Hello, My Name Is Dave

I’ll start with a little background about myself. I’m a software developer in my 40’s with a wife and two daughters who live in a Minneapolis suburb. I grew up in a small town and fled to the big city while in my early 20’s. Pretty standard stuff.

I’m fortunate to have never been obese so I don’t have a real inspiring story about weight-loss. In fact, I was always real skinny growing up and hated it. As ac child, I never paid any attention to what I ate and had zero interest in doing any exercise. It wasn’t until my early 30’s when everything changed and I started to gain weight. At age 33, I weighed 165 pounds and by my 36th birthday, I was officially overweight and tipped the scales at 200 pounds.

To be honest, after years of trying to not be skinny, I was weirdly happy to look more like a “normal” person. I definitely noticed a lack of energy but attributed it to the fact that I was getting older. More and more, I would catch myself trying to hide my gut and even started to wear a shirt whenever I was at a pool or beach. Eventually, I started to realize that being skinny wasn’t so bad.

During a check-up, a doctor told me that I really should start exercising. If not for myself, then for my kids. I agreed and suddenly, I found myself trying to lose weight. I began by biking 9 miles before work several days each week. I wasn’t losing any weight but it was helping me feel more energetic.

Then one day, we received a letter stating that our neighbor had complained to the city about our garage being in disrepair. An inspector came over and said that we needed to replace some trim. Then he happened to notice that the window frames on our house also needed to be replaced. He added it to the list of repairs and said that everything was to be done and inspected in 90 days. If they weren’t done, we would be fined.

I started with the garage which only took a couple of days. The house windows however, took all summer! Our house is two stories every weekend was spent ripping out wood, hauling materials up and down the ladder, sawing, pounding, etc. It was hot and difficult but the job was done on time and the inspector was happy with the results.

Unbeknownst to me, another project had begun that summer. I was thinking that I looked thinner so one day I stepped on the scale and was shocked to see that I had lost weight for the first time in my life. While working on the house that summer (and biking), I had lost nearly 25 pounds! This time, I decided to not let myself gain it back.