Warning - this is my first blog post and it's a lengthy one...
I’ve always been heavy. Well, nearly always. I’m 54 years old and I can remember just three times in my life when I wasn’t overweight or obese.
The summer when I was 19, I worked at an amusement park, running a roller coaster and a few other rides. 10 weeks of manual labor, 6 or 7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day, and despite a constant diet of pizza, hotdogs and hamburgers, soda, ice cream, milk shakes, and Funnel Cakes, at the end of the summer I was 156 pounds of solid muscle. Albeit, with some very odd tan lines on my arms and legs.
Ever since I was a small child, I have loved bicycling and growing up in and around New York City, I would cycle nine months a year, from March to November. During my twenties, I would kick off my cycling season each March, riding the three-mile loop around SUNY Purchase in Westchester County, often while snow was still on the ground. In early 1987, I set a goal of riding a Century and trained all Spring and Summer, riding thousands of miles. In October, I completed the Golden Apple Century which somehow wound up being 103 miles! I don’t know what I weighed then but I was lean.
The third time was in 1998. While the first two instances involved big doses of physical activity, this one was centered on eating well and stress reduction. I took a long-planned break from my high-tech career and spent a month at Esalen in Big Sur, CA studying massage. Centered in a place of absolute beauty, giving and receiving a massage every day, and eating wonderful food, I dropped 28 pounds in 28 days. I weighed 208 when I arrived and 180 when I departed. At 180, I was technically still overweight by 11 pounds but I looked and felt great!
And then, in 1999, I got married. This resulted in a lot of joy but also a slow and steady gain of five pounds a year for the next 16 years. Such a small thing – whether calories consumed or burned - we’re talking a net excess of 336 calories a week or 48 calories a day. But repeated for 16 years and the result was bad. And nothing motivated me to turn it around, not even a family history that includes cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.
And this brings me to this past March when I weighed a whopping 252 pounds. A friend mentioned Dietbet and I checked it out and joined a kickstarter to try it out. Within days, I was hooked and joined two more kickstarters. By the end of the first four weeks, I was in three transformers too. Dietbet gave me drive and motivation to exercise and eat better like nothing I have ever experienced. The accountability with very specific goals made me stop saying, “tomorrow”. The result so far is a loss of over 25 pounds, a newfound consistency of exercising, and the fact that I simply feel great and this manifests itself in many ways. One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past 4 months is just how sensitive my body is to sodium. As an example, after winning three kickstarters, I took a few days off and had two not-so-good meals, a big BBQ plate and a McDonalds Big Mac meal. The result was that I gained five pounds! Now, bad as those meals were, there certainly wasn’t an excess 17,500 calories in them. It took 4 or 5 more days to drop the water weight.
I was consumed so quickly by Dietbet that it took me a few days of thinking to figure out why I find it so compelling. I concluded that Dietbet sits right at the center of my four drivers:
- I like wagering on things
- I desperately need to lose weight
- I want some extra money
- And I have a drive to win
And this brings me to the, “bump in the road” in the title. I’ve been enjoying my Dietbet experience so much that the only thing I was afraid of was some sort of injury that would interfere with my daily exercise. About 10 days ago, I was sitting in a meeting and felt my back start to tighten. By the next morning, my lower back muscles were locked in spasm and I could barely move without screaming in pain. In a flash, I went from walking over 10,000 steps a day to barely making 1,000. It’s taken 10 days, five chiropractor visits, and a ton of ice to recover but I walked over 11,000 steps today and felt great doing it.
I’d like to say that I could have done without the pain but it made me think about how grateful I am. I am grateful that I found Dietbet and found a tool that motivates me to become so much healthier. I am grateful that I recovered fairly quickly and can return to the exercise that is making me feel so good. And I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to motivate some people around me.
Thanks for reading this!