Our Personal Turning Point
About four months ago, Kay and I started a journey, almost immediately after she rather unceremoniously lobbed the following grenade over the transom:
“I’m going to be dead in five years if we don’t make a serious lifestyle change.”
Huh? Well, that got my attention. This was a turning point for me personally, and for Kay as well. Here’s what we decided to do with that.
Since then, we’ve each lost almost forty pounds, have made significant changes in our eating and drinking habits, and are feeling a good bit better!
Just recently, we joined a fitness center and have also vowed to use our home gym more regularly (and more strenuously). It’s a brand new day, boys and girls!
We’ve noticed that the older we grow (we’re both pushin’ the big six-oh), more aches and pains are induced and aggrevated by less and less physical activity, injuries take seemingly forever to heal, and there’s only so much that modern medicine can do if we’re not caring for ground zero, our own bodies.
And oh, the good life was, well, good, at least in the short term, but sixty years of livin’ good start making ya feel bad, if you know what I mean.
So, we decided to take over the controls once again from a sporatically working autopilot and turn the ole canoe upstream (or so it seems right now).
Why? Well, increased risk factors, the doctors say, are beginning to compound a lot closer to home than they were even a few years ago.
SOOOOOOO, we’ve given her hell the last four months, and we’re actually making some pretty good progress on this, our next voyage….
For example, I personally went from some indeterminate weight in excess of 230 pounds (more like 240-ish) with a sweaty forty inch waist (more like 42″) in 2007:
to “only” 223 pounds and a 38 inch waist just a few months ago (that’s my blushing bride on my right arm), along with a demonstrative reticence to wearing a speedo, even in private):
to a skinnier and more confident 185 pound runt, down to a 34 inch waist, with maybe another ten pounds of body fat to lose. Notice the speedo? Even if in the privacy of my own home? OK, smart-ass, do you have the stones to put YOUR picture on the internet wearing nothing but a speedo?):
I’ll let Kay decide whether she wants to post her pics or not. That is NOT my call, thanks very much!
Now it’s time to start gettin’ buff. Kay and I are on a twelve week program based on the book and journal entitled, “Body for Life” by Bill Phillips, and Kay is working with a personal trainer, Connie Powell at Twenty-Four Hour Fitness. We’ll see what kind of results this will produce with “seniors” like us, but I like Bill’s method of combining weight loss with strength and nutrition training via short term goals. Kay does too, but also likes a more personalized program that working with Connie is giving her.
We’ve now proven we known how to lose weight, but do I really want my journey to stop here? Uh-uh. As Kay says, “we’re not on a diet, we’ve made a sustainable lifestyle change.” Right you are, Hon.
So we work-out six days a week around a highly structured regimen designed for maximum results efficiently, and eat five to six small nutritious meals a day for the next twelve weeks (yes, this all takes daily planning the night before), and then we’ll stop for a checkpoint in December to see if this is getting us where we want to be and how we want to look, but most importantly, how we need to feel!
Wish us luck, gang!
With scales and dumbells on…
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