From Dad Bod to Dad Strong: My Journey in Fitness
In this post, I will share the story of how I went from sporting a chubby “dad bod” to where I am today, which is in the best and strongest shape of my life as I approach 40 years old.
Around 2014, I read the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris, which was really the catalyst to get my fitness lifestyle back on solid footing and propel me towards an obsession with strength training and maximizing my body’s potential. His slow carb, rules-based diet help set the tone for me developing an ability to adhere to diet and training protocols to a much higher degree than before.
Below is the bullet point summary and then narrative account of the evolution of my body and my fitness knowledge starting as an overweight boy through today as a relatively fit 38-year old man. I put this out there into the world as a reference to others who may not know where to start or who may not believe they can change.
- I’ve always been active playing sports, jogging, pick-up basketball, etc. and always had access to gyms with weights and machines. I did some weight training in high school, but totally without knowledge or guidance.
- Stagnated with strength for years, focused more on cardio, and the result was limited results, except for those periods when I really amped up the volume of running for a long-distance race or something.
- I ate “healthy” foods, but with no plan. I had no knowledge of nutrition basics, even basics on calories and calories. That is very surprising to me looking back, given how much I cared about staying trim. It amazes me that I always focused on the training/cardio component and didn’t focus at all on the nutrition side.
- Around 2014, something clicked and I made some sustainable lifestyle changes with regards to the diet and progressive weight training that kicked off the progress that I continue to this day.
- Today, I am leaner and stronger than I’ve been at any point in my life, and while my base of knowledge is bigger, I am excited to continue to learn and employ techniques on myself and my kids as they grow up into healthy, strong adults.
Middle School Transformation
When I was a kid, I struggled with being overweight. Throughout elementary school and half of middle school, I was the fat kid among my group of friends and the grade at large. Growing up, cardio was the primary focus. We had a treadmill in the house and the rule of the house was that I could watch TV if I ran on the treadmill. Also, my parents got divorced when I was like 5 years old, and my dad was into running marathons, so we would jog a loop around Memorial Park in Houston (1 lap = 3 miles) every now and then.
The summer before eighth grade, I was fed up and ready to make a change. Summers would always start with a month of summer camp in Hunt, TX and would end with a few weeks in Evergreen, Colorado where my grandparents had a house. That summer at camp, I moved a lot and slimmed down a bit, then July came, and I got serious about losing weight.
It was all about reducing the number on the scale, nothing else. I went into a heavy food restriction coupled with extensive cardio (all running) and sit ups. But I didn’t know anything about nutrition, so my restriction amounted to basically not eating fat. The prevailing common knowledge was that fat made you fat. So, I tried to basically keep fat grams as low as possible. For a month or so there, I think I was able to keep fat grams below 10 grams. With that mentality, things like skim milk and Twizzlers were ok, but something like an egg or steak was not ok. It makes zero sense looking back.
This silly obsession lasted through August and it worked. I dropped lbs pretty fast. My parents had vague concerns that I might have an eating disorder or something, but their level of concern was fairly low just because they didn’t have that much interest, at least as far as I could tell. By the end of the summer, I had dropped like 20-25 pounds vs. the end of the school year, which made 8th grade much more fun. I stayed in that skinny fat mode for the next several years, although did participate in some mild weight training in high school when pushed to do so through sports teams (basketball, football, etc.).
High School / College Fluctuations
By the time I got to summer before my senior year of high school, I remember tipping the scales at 209 lbs for the weigh-in for pre-season football. It was the heaviest I would ever be. I was slated to be a starting defensive lineman on the varsity football squad at the small prep school I attended. Instead, I quit after pre-season and from there slowly reduced my weight through the year to get back down to maybe to 175 on my full-grown 5’9” frame by the time I graduated in the spring.
In college I stayed active and worked out consistently, but without a goal in mind or without real purpose when it came to lifting weights. I remember running a lot, I remember being in the weight room and pumping out sets, but don’t remember following a serious program.
Yuppie Gains
After graduation in 2004, my full-time job as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers in NYC really consumed all potential exercise time, and 3 years later when I quit, I was not in good shape. There were certainly some cardio sessions in there, lots of random push up and sit-ups in front of the TV, and a reasonably active lifestyle that included some recreational sports. But it was hard to offset so many hours sitting in a cubicle and the small amount of sleep.
We moved to Boston in 2008, 6 months after my wife and I had our first child, a daughter. In the suburbs of Boston, I began trying to be an entrepreneur, a father, a student and a husband all at once. It was a busy time, lots of “calisthenics” type workouts on the carpet in the living room. I remember using the Nintendo Wii fitness game to do steps on the elevated Wii at night in front of the TV. I did get into a routine of weekly pickup basketball games and tried to go the gym a few times a week. But it wasn’t a major priority.
Stumbling on Some Things That Worked
November 2012 is the first entry for weight on the nutrition tracking app I have pegs my weight at 195. There isn’t another entry until August 2015, which shows 166 lbs. But a few months before (March 2015), I had started tracking my weight every week or so in a spreadsheet and the first entry there says I weighed 185 pounds. So, in those 2.5 years from 2012 to 2015, I made enough lifestyle changes to work down from 195 to 185, then from March 2015 to August 2015, I made fitness and nutrition a priority with clear results.
It wasn’t until 2014 that I started to get interested in learning how all this stuff worked. In the Four Hour Body, Tim Ferris laid out a diet that included eating as much of certain foods as you want (proteins, vegetables and beans) and restricting certain other foods. It introduced cheat meals concept to me as well.
I did that diet religiously starting in Spring 2014 (even on a trip to Disney in Florida). I didn’t track calories at all and just the subtle changes forced calorie restriction. In just 6-8 weeks, I had lost 15 pounds and was noticeably in better shape. But the workout regimen hadn’t changed much, and I hadn’t started focusing as much on barbell movements. My workouts did include things like kettlebell swings and a few exercises, but I didn’t really work on compound movements.
But I was still pretty focused on cardio. My boss at work was into running, he invited me to run a few times during lunch. He also told me about road races, a 5 mile one, a 5k, and the Broad Street Run (very popular 10-mile run). I got into all of that, ran the Broad Street Run and finally peaked with a half marathon in 2015 that my sister came up from Texas to run with me that November.
Putting it All Together
In 2015, I began training based on various programs. I would always run the whole program, and my choice of programs improved dramatically over time, such that I have a strong idea of what program works for me and am also ok programming for myself based on the principals learned from all the programs I’ve tried before.
Since 2015, I have been dialing in my training and nutrition. The pace of strength improvements has slowed, but my passion for the mental battle has not. The amount of equipment in the garage has swelled, and my kids have reached ages where they are starting to show interest in what I’m up to out there. Any time they spend out there with me is a huge bonus.
In a future post, I’ll break down the progression of the various programs I have run since 2015, from the ridiculous to the sublime in terms of the quality and results. But for now, I hope you enjoyed this baseline summary of my lifelong relationship with fitness and body image that has impacted how I view nutrition and training today.
