer on the goat farm.

Now it’s REALLY time to get serious about losing weight and blogging.

Stay tuned!

Straight through, no breaks.

In a constant drizzle; when I got home my parka was soaked. So were my shoes, shirt, and sweat pants. But I felt great.

My back still hurts, my right heel still hurts, but who cares? I walked for an hour and a half straight. I feel like I’m starting to hit my groove.

Still finishing off the left over Mountain Dew.

Still can’t sleep, even though I’m dead tired, and worn out from walking.

Probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow, as we’re due for another 2-4 inches of snow. But it should melt the next day, if the forecast is right, so I won’t be out of commission very long.

Stay tuned.

Oh, BTW, right now I weigh about 322. Looking forward to cracking 320 in the next week or so.