I recently retired after 37 years in the Law Enforcement field. I had originally planned to retire in 2010, but due to a terminal illnes in the family I retired early to stay with and support the family member. The reason I started this site was to help people get information and programs to help them lose weight in a healthy way and to help people reach the level of fitness that would improve their lives. Having worked in Law Enforcement, weight control and fitness were very important to me, and they kinda went hand in hand. After all, having to chase criminals on foot, over fences, and then wrestle with them, you needed to be in shape. Nothings worse than leting a criminal get away because you couldn’t climb a fence, or were so out of shape you couldn’t run a mile. I retired at the age of 55, I don’t look like a greek god, far from it, but I could chase down criminals and run them to ground, with-out having a heart attack.
All cleaned up.
Before retirement
My Personal Weight Story
I have received feed back that some are interested in my personal story about weight loss and fitness, aside from that I had already stated. As you can see in the photo on the right I am a little heavy, 210 lbs and I am 5 feet 71/2 inches tall. The photo on the left was taken in 2008 and I was 185 lbs. Prior to a close family member passing on in Sept. of 2007 , I was 180 lbs. Until the age of 27, I could eat whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted and never gained weight. At 27 that began to change, I started gaining weight. It was easy to take care of I just stopped using sugar in my coffee and cut down on the sweets, returned to my normal weight of about 155 lbs. In my mid thirties things changed again I gained weight and had a really hard time of getting it off. I started running two miles every night about an hour after dinner and started watching everything I ate. As long as I kept running the weight would remain about the same, then came the forties. Increase in exercise, running, sports activities did not work. I hated diets and loved to eat, so I started looking for the easy way out. Diet pills and fad diets, the pills about four or five different ones that promised to emulsify fat and drop those pounds without dieting, or they would block fats from being digested and absorbed by the body, or they would speed up my metabolism causing my body to burn fat, none of them worked at all. I then started on diets, Adkins, grapefruit, Hollywood and a bunch of others. I found that a lot of these diets actually worked, well at least for as long as I was on them. As soon as the 6 to 8 weeks were over, I ended up returning to my old eating habits and the weight would slowly creep back to my stomach and love handles. In my mid forties I accidentally ended up on a diet, a close friend and I worked out together 3 to 4 times a week in his gym in his garage. He came across a workout programs to build muscle and wanted me to go on the programs with him. He did not tell me about the diet part of it till we started it. The diet was very simple, meat once a week and chicken and fish the rest of the week, oh and it had to be either grilled, baked, or boiled with the chicken skin removed. We ate small portions at least 6 times a day. Now, I really like chicken, love meat, and kinda like fish, ok I don’t like fish, but I will eat it if I am hungry enough. Also veggies and fruits were a high light of the diet. Short story, after 3 months we were both in the best shape of our lives and looked pretty good, my weight was 170 lbs of spring steel and rawhide. Due to our work schedules changing we discontinued our workouts and due to the nature of my job my eating habits turned really bad. I had coffee for breakfast at about 9:00am, at about 4:00pm I would get a fast food meal, sit in my car and do paperwork while I wolfed down a taco steak supreme, with fries and a coke. I returned home around 11:00 pm starving, and would eat everything in the house till I was as stuffed as a turkey on Thanksgiving. I would unwind from work watching tv and snacking on what ever was there, usually cookies and or chips. I love Mother’s double dipped chocolate cream cookies. At about 1:00am to 2:00am I would go to bed and repeat the process the following day.
The Day I Realised I was FAT.
Like most of us I was caught up in my work and personal life and failed to realize the transformation my body had gone through. Now, when men look in a mirror all we see is muscle, I think we suck in our gut and flex our muscles and never view our selves from any direction that might show the fat. My clothes were getting a little tight, which was due to my wife shrinking them in the washing machine and dryer, so I bought larger clothes, not because I was gaining weight but to make up for the clothes shrinking.
Thanksgiving Day 1998, all the family was there including my two fat brothers. They were both about 5′10″ and were about 265 pounds and the only exercise they got was walking from a chair to the kitchen and back to the chair. On the other hand I worked out with weights several times a week and ran about a mile every other day. Thanksgiving passed and I continued my regular schedule, work, home, bed and repeat. The first week of December 1998, I visited my Mother and she brought out the photo’s taken during Thanksgiving. As I went through the pictures, I came to the one where my two fat brothers were sitting on the couch with this third fat guy sitting in the middle. At first I couldn’t think of who he was, I didn’t remember seeing a third fat guy at Thanksgiving. Oh, MG it was me, I was sitting on the couch in a T-Shirt, that was stretched to the limit, with my arms folded, resting on my stomach and I looked just like my two fat brothers. I immediately went to my Mothers scale, it said 215, I asked if it was broken and was assured that it was working correctly. That evening, standing in the bathroom, naked looked at myself in the mirror from all possible directions and found, that when I could not see my face, I could see a lot of fat and that my hair was thinning on top, yep a bald spot, just like my brothers.
I now realized that I was really FAT, and knew I had to do something about it. I realized that pills, powders, and fads were not going to help in the long term. I then realized that like alcoholics and drug users, I had to make perminate changes in my eating habits, to change them forever not just 60 or 90 days. My first step was to get information on food and the human body. I read diet books, calorie books, good food books, bad food books, and books about foods that used more calories to digest then they furnished in energy. I realized that I needed to make better choices regarding food, cut out sugar, salt, fat, sweets and fast food, reduce the portions I would eat and to eat more often. I reverted back to the diet I had started with my friend years earlier, with some slight modifications. I did not lose it all over night, in fact i would lose about 1/2 a pound a week, I stopped weighing myself as I would get frustrated with the slow progress. The end result is that exchanging by bad eating habits for good ones, became easier and easier. I found I was eating more and not feeling hungry all the time and stopped thinking about food when I wasn’t really hungry. I began a circuit type workout, push-ups, pull-up,bar dips, leg lifts, and sit ups and also continued my running, which I still hate by the way. My weight reduce to 180 lbs, 15″ biceps, 42″ chest and 33 inch waist. At 55 I still play softball with the guys in their thirties.
So there you have it, I still screw up my diet every now and then but I have learned that mistakes happen, learn from them and get back on the right road. Just like the alcoholic and the junkie, its a life long Life Style Change that has to take place, or nothing will change.
