A Directional Shift

Over the past couple of months, I have been busy busting ass and working towards my weight-loss goals .  I've been working out.  I've been eating a balanced calorically deficient diet.  Most importantly, however, I've been devouring information in the form of research, documentaries, and blog posts dealing with health and fitness.  All of this information consumption has caused me to rethink this blog, and the direction that I want to take it.

Initially, as you will know from reading the earlier posts, this blog was intended to be a way to track my journey from obesity to the Tough Mudder.  I laid out the preliminary posts to set things up, and then let it sit, for weeks and weeks, while I worked towards my goals.  On the one hand, I felt as though the blog was meaningless if I didn't post regularly.  On the other hand, though, I felt as though it would be equally pointless  and boring if I was posting each and every little thing that I did on a day to day basis, in my weight-loss journey.  In addition to this, all of the research and reading that I had been doing on health and fitness topics caused me to want to start writing posts on a lot of different health and fitness topics that went outside the realm of just my own journey.

So, with all of this in mind, I came to a cross-roads of sorts.  Do I make a secondary "fitness" blog for all of the additional writing that I want to do, and keep this blog as a place that I can track my own progress on a bi-weekly, or bi-monthly, or whatever basis?  Or do I find a way to utilize one blog for both things?  In the end, I made the executive decision to combine all of these ideas into one, uniform blog.  Obviously, this is going to require some change around here.  Fear not, though, for explanation is to follow.

First and foremost, I do still plan to use this blog to track my progress.  The main difference from the original blog will the use of specifically labeled posts that track my progress, not just to the Tough Mudder, but now to my overall journey to health, fitness, and happiness.

Secondly, when not writing my "UPDATE" posts, I plan to spend time writing posts on other hot topics, or areas of current interest to me in the health and fitness community.  These posts may involve fitness news, reviews on products, new research in health and fitness, or whatever else I might desire to write about.

To wrap things up and summarize:  this blog will be changing from a diary that tracks my journey to get to the Tough Mudder to a health and fitness enthusiast blog aimed to track my own progress towards living a healthy life, and inspiring others with no-bullshit fitness information.

So with that, I will leave you with a brand new blog;  welcome to Defattify Your Portfolio.

The First of Many

The first few posts on this blog served the sole purpose of setting everything up;  making sure that you, the reader, understood what the goal of the blog was, and how I intended to accomplish that goal.  While I enjoyed writing those posts, this is what I have really been looking forward to:  the first of many update posts on my progress.

You will notice that this post is coming just over 3 weeks after I kicked off my journey.  I admit, this is a long amount of time, but that was intended.  I didn't want to post an update until I had really made some progress and had something to actually update about.  My reasoning for this was two-fold.  First of all,  I didn't want my first post after starting this venture to simply be me stating the obvious (ie "hey guys, I'm exercising and dieting on the first day.... huzzah!")  Secondly, not allowing myself to post anything until I really started to see some progress gave me a small goal to reach, and got me excited to push harder and harder so that I could start blogging again.

Because you are reading this post, you can rest assured that I did indeed meet my goal, and have made some solid progress that I would like to share with you, so sit back, relax, and read on.

Let The Games Begin!

I've spent the past several posts laying everything out for you in terms of my realization that I was obese, my desire to change my body and my life so that I could participate and succeed in something as intense as Tough Mudder, and my plan of action for going about those changes.  Now, it's time for me to put all of that thought and planning to work, and start becoming the badass that I want to be.

How?

Figuring out the "Why?" is all well and good, but no lifestyle change is worth a damn if you don't have a plan of action.  So, after sitting down and spending several weeks researching, and combining that with things that I had already done in the past to lose weight and get in shape (believe it or not, I actually was fairly in shape at one time), I built my own health and wellness plan that I believe will bring me to the Tough Mudder and beyond.  To explain my plan to you, I will break it down into its two essential parts, Diet and Exercise, and talk about each part separately.

Why?

In my last post, I gave you my creed;  my realization that I was, in fact ill, and that I needed to do something about it.  In this post, I want to give you the "why."  Why am I doing this?  What caused me to want to make a change?  What made me want to become a healthier person and not just deal with what was?