Growing up, I struggled with weight. I grew larger and larger with certain plateaus, but physical exercise was not something fun. Quite frankly, I hated it.
I tried American Football, which felt more like a chore than anything else. My brother showed me how to lift weights at home, which I did on a semi-regular basis, but it took joining a gym when I was around 17, that I really did exercise outside P.E. in school on a regular basis. Seeing the weights go up was really motivating and it made me feel somewhat good about my body.
Alas, the bodyweight went up and up, peaking at 137.7 kg in my early twenties. Going to the gym was becoming a on-off-affair. At that time I was also struggling mentally, but that’s another topic.
But at one point in 2011, something clicked and I started to look at my diet, my nutrition, my health. Don’t ask me what it was. My best guess is, that I finally had enough and did not like how I looked and felt and did not want to be the fat guy any longer.
At first, it was just about watching my portions and reducing my intake of sweets. That helped me drop around 10-15 kg, until I hit another plateau. Meanwhile I started to read about nutrition and health and with that came upon a book called “You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises” by Mark Lauren. I switched from half-assing my gym workouts to consistently working out at home. And over the next two years I tried Paleo for around one to one and a half years and implementing some carbs in the form of rice and other grains until I hit my lowest weight since my peak at 88.6 kg.
It was amazing seeing the numbers on the scale drop, but it wasn’t sustainable in the way that I did it. Also, I did not feel like I had enough energy, for the exercises I was doing. So I kept looking and after two failed attempts (not enough prepared), I tried going vegan for a month in November of 2014 and ate a vegan diet for five years. It gave me the necessary energy I was lacking. I gained a bit of weight and since then always stayed steady somewhere between 105 and 100 kg, albeit keeping up with my bodyweight exercises around 5-7 times a week.
In 2018, I joined a Taekwondo gym, which also helped me physically and I managed to shed a bit of weight again through that. But in August of 2019 I left the gym for different reasons and was back to bodyweight exercises again.
And in that fall, I read “Can’t hurt me” by David Goggins. Throughout my whole journey up to this point, I never thought myself capable of running or even doing it on my own accord. And after reading the book, I did not plan on becoming an Ultra Runner or anything like that. It just gave me a little push to see whether or not the chubby little boy inside of me was capable of running. To get some cardio in. To do something I hated and maybe find joy and a feeling of accomplishment in it. So in December of 2019, on a mild winter day, I put on some old sneakers and went (bearly) running.
I took one step.
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