Robs Introduction!

Hello everybody! I guess this post is to provide a bit of a back story about me, so here goes. I’ve been on the heavy side almost my entire life, dating back to kindergarten when I’d ask for an extra cookie for my invisible friend (or not so invisible on the days when I would take My Buddy™ to school). I was never incredibly active as a child, and graduated from playing right field/playing in the dirt to scorekeeper during my brief career in baseball. Size really came in to play during college, thanks to free daily access to ice cream and pizza. Raise your hand if you can or could eat a whole large Papa John's pizza plus cheese sticks on your own! This combined with an increasingly inactive lifestyle brought me to my largest weight in January of this year of 350 pounds.

When I first heard Ricky’s story on KLBJ, it inspired me to try out Workshop Fitness. After a few sessions, I determined that it was a bit too far of a drive going from north Austin to downtown during rush hour. Shortly thereafter a friend advised me of a more local trainer that did one on one sessions. I worked out with him for a while, and was doing pretty good, but I was having difficulty cracking the 300 mark. This was mainly due to poor food choices, which is eventually what led to us agreeing that until I could get my eating under control, we would keep going in circles. After that, I slowly ballooned up to 350 pounds.

Then, during my trip home for Christmas, my brother surprised me with the fact that he had been going through his own weight loss process, losing a little over 100 pounds. He did it through a program called Optifast. When I returned to Austin in January, I signed up for the program. Basically, while on the program, you are on a liquid diet with only 800 calories per day for 16 weeks. It can only be prescribed through a doctor, and you have to go in to get your vitals checked every week and your blood drawn every month. More on this program later. At the end of the program, I was down to 266 pounds and feeling good.

Afterwards, I was on my own with the food again, and while I was making smarter choices and eating healthier, those not so good habits were creeping back in. Cue the new job and that fateful morning when I discovered that Ricky, the guy who inspired my weight loss adventure, was in my training class. And the rest, as they say, is history.

180 Degrees of Ricky Update

This feels a little crazy to be writing on the blog. I left this without providing any justification of why I stopped blogging. Thankfully, that will all be explained and you will get a sneak peak into the next chapter of 180 Degrees of Ricky.
Let’s first get you up to date with how life is going right now. Currently, I am living in Austin and am engaged to my beautiful fiance Crista Sheumaker. I work for a technology company in town and also at doing a little training on the side (more on this later).
I have tried my hardest to stay at my target weight and right now I am at 245 (when I finished with Workshop Fitness I was at 240). It hasn’t been easy; my weight has fluctuated from back up to 270 pounds to as low as 235 pounds. My experiences have forced me to realize that maintaining is just as big of a challenge as losing weight was.
I still workout 4-5 times a week, either at the gym at my apartment complex or at Austin Peak Fitness, a gym that focuses on group workouts. I only went there because I bought a Groupon to try it out, but I fell in love with the trainers and they are constantly challenging what I thought I was able to do.
I received my Personal Trainer certification over a year ago through NASM, and have trained a couple friends for a little while, however training people never felt right. I also was having trouble believing gyms would hire me since I still looked overweight. When you look at trainers, you see a person who has dedicated their entire lives to fitness, where I’ve only been dedicated for a little over 2 years. My body issues seem to never go away no matter how much weight I have lost. I was losing faith in being a trainer and making that something part of my life.
So I started to think why I wanted to become a trainer and it boiled down to the fact that six trainers helped me for FREE for a YEAR and gave me my life back. This is something I want to give to others, yet I was having a difficult time finding a way to make this possible. That was until I found Rob “Undercover Boss” Dooley.
Rob is a co-worker with me and he had listened to me while I was at KLBJ, the Texas State radio station.. He was inspired by my story and even went to Workshop Fitness to train there. I will let him tell more of his story when he posts an introduction on the blog in a couple of days.
Why Rob will be writing on this blog is because I am happy to announce that I will be training Rob for the next six months. The blog will now be transformed into how I train Rob, while also allowing him a forum to write about how the weight loss plan is going. I will have much more information as the weeks progress, but our start date is set for November 1st.
Rob is looking to change his life and I want him to change mine. I will be pushing Rob where my trainers pushed me. I am looking forward to seeing how people react to the new idea on the blog. I will continue to post my weight loss too, and any updates that go along with that.