So starting about this time last year I began my journey of getting back into shape.  It started small, just walking a mile in the morning as I began to get ready for what would be my first of many races.  The walk turned into a walk/jog and then a full out jog.  I then moved to two miles and now I’m running anywhere from 3-4 miles in-between my two days a week at the gym.

So my initial goal was to actually be able to run a complete 5K without walking.  I wasn’t really sure how many races I was going to do after the Mini-Country Music Marathon I was signed up for at the time but I knew it was going to at least a few as I needed to complete a full race without walking (which happened on my third race).  I hadn’t planned on losing a bunch of weight so I didn’t take any pictures of my progress (I’ll need to go through what I have and try and put some time-lapse look-at-me progression type thingy together), but as I was losing weight I decided to set two weight loss goals.

The first goal was to lose 100 pounds.  I see people write about how they did such a thing and I when I would read those stories I always wished that was me, so a 100 pound weight loss was my first goal.  The next goal was to get my BMI out of the obese range.  I started this journey at 348 pounds with a BMI of 47.2.  A non-obese, but still overweight BMI is 29.9 which would put me at 220 pounds.  So the second goal is to reach 220 pounds.  What’s crazy is for me to be at a “normal” weight would be 183 pounds. I think the last time I weighed that little was 5th grade…maybe 6th.

The lightest I can ever recall weighing was 189 pounds my Senior year in High School when I dropped down to that weight for wrestling.  That lasted all of about 4 weeks before I went back up to the Heavyweight weight class (we didn’t have the 220 pound weight class like they do now so I was wrestling people anywhere from 190 to 275 pounds and I was around 215).  I don’t see myself really getting down much below 220.

So as of this morning I reached the first goal of losing 100 pounds!  That’s a lot of extra baggage I’m no longer carrying around.  Next up is that 220 goal, only 28 pounds to go!

Below is a picture taken on December 24, 2012.  If I was any bigger I would have consumed Victoria!  After seeing this picture I knew I needed to make a change, it wasn’t until a few months later when I was on the verge of hitting 350 and was needing to buy 4XL shirts that I started such a change!  Man, what a year makes!  I’m 100 pounds lighter and take more vitamins than medication in the morning.  Praise the Lord!