Hi, Josh here! Welcome to my story of how I went from 400lbs to an Ultrarunner!
So my weight loss journey began in 2015 when I decided I was tired of being fat and I needed to start eating healthier. I thought all I needed to do was not eat fast food so much (I lived off takeout) and eat veggies and fruits and home cooked meals and I'd be fine. My wife (gf at the time) told me all I needed to worry about was calories, and eating an entire bag of carrots and two bananas isn't going to do anything for me. I argued with her and told her that no way 100 calories of carrots and 100 calories of chips is the same thing.. well I was wrong , but I didn't know it then. Another good example is at the gas station. I'd get 2 breakfast sandwiches, a hashbrown and an energy drink or something. Healthy Josh got 1 breakfast sandwich, a banana, a protein bar, and a "healthy" sugary drink. Same amount of calories though..
I didn't lose any weight, so I gave up and thought that it was just genetics. My family has all been bigger, so clearly I can't fight that. Again ..so so wrong!
Fast forward a year or so.
In order to save money, I ask one of my roommates if he wants to go halfsies and prepare meals for a week at a time together.
He said sure, but he warned me that he is on the Paleo diet, and if I'm making food with him, I'd be following that as well I was, 320lbs, I needed a change in diet habits anyway. Our first week we made this bomb chili, and the only thing I ate aside from that was vegetables.
Diet alone isn't enough, if I'm doing one, I might as well do more. Regardless of my size, I've always been pretty active by playing disc golf a lot, but this summer I haven't been for some reason. So I started going on nighttime walks.
Then one Friday, I got to work (quick backstory, I worked in IT for a small local company. There are 11 employees, we were a pretty tight nit bunch) Fridays were usually awesome. We don't work that hard and IT meets the programmers for lunch, beers, and usually after work beers. Not this friday though.
Thursday night, one of our programmers was out for a jog, collapsed and died due to heart failure. Turned out it was one of those one in a million things, he had an undiagnosed enlarged heart valve that closed up or something of the sort. I didn't just lose a coworker. We lost part of our work family. It's not fair. He jogged, biked, kayaked, and everything. He smoked and didn't sleep right but we all have our faults. He was always grinning at something, usually a find from the thrift store across the way.
Needless to say I was pretty goddamn motivated to lose weight. I got down to around 300lbs, but then went on a vacation, stopped eating paleo and went back into my old habits. I consider this failure #1. What I learned from this failure is that motivation is fleeting. I lost a very good friend, you can't find much more motivation to get your shit together but it wasn't enough. During the times when you get motivated, it's not going to last. You need to develop discipline during that time so when it wears off you have healthy habits that you stick to during the times when it gets tough.
Fast forward to around January of next year. I couldn't sleep, and of course when you can't sleep you start thinking about life. I thought about how much I've accomplished in life, and anything I've wanted I've been able to just put my head down and do it. Except..for losing weight. It's dumb. I have no reason and no one to blame but myself. So , I started browsing different diets. I started browsing reddit and found out about the 4 hour body slow carb diet. I thought, heck this seems awesome and I get a cheat meal each week, I can do this! You're only allowed meat, eggs, dark green veggies, and beans every day except for one glorious cheat day a week.
That weekend I went shopping and attempted my first ever meal prep. Chicken, beans and squash - http://imgur.com/a/lEAy7
I lasted 2 months on slow carb before it was just too restrictive and I "relapsed" and started eating everything and falling off the wagon. I felt like crap though, and I didn't want to fail yet again.
This is failure #2. What I learned from this failure is that meal prepping is fucking awesome and something I want to keep doing. Although it's not necessary with CICO, I find having my meals pre logged and premade for the week helps me achieve my calorie goal for the day. Plus I love cooking and I'd rather have my food than fast food lunches most days anyway. If you're interested, I have all my meal preps and a guide at this site - reddit.com/r/hxcjosh23mealprep. I have even been featured in a published Meal Prep book as a recipe tester! My meal preps have also come a long way from the one posted above - https://imgur.com/gallery/by5YFP0#YfcY9OX
Anyway, cue another sleepless night, Back to reading about diets and such. Then I found out about CICO on here. It was different then the "fad" diets, let's face it pizza and beer are just too good to live life without! CICO: calories in, calories out...just take in less calories than you burn. It's pretty much just simple math!
