The day I decided was not a New Year’s resolution. It was a 2XL shirt. I had to stretch it out to get it over my head, and then I stood in front of the mirror hating what I saw. I had been unhappy with my body for most of my life, but that was the morning I decided to stop picking up the fork. Not a diet. Just done.
The numbers, dated
I weighed myself every single morning on a Garmin scale, after the bathroom, and I never skipped a day. I wanted data I could trust instead of a feeling.
| Date | Weight |
|---|---|
| February 1, 2026 | 320 lb (start) |
| March 2026 | about 310 lb |
| April 2026 | 290 lb at the start of the month, 275 lb by the end |
| May 2026 | 267 lb |
| June 2026 | 263 lb |
| July 2026 | 255 lb |
| September 2026 | 249 lb |
Seventy-one pounds so far. April was the strongest month: I went all in at the gym and walked 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day. The floor under everything was 10,000 steps, every day, no exceptions. From June the loss slowed, and I explain why at the end, because it is the best part.
How I got here, including the parts people leave out
I grew up obese. Food was comfort. At 12 I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and told I was prediabetic. In 2025, weighing about 295, I took semaglutide for roughly three months and lost around 12 pounds. It felt like nothing, and I convinced myself I was never going to lose the weight.
Then my lease ended and I moved to Mexico to stay with family for a few months. I ate, and I climbed to 320. Around Christmas I bought a plane ticket home and started over.
Full disclosure, because this site does not do secrets. Since December 2025 I have taken retatrutide. It is not approved by the FDA for anything yet. For me it shut off the food noise on the first day: I stopped thinking about food, and for someone who had used food as comfort since childhood, that silence was the whole game. I have also used compounds that are sold for research use only: MOTS-C, BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. None of them is approved for any use in people, no trial shows they do what the forums say they do, and I cannot separate whatever they did from losing 71 pounds and walking 10,000 steps a day. I am not recommending any of it, I am not telling you where to get it, and I will not link to it. Talk to a doctor. This site is a record of what I did, not a plan for you.
What I actually ate
Clean and boring: beef, chicken, steak, rice. One sweet thing a week at most, and when I had it I walked more or fasted for 12 to 24 hours afterwards. I ate one meal a day for long stretches and fasted for 24 to 48 hours at times. I am a Christian, and fasting was as much about my relationship with the Lord as about food. That made it easier to hold than any diet rule ever was.
What changed that nobody warned me about
- The food noise is gone. Not managed. Gone. I did not know how loud it had been until it stopped.
- Lifting became my rest day. For years the gym felt like the hard thing. Now one or two sessions a week, mostly plyometrics for my feet, ankles and calves, is how I recover from swimming, cycling and running.
- Wanting more. Nobody tells you how much your head changes. Once the body starts moving, staying the same becomes the unacceptable option. That is why I post more, train more, and started this site.
- My clothes became a problem in the other direction. My running shorts got so big that they rubbed me raw on every sweaty run. Half tights fixed it in one day.
- Eating enough got hard. After a year of eating little, I now have to carb-load so I do not bonk on a long run or ride. Eating more, on purpose, is a skill I am relearning.
- The self-talk. I spent my whole life calling myself a loser and hating the mirror. Training taught me I never had a reason to talk to myself that way. I had just never done the work.
- Running more than 10 miles without stopping hit harder than any number on the scale.
- The bloodwork. As of this year the hypothyroidism I was diagnosed with at 12 is no longer showing, and I am no longer prediabetic.
What did not change, or got harder
- Sleep. Still 4 to 8 hours a night. I am working on it, and it is the weakest part of everything I do.
- Eating more is now the discipline, not eating less.
Why the scale slowed down
Because the goal changed. I signed up for a full-distance triathlon, Ironman Jacksonville on May 16, 2027, and I am training for it now. My first run of the program was a 16-minute mile with stops. A month later I hold a 13:30 to 13:40 pace for more than six miles. The pool humbled me completely. The weight is still coming off, slowly, and I have stopped caring how fast. The finish line I am chasing now is not a number.
The training story, month by month, lives in The Journey. The running specifics are in How I started running at 250 pounds.