52 in 52 a Goal and a Challenge

If you haven’t heard, Thom DeVos and I have entered into a friendly weight loss challenge. We are both looking to lose 50lbs before Thom turns 50 years old, I’ll still be a young, handsome 42 🙂

When I first started building the new Millennium Running website and we were discussing the ideas we had for content I came up with a challenge for myself to lose 50 lbs in 52 weeks. I would call the blog 50 in 52, well since I came up with that idea I gained 2 lbs, now we have 52 in 52.

Here’s my story:

One day, at the naive age of 24, I was outside working on a project chatting with a neighbor while enjoying a beer. Somehow the conversation turned to the beer, then to a bet, my neighbor bet me $200 that I would exceed 200 lbs before I was thirty. “You’re on.” In my mind, the guy is an idiot, I can eat, drink, act, however I want and no worries I’m still a skinny punk, somewhere around 175 lbs at the time.

Well the neighbor moved away, I moved away, and the years ticked by as the pounds ever so slowly started adding up. The “winter weight” stuck around longer, and the pants sizes increased. The bet stayed on my mind, and has always been in the back of my head. On my thirtieth birthday I proudly stepped on the scale, knowing that I had made a lot of effort in the past year to be sure I stayed under 200 lbs. The dial on the scale spun around to 199, no lie, I had won, to that point I had never to my knowledge exceeded 200 lbs. It all went down hill from there, after winning the bet, which was now just principle because I don’t even remember that neighbors name, I was free to not care about my weight, and it showed.

Let’s fast forward about ten years, I changed jobs, I was no longer in the relatively active masonry trade and I had not ventured near a scale in who knows how long. New years eve 12/31/09, there is a wedding, there is an open bar, lots of food, and good times. A few days later a picture of me shows up on Facebook, and I cringed “Dude you look like crap and you need to lose some weight”. I was at 230lbs exploring new ways to tie my shoes and throwing away cloths that made me sad. I needed to make a change, and it had to happen now.

Sure, I’ll show you the picture. I put in a lot of effort and lost 30lbs by the summer, it was then that I realized that I was still overweight and that the weight  the doctor said I should be at didn’t seem so crazy anymore. That is also when I hit the wall, losing the 30lbs was tough but for some reason nothing more would come off, so I lost ambition and went back to life as usual.

Now we are at present, well last week actually, when I re-committed to getting down to the 175lbs that I want to be at, the doctor says 165, I’m shooting for 175 and we’ll see what happens from there. If you’ve been following along with the math you’ll know that upon the start of this challenge I was sitting at 227lbs.

My Challenge with Thom is to lose the weight by his birthday, my continuing challenge with myself is to keep the weight off, and moreover to improve my lifestyle to something that can be considered healthy. I will continue this blog for the 52 weeks, and once I have lost the weight I will continue chatting about the things that I am doing to maintain my weight and improve my overall health.

Good luck Thom, I hope we both kick butt.

Stick around, cheer me on, and leave me some supporting words in the comments.

Thanks,
Keith