One of the (many) things I’ve been really working on is my health.

Perhaps the most frustrating things about this particular area of self-improvement is that the gurus all seem to be folks who’ve always taken good care of themselves. I think this limits their ability to teach the rest of us who have been overweight. While there are many success stories out there, I wonder is that is due to the individual starting out ready to change—maybe after having hit rock bottom—rather than as a result of receiving particularly good training from a health and fitness professional.

Speaking for myself, I had a rock bottom experience looking at pictures from my sister’s wedding. My wife looked gorgeous (and she still does), but I had somehow become truly fat while I wasn’t paying attention. I knew I’d been gaining some weight, but when did this happen? While I liked no aspect of myself in those pictures, for some reason, it was my fingers that did the trick. It looked like someone had replaced them with kielbasas. It’s weird what sticks with us.

It’s been about 15 years since then,1 and I would love to tell you that I walked a smooth path to a healthy life from that day forward, but it was damned hard. It was a struggle, with a lot of ups and downs. Those ups and downs trended in the right direction, however, and I am in better shape now, at age 41, than I have ever been.

I tried many different plans and diets to get here, and it was only recently, looking back on my experience, that I noticed that all these plans and diets were designed by people who’ve always been in shape.2 That may have been part of my problem and why it took so long. Maybe this is true for more than just me. After all, it’s hard to teach what you’ve never had to do.

I’d love to design a program to help people get healthy, because it makes every part of life better. I want other people to discover this for themselves. If you’re struggling with your weight right now, that’s okay. It’s not as easy as the jacked and tan trainers make it sound in their motivational speeches, but it is possible. I did it, and so can you.

Send me an email if you need someone to talk to.

  1. I should probably remember my only sister’s anniversary better than this. ↩︎

  2. Some of them maybe had love handles for a couple weeks in their thirties. ↩︎