I want to paint the floor now, so all the concrete matches. That’s a simple cosmetic issue.

There was a short period of time in my life when I ran and lifted weights and was in pretty damn good shape.

But friends I hate to constantly harp on age and I promise to try and not run it into the ground but by god when you get towards 50 things start happening that you only had heard of but never believed.

I’m not gonna use it as an excuse and I am starting my crunches tonight (thanks for the pointers on your blog Ricky) and we will see where we go from here.

Did you ever get the jackhammers out of your basement Brainwise?

But at least I have stopped the upward trend of my weight.

I’m such a dork that I actually plotted my weight loss over the year

Dude, I have a spreadsheet detailing my weight & percent body fat that goes back to 2003. I aspire to dwindle my dorkiness to the level that it’s only “plotting”.

I’m such a dork that I actually plotted my weight loss over the year.

It was, overall, a straight line going down BUT there were MANY stretchs of flat. It’s part of the process.

Basically, your body gets to a plateau where equilibrium between new caloric intake and calories burned through exercise. To overcome them, you need to either burn more calories in exercise or take fewer in. Over time, I got pretty good at spotting plateaus as they arose.

Take a good long look at where you’re at now. If you are exercising the same amount as before when you were losing weight, *and* you’re still taking in the same amount of calories, then it’s time to kick it up a notch.

As for me, I looked on the calendar a couple of days ago to see how my maintenance was going. In early May I weighed 177.0 lbs. This morning I was 174.5 lbs. That’s 2.5 pounds over 5 months. It is possible. I *still* count my calories every single day, every single one. And I will have to do this literally for the rest of my life if I want to keep the weight off.

But I *do* want to keep the weight off. I like buying size MEDIUM shirts…

The pit is just the pit. It comes and it goes and I have no idea why it is there or where it came from. But I have learned over the past 50 years that you cannot fill it up with anything.

Even yesterday, as I contemplated the prospect of a bowl of cereal right before I went to bed - even though I wasn’t hungry, just wanted to scratch a fake itch that my taste buds had thrown my way - I considered “well, if Buck can drop all that weight in the last year or so, I can get my lazy @$$ in gear and start sloping back my calories a bit more than I have”. Seriously, I’m using you & Jay as my guides to putting the blanking fork down. I’m headed in the right direction and am maintaining the pace to get my waist back to where it was while keeping the rest of me large. You guys are keeping me in that direction.

And, to me at least, the best news of all came down the pike in the last month: my wife is on board. She’s already 5 pounds down in three weeks. Oh, man, if I get her back even CLOSE to her pre-pregnancy size (we went to different colleges & the men at hers did a take on Jesse Ventura and nicknamed her “the body”), you’ll never see me near a keyboard again because my hands will be too busy feeling her up.

Remember one thing: You are going the right way.

You’re not gaining any weight; you’re still going down in pants size; all systems are still go. Wanted to touch on a couple of points:

“When I think of all of the years I ate what I wanted when I wanted and in whatever quantity I wanted I wonder what it was that kept me from weighing 1,000 pounds.”

That is so f’n true it’s scary. I look back at when I was a teenager/20 something and the way I used to eat, and it’s just amazing I never hit 400 pounds. McD’s 2/3/4 times a week, late night pasta, 3AM runs to Denny’s…

“I have never regretted that decision but when you simply replace a drink of liquor with a box of ice cream all you are doing is trying to fill up a bottomless pit with something else.”

Damn straight. And unless you find out why that pit is there, all attempts to fill it will fall short.

As I have told you before. I love Wordless Wednesdays!