My "athletic" life has had more up and downs than a roller coaster.
As a kid I played every sport imaginable; football, ice hockey, table tennis, tennis, a dabble in martial arts, downhill skiing, and so on.
In my late teens I stuck with karate for a few years and got very fit, and this was combined with discovering free weights, so I was quite buff, but not big, in high school.
Last year in high school I tore or at least severly strained a muscle hamstring, and had to quit karate completely for several months. Once healed, I'd more or less lost interest, and as I was moving away to college I never really got going again. Of course during my recouperation I for the first time put on weight more than I should weigh, and it was the start of a 18 year long issue. I went from just under 70kg to about 75kg at the end of high school, and at this point I reached my adult height, 179cm.
At college, I began well, joined a gym, played sports, but beer and food became the my nemesis, and although I now added on a fair amount of muscle, my middle section also became quite soft. I went up past 80kg and kept on increasing.
At the end of college I'd slowly but surely crept up the scales past the mid 80s section, and showed really no signs of improving. At this point I would be a binge gym goer - I'd be frenetic for a few months, and then nothing. Working late shifts with easy access to junk food hurt even more.
A long distance move to a new culture and unemployment a feew years later didn't make the situation better, and I now went past the 90kg barrier for the first time.
The next decade again saw spurts of gym going, but no team sports at all, nor really any decent food intakes. I closed in on 100kg, and had hit 30 years of age.
The 6 months in the run up to my wedding, I decided I was very unhappy with my looks, and more importantly with my physical abilities. I wanted to get more energy, so I found a book by Mark Verstegen, called Core Performance, and started following his programme, whilst starting a low carb diet.
This was tough, 4-5 gym sets per week, and lots of cooking, but it paid off, and I dropped down to 92kgs during the summer of 2004.
2005 and 2006 I did post grad studies, not visiting a gym more than once every other month, with extremely poor eating habits and sleeping no more than 4-5 hours per night.
I peaked at 102kg, closing in on a 38-40in waist, but managed to drop down to roughly 96-97 by summer of 2006, simply by cutting down on junk food and snacks. However they came back during the latter parts of the summer, and I think I was back to around 98-99kgs.
In the autumn of 2006 I went through a family crisis, and lost roughly 9kg in 2 1/2 weeks. The drop continued due to a complete lack of appetite, and as the hunger pains were something I could deal with, I ate very little. I bottomed out around 89kgs, the first time below 90 in more than a decade, and about 5-6kgs above my perfect weight.
I kept this off for about 4-5 months, until I moved into new accomodations on my own. A new active social life, with lots of eating out and lots of alcohol saw the scales creep up again, and I ended up back past 95 until I decided enough was enough.
On a trip to the US, I saw an ad for P90x, and decided to give it a try. I will be following the exercise routine as close as possible, and I'll try to stick to the eating plan, but as my time is somewhat limited we'll see how well I can do that. I will also be doing a fair bit of running, as I'm doing a 10k run in the summer.
This blog is supposed to be a carrot for Me, and I might even make it private - we'll see ;)
Here we go - let's bring it.
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Edited to add: About two weeks into the initial test of the P90x programme in March 2008 I got a grade 1 tear in my left hamstring, and had to do nothing at all for 8 weeks. After about 10 months I now feel able to restart my fitness programme.
