How I Plan on Doing This

So you say you want to change your lifestyle but how are you going to do that…?

 

That’s the question that I kept asking myself a couple of weeks ago. I can’t always rely on Dudley and Bob, or Workshop Fitness to bail me out. I needed to figure out a plan that would utilize what I know while also allowing me to continue to learn about fitness with people who understand fitness and health better than myself. That’s when my longtime friend, David Becker, contacted me. He asked me to come check out his gym for an open session that he has every Saturday morning.

I had only worked out with David once before about two years ago, and he completely wiped the floor with me. He had me doing a fully body workout with jogging as my active rest within about a 45 minute workout. That was when I was in great shape. Now I am in the worst shape I have been in for about 4 years so I was apprehensive about the workout. Thankfully David put me through a workout I could handle but at the same time made me sweat my butt off.  It involved a low impact warm up, kickboxing, and doing sprints on his air-dyne bikes. After the workout I had a stroke of genius.

I need to get my butt kicked by David.  I need this to help me out because without a trainer I had lost all the success I had gained. There also needs to be accountability. What better way to create accountability than to workout at his gym and get a group of people to join me who are looking to get back into workouts. The truth is that I have been getting a lot of feedback about training again. The problem with training right now is that I am not fit to tell someone else to perform to his or her best. It wouldn’t feel right. So I want to see if people would be interested in starting a workout with David that would be specific to people I used to train, friends who are interested in working out with me, or anyone who is looking to be part of a workout community.

I want to make sure its known that I am in no way making any money from this, getting a discount on any kind of fees associated with the gym, etc. I am just looking for accountability and to create a workout family I desperately miss. I am currently looking at holding these workouts Tuesday-Thursday 8:00PM.  If you are interested in finding out more information regarding this let me know.

Just some additional workout information regarding David’s gym. He will be instructing us using Caveman Training. It sounds a lot more intimidating than it actually is. The program is progressive and will start at a beginner level. And not to be intimidated by the name, it simply means going back to the basics. Basic movements structured properly to produce results. You can find more info about his gym here at http://www.austincaveman.com/ , or https://www.facebook.com/austincaveman .

This is My Confession

Sometimes in life you are given an opportunity of a lifetime and what you do with it will define your path in life. I was given this opportunity a little over four and a half years ago. Getting free workouts for a year allowed me to gain control of my weight, find a new passion for life, and it opened the door for me to meet the girl of my dreams.

Since that year a lot has changed, some things for the good and some for the bad. Now I realize, that when I stayed accountable I was at my healthiest and happiest. With that being said I have a confession to make that I hoped never to say.

I have gained a considerable amount of my weight back. To give perspective on the situation I was at 420 pounds at my heaviest. At my lightest I had gotten down to 220 pounds. The last time I had been at 220 pounds was in the 7th grade…Wow! That is hard to say. It’s even harder to admit that I have gained back almost 100 pounds and now hover somewhere around 310 pounds.

Man, the emotions behind that statement are hard to fathom. I worked so hard to get to 220. I remember the feeling I had when I hit that number. That’s an achievement I can hang my hat on. I cried knowing that I had accomplished something only a few people could understand. Losing 200 pounds is something most people can’t comprehend. Some people may never even weigh 200 pounds in their entire life.

The idea of gaining 100 pounds back is utterly shocking me. I have such confidence in how I carry myself that I lost track with how I really looked in the mirror. It wasn’t until I recently saw a picture of myself about 1-2 months ago at a birthday party that I thought, “Wow my shirts aren’t fitting nearly as well”. Maybe I should have noticed when I had to go up 2 sometimes 3 sizes in my shirts or 6-8 inches in my waist for my pants. Oh the things you don’t think about until its too late.
 

Alright its out! I feel better now…that I have shared this. But what good is sharing the problem unless you have a plan in place to take care of that problem.  Don’t worry guys I do have a plan and its called starting this blog again. I plan to be energized by the power and inspiration people give me by telling me their stories of triumph. I will rely on myself and my loved ones to keep me from falling off the wagon again, and remembering what got me here in the first place. My health is something that I am not willing to compromise...again!

So this is my shout out to everyone who wants to make a change in their life and needs a push in the right direction. Join me on this journey of self-improvement and I will continue to write my challenges and victories so that together we can find our passion to be the best we can be and live a life filled with joy and happiness, because we all deserve that.

- Ricky Lawson

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.

June 23rd food entry

Breakfast: protein shake and a turkey bacon sandwich on multi grain toast.



Lunch: 8 ounce steak, carrots, mashed potatoes.





Mid afternoon meal: peanut butter and jelly with chips and salsa.





Dinner: 6 ounce pork chop and peas. Forgot to take a picture.


Overall: Not the best way to start out but nothing outrageous.

THE FINISH LINE

It has been about two months since my last blog entry, and I will be the first to admit I have failed in the department of giving out updates. No excuses necessary, but I do bring exciting news.

For the past couple of months, trying to figure out what to write about has been a tough task. I have been talking to my editor, Sam, about how I keep running into the same struggles, and writing them would just be boring to most of the readers of this blog. I needed to find a different way to utilize my blog, and after talking with Sam, I feel that I have a good idea.

Starting June 23, I will be posting a picture of everything I eat or drink. If it is a glass of water, a handful of nuts or a cheeseburger; I will put it on my blog. I will then take all the food I have eaten for that day and calculate how many calories, grams of fat, carbs and protein I accumulated throughout the day. I will put my starting and ending weight each week, and post my weight for the final month. If I get any questions or comments, I will also try to post a response each day.

Doing this may not interest many people, but to me, it’s a great way to keep myself in check, and to give people who have been wondering what I eat to lose weight a better picture of my day-to-day habits. The idea also keeps me in better check of what I put in my body. For the past two months, I have lost a total of 8 pounds, and a main cause of that is due to my diet. I have eaten so much worse than I was in the previous months that I really have struggled to even keep off those 8 pounds I lost since April. With the last month approaching I need to re-dedicate myself to losing as much weight as possible when I have the help of all these wonderful trainers at Workshop Fitness.

DUDLEY AND BOB SPOT 4/22