I downloaded myfitnesspal, entered my stats and started tracking everything I ate. It doesn't take long to do, I maybe spend 5 minute inputting my meals for the day. I do meal prep for my lunches, which helps quite a bit because then I know what I'm eating and it's cheaper/tastier than eating out all the time, but it's totally not necessary. You could eat mcdonalds for every meal, and as long as you stay under your calories..you'll lose weight! I still about once a month or so hit up that Chinese buffet. But instead of thinking oh I "fell off the wagon" I just realize It happens. It's one weekend, or one day, or even one meal. Just get it over with and get on with my journey. In doing so, yes I delay my results by a few days, but I fucking love Chinese food and I typically eat a small breakfast and lunch that day to make up for it. The day after, I don't go..well I ate a bunch , better stop doing CICO and working out and just go back to eating a bunch. I just go about my day like normal, track everything and do my workouts. Remember , you're making lifestyle changes not dieting! Your daily habits will far outweigh those days where you eat all the things.
This whole lifestyle change started a domino effect. I ate better, so I felt better. I felt better so I moved more. Exercise wise, I didn't do anything for the first 50 lbs or so. When I got around 300 I started walking a route from my house to a chinese resturant and back. I live just off the main street of my town and the restaurant is almost at the end of the street. The route is a little over 2 miles. Walking it took about 50 minutes and I would be out of breath afterwards. I got to about 290 and decided to give Couch to 5k a try. I've never been a runner, but I've always been "athletic" in my life. I love sports, I played disc golf professionally and loved playing other sports. It gave me something new to try and a new goal. I gave myself the condition that if anything hurt at all I would stop and keep losing weight until it didn't hurt. I remember running my first ever mile during Week 5 day 3 of the program. I was so excited that I woke my wife up at night just to tell her =). (It was 11pm at night and she worked at 5am. She wasn’t as excited as I was lol)
After doing my first 5k (a local turkey trot) I needed more. The route I used to walk, I was able to run in a little under 20 minutes and was hungry for more. I started doing the couch to 10k plan, but got bored one night and decided to see how far I could go and knocked out a 10k! I stuck around that distance for a while just enjoying running. I got down to 220ish and knocked out a nice 9 mile run in December of 2017. Then the story takes a little of a backslide. Wife and I learned we were expecting our second child. I had to get a second job since my wife wasn’t able to work and we couldn’t afford daycare. Things were fine for a while but then some stuff happened with my day job and luckily I was offered a management job at the restaurant I was working part time at. The downside though, is I was around free food and beer for most of the working day. I would snack throughout the day so I wasn’t really losing weight anymore at this point. We opened 2 stores in a 6 month period . I had to live in a hotel for 2 months opening one store in a different state. Opening stores is a 90-100 hour week as well. My diet pretty much went out the window here, and I couldn’t really keep up with my running either.
I slid back all the way to about 290. I knew what I needed to do but the stress and my schedule was basically just making food decisions the last thing on my mind and I went back into old habits. I started getting pretty down in the dumps and was not doing so well. But, the good part was I already lost the weight. I knew what I needed to do. I got more active on r/loseit again. I became more active in the challenges. I started meal prepping and running again. I started training for my first half marathon. I worked my way down to 240 while working around my crazy schedule and successfully completed my first half! It was pouring rain the whole time too! I made up a pretty awesome race report here - https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/brda83/i_used_to_be_almost_400lbs_this_weekend_i_ran_my/
In training for my half, I discovered a podcast called Ten Junk Miles. It’s a running podcast, but the allure is it’s a group of runners that more or less talk about their lives and silly stuff, and running to a short extent. They basically are like running friends for runners who don’t run with friends. They kept talking about Ultra Marathons so I did some research. The half marathon was cool but I needed a new goal, the marathon was the obvious step up but these Ultras seemed way cooler. I kept it on the backburner as after my half I kinda took a small break from running in which I backslid a little again to around 260. I was still active on the r/loseit challenges so that backslide didn’t last long. Plus, the Ultra was still in the back of my head. TJM also started a group chat and other events where the fans/hosts all became friends. I would talk to these people on the daily. Their motivation pushed me to go further.
