Welcome..

Hi there.. yes, this is the obligatory introductory post. an obligatory picture or two will follow once I get around to uploading them and setting up an account on one of the various services that let you upload pictures (not necessarily in that order)

I'm debating whether to backfill my workout posts from my other journal, or just start fresh here. At this moment I'm inclined toward starting fresh.

I made a major change to my life in 2006. For my 41st birthday, I quit smoking. I had smoked a pipe since I was in college. I started smoking with cigarettes. I didn't like the taste, and rather than choosing the sensible course of "Well, maybe I won't smoke then", I tried cigars. I found some cigars I liked but couldn't afford those that I enjoyed the flavor of. So, I settled on the same source of nicotine that my father did before me. A pipe.

And for 20 plus years that was a huge part of my identity. But, along with other signs of getting older, I recognized that smoking was interfering with my efforts to get back into shape.

My Dad quit smoking in his 60s. Now I know that being in your 60s today isn't anything like being in your 60s was 20 years ago. Thanks to modern medical science and lots of learning about what makes us tick, 60s aren't the end.. they are for many people a new beginning. None the less I couldn't shake the feeling that if you're going to quit smoking you should do it when you're still young enough to enjoy the benefits.

Well, ideally that would have been about a decade ago, before my metabolism slowed down and I stopped fitting into my 32w, 32l 501 jeans. But that didn't happen. I was going to quit for my 40th birthday, but I had a storm of wonderful stress producers fall from the sky and into my lap a couple months before that birthday and I decided that trying to quit on top of the rest was a road map to failure. I didn't want to quit and fail. I wanted to quit and be done.

So i worked through those stress producing months, and I kept to an on/off workout schedule, trying to get into better shape whether I was still smoking or not.

Now, 2007 has rolled around and for the first time since 1985 I didn't light up a smoke on New years day. Instead I have marked the beginning of my 6th month as an ex-smoker.

My workouts have been a part of my life since 2003, I'm not even sure what the inspiration was at the moment, but it certainly didn't become a constant thing. I'd workout for a few months and something would interrupt my workout schedule. Sometimes I would get back to it, and sometimes I wouldn't for several months.

Releasing myself from my daily nicotine dependence has changed that. because about 2 1/5 months after my last dose of nicotine I discovered that many smokers discover when the become ex-smokers.

As of the middle of October 2006, I weighed more than I have ever weighed in my entire life.

On the grand scale of things being 6 foot tall and 210-220 pounds isn't a terrible thing. In the United States I could certainly walk down the street and be considered of at most average weight/size. But it sure as heck wasn't average for me. In American culture men don't usually worry as much about their weight as much as women do. We're not surrounded by as many cultural messages that we need to be thinner, we need to be taller, we need to be thinner, etc. That's slowly changing, not in the lessening of such messages for women, but in the increase in those messages for men.

For me, the first trauma was having to buy pants with a 34 inch waist, then a 35 inch waist, and finally settling in at a 36 inch waist, then after I started working out in 2003, back to a 35 inch waist.

So when I saw my weight in October 2006, there is no way I will buy 38 inch waist pants. No way, not gonna happen.

I ventured over to a website by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, called The Hacker's Diet because I had found it months before from a posting on Fark and forwarded it on to a friend at work who'd just started to try and lose weight.

His approach to weight loss made a lot of sense to me and while I'm not really up for counting calories, his idea of exercise and his approach to measuring your weight loss both worked for me.

So, that's what I started doing. I started myself on rung 10 of the "introductory ladder" and have not missed a single day since. I'm currently at rung 30, getting ready to move up to rung 31. I paced myself by the method he specified.. what rung of the ladder can I complete in about 15 minutes.

And I started weighing myself. Every single morning.

So far I'm down about 12-13 pounds. Which is about the pace I was looking for. When it came to the holidays I decided all I really wanted was to keep a holding action.

Now I'm back on track for slow, maintainable weight loss.

Welcome to my journey.. we'll see where it goes.