Got Built?

In the beginning, I was skinny. Yep, a skinny teenager. I used to butter my fries trying to gain weight when I was a kid – but because this isn’t Heaven, eventually I gained. When this happened, I did NOT know what to do, so like everybody else, I joined a gym and took many, many high-intensity cardio classes while eating almost nothing.

The weight FELL off – 30 lbs in three months. But it all came back, and it brought friends.

Through most of my twenties and thirties, I gained and lost progressively larger amounts of weight, always through excessive cardio and with no understanding of how the process of leaning out actually worked – I just wanted that number on the scale to go down.

Instead it crept up.

In my late twenties, I took up jogging – ran my first Vancouver Sun Run at 29, and ran several more through my thirties. I continued to battle my weight through this time.

By the time I was 33, I had cholesterol high enough to medicate, and by 38 years of age, I was 170 lbs, about 40% bodyfat and facing Metformin for the metabolic syndrome. I begged my doctor for yet another course of diet pills. Instead he told me to go buy Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution.

I thought he had lost his mind, but I was determined to prove him wrong. Coincidentally, a male friend of mine offered to teach me how to lift.

This combination of events changed my life. Within a year I had lost 30 pounds and was off all meds. I had gone from squatting pink dumbbells to squatting my weight, and from a size 14 to a size 4.

Now success is a funny thing – see, it’s very motivating. I started reading, and reading, and reading. I didn’t just want to be smaller anymore, now I wanted to be leaner, more muscular, sculpted. Atkins and lifting had gotten me to a very healthy maintenance weight, but it was obvious I was going to need some more strategy if I was to achieve my goals.
It also became increasingly obvious to me that the people running the gyms and diet centres aren’t interested in your lasting success – they’re banking on your inevitable failure. Just so long as you keep paying those monthly dues, and signing up for personal training sessions – or better yet, not coming at all.

Welcome to my blog. In these posts I offer you the very best of what I’ve discovered. What works isn’t all that complicated – but it may not seem obvious until you’ve lived it.