An Ultra marathon is any distance over a normal 26.2 marathon. Typically they start at 50k (31 miles), but also have them in 50 miler, 100k (62 miles) 100 miles, and on up. It seemed pretty far out of reach but as I became more connected with this podcast and other people from it, I knew I was going to do one.
I worked my way up to GM at my restaurant but for my health, I knew I couldn’t keep doing it. In November 2019, I managed to get a job back in IT with an amazing company, and go back down to part time at the restaurant. Now paired with a more consistent schedule, I developed a new running training plan. I got heavily back into meal prepping too since I could do it on the weekends and have lunch for the week at my office job.
2020 had its ups and downs for me (and most people), but I was finally feeling back to my old self. There were some super stressful months, and we were limbo with buying and selling a house for 4 months or so, but I just kept grinding the training and sticking with MFP tracking. In fact, currently as it stands I have a 1696 day streak on Myfitnesspal. It’s part of my daily routine at this point, I would feel super weird not tracking.
Fast forward to August 2020. The races I had signed up for in 2020 went all virtual, I was supposed to do my first marathon in September but that also got postponed. I signed up for a 50k and a 33 miler virtual race instead. My training wasn’t the best since we were in the middle of moving, but I just wanted to try it. I wanted to see how far I could go. The furthest I had ran up to this point was 14 miles. We finally moved into our new house on Aug 21st. The date of my race was Aug 28th.
I woke up at 6am that day to set off on my 33 mile journey. I started off really well, kept up with hydration and eating good, ran 6 miles with a friend even! I got to mile 26.2 and thought man, what a stupid uneven number to stop at! Good thing I’m still going! Around mile 29, my right foot was just done. Looking back I think I wasn’t drinking as much water towards the end since I wasn’t running as fast and I may have had a dehydration cramp. Either way, I was so close so I pushed through and death marched to the end. The last 4 miles were pretty brutal, but I was determined. My wife and kids set up a finish line for me, I broke through that and laid on the ground for a solid 10 minutes. I had done it! I am now an official Ultra marathon finisher!
4 months later, I’m still keeping up. I'm down to around 240 again and I plan on running another 50k in the Spring, and a 100k in the late Summer. My scale is steadily going down. I’m still tracking and meal prepping. My love for running and my goals keep my diet in check, as losing weight helps so much with running. Sometimes it’s tricky to find the right deficit, as I have to eat more than 1800 calories a day during longer run days, but I’m in this for the long haul.
I can’t stress how much having like minded people around me is. r/loseit has played a HUGE role in my success. It helps seeing people strive for healthiness every day. Also, teaching people helps keep me accountable. I don't want them to make the same mistakes I did. If I talk the talk, I have to walk the walk so it keeps me on track. If I had to pick the one moment I can look back on that caused so much amazing change, it’s when I clicked on r/loseit, read the quick start guide and the FAQS, and then started getting more involved here. I cannot recommend it enough!
Thanks for reading, enjoy my progress pics! They get better as you scroll down ;)
http://imgur.com/gallery/RpXjG - from one year of progress 2016-2017
https://imgur.com/gallery/uYiS1xm - Half marathon finisher pic
https://imgur.com/gallery/ZsTmpGv - My favorite pizzacat shirt
https://imgur.com/a/V3s9Nxb - Ultra finisher medal and most recent progress pics
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