About five months ago I got the serious kick in the butt I needed to get rid of a bunch of extra weight. I'm 5'10", and was 196 when i graduated high school and went to basic. Life happened, and at almost 34 I was up to a whopping 263. Lifetime of poor eating habits didn't help, yay for parental influences. Even at 260+, I was the skinny one of the family. Both my parents and sister are obese and diabetic, and have the healthy problems to go along with it.

So when I finally conceded to try on a pair of jeans a size bigger and they still weren't big enough in the waist, I said "eff this, I'm NOT going up two pants sizes", I downloaded the My Fitness Pal app the next and started counting calories. The goal is to get back to that 196 I graduated high school at. That was in May. I wound up after a little toying around with it setting it at 1600 calories/day. Didn't specifically prohibit any food, but when that's your cap, it causes a guy to look an awful lot closer at what goes in. I didn't "work out", I hate the gym, I hate running, I don't even like walking for the sake of walking. If I go to the range and have to walk to the 300 yard mark to check targets, then I don't mind making that extra trip down range now, but just to go walk? Heck no.

I do work in manual labor. Basically I get paid to strength train every day I go shoe horses, which works out (no pun intended). In that first 90 days I dropped 45 lbs. At 3500 calories per pound, that meant I was burning 17-1800 calories a day under what my body uses. During the summer, I figured out I could go to the pool with my kids and swim laps while they did their thing, get a hella workout that's no impact, and eat a few hundred extra calories because of what I burned off. So say I was consuming 1750/day on average, and losing 1750/day that I didn't eat. I don't feel like I'm that active, even in the summer, but that means I burn somewhere around 3500 a day.

Around the first of September, my body hit a wall. It was telling me there wasn't enough extra fat to keep up at the pace of well under 2000 cal/day. I've settled in on around 2400/day for now. As of now, I'm down to 210, and with kids in school and fall here, I wonder if this will be more of a maintenance number through the winter than a weight loss number. I've still kept dropping a pound or so a week for the last month and a half, but the cool has started to hit.

When I was on the 1600 cal program, I was super watchful of what I ate. I'd eat other "not so healthy" stuff, in extreme moderation. Going back up on my intake, that's the struggle I have now. Energy bars and certain kinds of carbs (read: sugar, mostly) have wanted to creep in to bite me. I have done well to keep overall intake down, but could probably use more veggies sometimes, and more meat. Overall, I'm still feeling good about things, but I am not enthusiastic about the holiday season at all. If we could just skip to past Christmas, I'd be good to go.

When I started out on this, I hadn't had a physical for probably three years, and didn't want one. I spent a lot of years around 240-243, but a couple years ago that old life thing crept up and put that extra 20 on. I just started using the VA for health care this year, and they called in July wanting me to come in for a physical. I was good with that because i was down to around 220 and wanted to see what my numbers were at that point. My BP was down to 118/80, I think. It had been around 160/80. When I was a kid, I always had an insanely low pulse, or so I thought. It was around 80 when I was super fat, but I go in for that appointment and it was around 45. All my blood work came back solid. Doc was impressed, especially after quizzing me on family history. My response to "oh, you're pre programmed for diabetes" was oh hell no.

So, thus far I've lost 53 lbs, still eating a limited quantity of ice cream, occasional donuts, drinking more diet soda than I should, the usual massive amounts of coffee, and otherwise keeping a cap on overall caloric intake. Generally not feeling depraved. I'm new to this weight loss/healthy eating concept, but that was one thing I realized in the first couple weeks. It's easy to lose weight, but many folks can't keep it off because of lack of planning on keeping it off. At least for the foreseeable future, I'm just going to concede to be a calorie counter.

I'm open to any other grand suggestions anyone else might have.