How did I get to where I am today with my fitness?  How did I go from a size 42 pant and drop 10 inches?  How did I go from 235 pounds to 160 pounds?  Certainly there must be some sort of health shake advertisement, supplements, pills, diets, or other trick to get me there, right?

Wrong…

What got me to where I am today was a mix of hard work, determination, along with some set backs and failures along the way.  I’d like to say it was easy, but it wasn’t.  I got mixed up in a few diet “fads” as I’ll call them.  The Adkins among several others plans, but as good as the weight came off, it went back on.  I tried some of the diet pills too, but all those did were amp me up and leave me feeling paranoid at times.  A brief 7-8 month stint of those ideas and I decided I needed to find another alternative in hard work, educating myself, and following a routine.

Hard work …

First of all, you can watch all the commercials, read the ads, listen to how there are miracles to losing the weight.  The truth is there is a reason they call that a miracle, because it will be a miracle if it does a single thing for you.  What will get you further than anything in your journey is hard work and being determined to make a change in your life.  There wasn’t any one thing that I did that made the entire difference, but a culmination of things that I found to be the key to success.  I’ll explain all of it later in other posts, but the majority of my success came from the following:

• Reading the labels
• Portion control
• Get rid of the pop
• Changing what I ate
• Hitting the gym
• Staying active

When I found things that didn’t work I gave it some time before tossing in the towel on them.  When I found things that worked I stuck to them and took notes of what to do.  When I got bored of those I tried similar exercises or similar foods to provide something different.

Set backs and failures…

Be prepared for the potential for things to go wrong along the way.  Losing weight and making changes doesn’t come without a snag here and there.  I went through periods of working out where I would hit the proverbial wall and not lose a pound for weeks.  Even more concerning and more of a kick to the gut was when I would gain, even a half pound or two pounds.  What took me awhile to realize, and get reassured was that not all weight is bad weight and those were often ok.   Go into this knowing that you will stumble, you will fall, and there will be times that you want to give up.  These are all normal things, you just need to get back up and keep moving forward.