Updated June 2012.

I’m a work in progress. Just like this site.

I started this site because I wanted to spread what I have learned over the years about losing weight and getting in shape. By a fat person, for a fat person. Fellow low-carber and now paleo convert Jimmy Moore, who is a great inspiration to a lot of people, often says on his podcasts that he feels a duty to spread the word and debunk the falsehoods and myths out there being spread about weight loss. I feel the same way.

My Story

Like lots of other folks, I have struggled with my weight for a long time. I was a very skinny young kid, and then all of a sudden by age 10 I was sporting some serious love handles. By 12 I was overweight (by any measure), and my weight kept going up from there. At 17, I went and signed up for six long years in the U.S. Navy. I figured it’d whip me into shape by force. At the conclusion of boot camp, I had to wave my fortunate friends off while I was ordered “to the fat farm” because even after 2 months of that I was still too fat and too weak to pass the performance test to graduate. After my enlistment I started college and during that time I ballooned up to about 260 pounds. At 5’10″, that’s what you call obese. It’s not all doom and gloom – I am very fortunate to have naturally large quads/thighs/calves. So I ‘always carried it well’.

Over the past 20 years I tried a number of diets. The government (USDA), Weight Watchers, Dr. Oz (especially that guy), and many more have prescribed all kinds of weight loss advice and it didn’t work for me, not long-term. A couple of times I was able to get on the low-cal + cardio treadmill and stay on it for months, all the while being hungry and hoping that I would wake up one day and not feel like a hamster on one of those circle exercise things. And invariably, I’d ‘fall off’ it. According to the ‘experts’, it was all due to my lack of will power. A couple of years ago my eyes were opened to another possibility – that their prescription formula of reduced calories + increased physical activity = weight loss might be flawed.

I’m now down to around 192 pounds, for a total loss of about 68 pounds, and am doing things I never thought I’d be able to do. Most of that weight was lost over a year ago and I’ve easily maintained it since. My FAT LOSS 101 page discusses the general philosophy/approach I took to lose the weight. But it was so simple I’ll just sum it up here: I ate less than 30g of carbs per day, on average, and I avoided physical exercise as when I tried that it would result in a stall due to my ‘working up an appetite.’ That’s it. Simple.

I’m Not Here to Give Advice

It’s all about feeling good. Not simply losing weight. If I was fat and feeling great I’d still be fat and happy.

I hope to help others by exposing my struggles on this blog with weight loss, what’s worked for me, what hasn’t. I will invariably BE DEAD WRONG ON SOME THINGS. Just like current conventional wisdom has been dead wrong for decades.

In 2012, with a fairly healthy weight (for me) being maintained for quite some time now, I’ve shifted my focus to physical fitness. I’m a weakling and want to change that. So nowadays most of posts are me whining about that struggle.