About Me
Hi, my name is Dan, and I’m a fat kid. Here is my story, and I’ll try not to bore you…
I haven’t always been a lardball, but I have never been at a physique level where I would be able to go to a beach and just take my shirt off like everyone else, and feel confident about myself. IT SUCKS!
Growing up I was a chubby kid, but reasonably athletic. I was the kid who could throw hard and hit hard, but I never lit up the base path in little league. I was an ok shooter in basketball, but it was a deal breaker for me when we played “shirts vs skins” at practice. No one likes to see a flabby 5th grader running up and down the court holding his boobs and being insecure….lets be honest.
While I was a kid w/ a lot of football potential in 7th grade (with full pads and full contact) I only lasted about 30 minutes the first day of practice, before I had a pretty big asthma attack. I called my mom to get picked up, and I was upset. I tried again the next day, ending with the same result. At the time I thought my asthma was the problem, when in reality it only played a partial role – the real problem was my POOR conditioning level and my inability to work through the pain and not give up.
Fast forward to my freshman year of high school. My gym teacher did a unit on weight training, and I was hooked. I LOVED to be in the weight room and surround myself with that environment. I cleaned up my diet a bit and managed to lose maybe 10-20 lbs, which left me at about 230 lbs at this point. The next year I had a lot of friends on the wrestling team, and I joined for the sole purpose of getting myself in shape, and boy did it work! My initial weigh in was 226 lbs in November and by the end of the season I was coming in at about 190 lbs. I also was outrunning the cross country kids in gym class and I was barely breaking a sweat. This level of conditioning and body fat continued until I graduated. My lowest weight was 183 lbs, and my lowest body fat level was probably about 14%. While this is nothing to brag about, it was a HUGE deal for me to wear reasonably sized clothes and not appear to be a fatty. And, I not only redeemed myself by playing football my last two years of high school, but I was a starter almost immediately, and I received all conference honors on defense, as well as a small handful of recruiting letters from tiny colleges with football programs. It isn’t much to brag about, but I do take some pride in being able to play after my middle school meltdown.
Through my early college years I let my weight fluctuate between about 200 and 260 lbs. I tried lifting programs in magazines and Arnold’s Bodybuilding Encyclopedia, and nothing really worked until I purchased a program from www.musclenow.com. While it was WAY more than I could afford I put faith in it and it paid off. I gained a lot of strength and muscle, but I also got really fat, because I did zero cardio and I ate a ton of food in the name of “bulking” and “adding muscle.” The musclenow program really was some pretty basic advice with diet and training, but it was what I needed at the time.
In 2003 I went all out on weights and cardio during my summer break. During this time I dropped from about 260 to about 225. I was benching about 320 lbs and squatting in mid 500 lb range. I was also able to strap a pair of 45 lb plates to a belt and crank out several sets of dips as well. Life was good and I was in reasonably good shape at a body fat of about 13-15%. I decided to take a personal risk of sorts, and I debuted the Incredible Hulk costume for Halloween of that year. Funny that at the time I still felt unsatisfied with myself, but I now I would be thrilled to be in that condition.
In 2004, I began to move away from the hardcore dieting and training habits I’d grown so used to. I met a gal who later became my wife, and she led me to see some of the fun in life I’d missed out on by being so consumed with my body and ME. I began to relax, enjoy life, and put less focus on my body. In time I would survive an AWFUL semester of student teaching, several jobs I didn’t care for, financial strain and hardship, and a lot of hard examining of who I am and why I have had successes and failures over the past couple of years.
Today (9/9/09) I am happily married and I have a wonderful little boy named Madden, and I have another baby on the way. I’m weighing in at about 290 lbs. Yes, I ballooned up considerably. I am actually down from 320 lbs which I was at for about 2 years. I made a deal with myself that when I saw 290 on the scale, I HAD to finally create my site and really dig down deep to see what I could accomplish.
My goals as of 9/9/09 are as follows:
- Get the scale down to about 225 lbs – This is a number I picked based on how I looked and felt in the past. It is a start, and my face is about half the size at this weight.
- Get my strength back up to reasonable levels.
- Get my endurance to a reasonable level – climbing flights of stairs without feeling gassed would be dandy…
- TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF AGAIN AND TO BE A HAPPY PERSON AGAIN!
I hope you enjoy my site, and find it useful,
-Dan
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