Throughout this retrospective, I’ll be linking to pertinent milestones in my path. First, if you haven’t read it lately, get to know me as I started this.

Read More – About Me.

I weighed 325lbs at my worst. Wore a 46-48″ pant and 3XL shirts. I had high blood pressure and no energy. I’d tried lots of diets with little to no success or will to stick to it. Sustainability of a diet was nil.

I started this journey the day after Memorial Day of 2012 (May 29, 2012). The weekend of Memorial Day was my friend’s bachelor party. Prior to leaving for it I weighed in at 300lbs even (May 25, 2012). After a solid weekend of drinking and not a lot of eating, I came home and weighed in at 297lbs on May 29th. We were off to the races with the Primal Blueprint. We chose the Primal Blueprint because we’d heard it was the best way to get into a primal lifestyle.

Read More – Life Changes and Moves Forward

I had a lot of hope with this diet, but I was concerned about sustainability. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to afford it or that the food would be crap or that my wife would give up on all the hard work in the kitchen or that sticking to it at work would be difficult. In the above post I outlined my goals.

I want to be able to get out of the shower, look in the mirror and not go “Yecchhh…” I want to be able to run for a whole mile. I want to be able to ride a bike without flattening the tires. I want to be able to buy clothes at the mall and not from the Fatso catalogs. I want to be able to keep up with my kid as he gets bigger and faster

Here’s my updates as of today

This is getting better. I’ve still got a lot of loose skin, but my gut is smaller, my tits are smaller, I’m not quite so wide and I can see my penis again. So that’s nice. On May 25th, 2013 I competed in a ‘miler’ run and finished 2nd overall! I can do this now. I weigh less now than I did when I bought the bike in 1996. I am now buying clothes at regular stores without digging through the rack for that lone pair of 40-somethings I can keep up with my 4 year old now, but he’s still got a ways to go and this will be ever evolving.

I decided very early on that I would blog about this adventure and if I was going to do it right, I needed to be honest with myself and my readers. I didn’t expect a lot of readers, but I figured I’d start with the ‘Semi Naked Truth’ Articles where I would put myself out there on display. Read More – The fat, (semi) naked truth [the post]. I knew there would be a lot of challenges on this adventure, mostly food related. It took the constant repeating of “don’t eat that, don’t eat that” to get past it, but it was working. I wrote a lot in June because everything was so new and interesting. My brain was still part fatso so I had that ability to remember how awful I ate and apply it to what I was eating now. The weight was coming off pretty steadily, to my surprise. I wasn’t really exercising all that much and I’ll admit that even now exercising is still a problem. Read More – Exercise Articles. After just 3 weeks, I was already feeling significantly better. I also started asserting my dietary requirements at work. It didn’t always work, but I found one person at the company who helped me by making sure we’d have salads without grains or dairy when possible and would order appropriate food for me when I was working on special project teams on the weekend. Then it happened… in less than a month I lost 20lbs. Despite all the initial challenges I was making it work!

I’m very lucky to have a wife that works harder at this than I do… because I can’t cook worth a damn. She is the reason this is working for me. It was working fast, too. My clothes were already fitting looser and my ‘summer of weddings’ was upon me. My first wedding was a ‘fat guy in a GIANT coat’ debacle. But it was working, by mid July of last year, with only 6 weeks or so into it, I was 55lbs down from my worst weight and 30lbs down since starting. My goal weight at the time was a lofty 205, my doctor stepped in and said I should be at 247. Little did he know that I would blow by that in short order, and then… a Whole30 for August. No weight charting, uber strict paleo… no cheating… except that we did cheat and it was TOTALLY WORTH IT… and then we tried it again and it really worked. I noticed that my appearance was getting tighter… particularly with my manboobs. Another thing that was happening quickly was that my high blood pressure was disappearing.

The Whole30 ended in a great success. I was nearing 50lbs lost since starting my adventure and almost 75lbs since my worst. I really started to feel it. That 50lb mark came shortly after. I was feeling fantastic, but I was still up over 40″ around my waist. I had bought some “Challenge pants” to push me. To help push me, my wife and I embarked on a Whole52 starting in October and ending at Thanksgiving. We figured we needed to prep our bodies for the onslaught of holiday feeding. 240lbs came shortly after… I was back to my high school weight… and I still had some clothes from High School to demonstrate. We did end up surviving Thanksgiving. By December, I had started posting less on here and moved primarily to facebook for my more ‘microupdates’. I left the blog for big posts like my FIRST 5K! It felt great to be able to complete this, even though I didn’t run it to it’s entirety.

Then the major goal happened. 100lbs down since my worst. I had blown past my 40″ goal pants right into a set of 36s. My wife and I reached our goal weights and part of a contract I had with her was that when she reached her goal weight, we would go to Disney World. We went, and we tried to stay paleo… for a few hours. Eventually we gave in and went full fat-American-Tourist mode to see what would happen to us. Luckily, we only packed on about 8 or 9 lbs in our extended stay (thanks to the Blizzard at home). However, when we got back and went back to a full strict paleo, I lost the weight in a few days and suffered from a fainting spell which claimed my glasses and gashed my skull. To this day we have no real answer as to why this happened. Low blood sugar is still the explanation despite me never HAVING it the entire time.

In April, I declared our Paleo Adventure over. It had become our lifestyle now and was less an adventure. However, now I’m thinking that I need to reinvigorate myself and get back on the wagon. I feel that I’ve been slipping badly and my scale is showing it. This morning I weighed in at 229lbs. That’s up 13lbs since my best weight on this. That’s a LOT. I’ve been cheating more and more. It’s time to get back on the wagon and do it right again. It’s time to go into Year 2. The Primal Empire Strikes Back!