My Journey - Fat to Fit? - Meet your author

Well, where to start? In order to understand my journey I will have to take you back a few years. I'm a regular guy, I'm 40 years old and I have never been what anyone would consider gifted when it comes to athletics. Although I did play on tee-ball, soccer, and baseball teams as a child, my greatest draw in the world of sports was the three years that I swam on a swim team in Southern Maryland. We trained in several strokes and had to learn all of the strokes, my main stroke was the breaststroke (the one that looks a little like a frog). I tried to do this stroke last week the first time that I went swimming and felt muscles in my groin area and base of my torso that I didn't even know that I had.
After the fifth grade I fell away from participating in any sports at all. I began to put on weight and have struggled with my weight ever since. I did not play any sports in High School and fell into recreational drugs. Twenty years later I got clean and found myself eating even more. I used to joke: "I'm in shape. Round is a shape!" I thought that I was funny, but - in all actuality - I was using humor to deflect my trouble I was having with my body image. In psychology they talk about something called a set point. A set point is the weight that your body will maintain if you don't do anything to gain or lose weight. I discovered that mine was 302 lbs.
I weighed 302 lbs and decided to do something about it. I lost 30 pounds over a period of a bout a year several years ago. I always said that I lostr 50 lbs of fat and gained 20 lbs of muscle. This is where I made great advances in my ideas about health. However, after getting married, I fell back into bad habits and gained the weight back. Returning to - you guessed it - 302 pounds.
January 2010 I started my quest for health at Three Hundred and two pounds! Within the first six minutes I dropped 60 lbs.
I started 2011 at 242 and have dropped to right around 217. I have looked into this topic and have discovered a range in what is considered an ideal weight for me. The basic range fluctuates between 170 (eek) and 190. And, since I always want to be the top in everything that I do, my goal weight is 190 lbs. This means that I still have about 25 pounds to drop until I have reached my "ideal weight."