How I Gained 15 Pounds

A couple recent tours of other people’s blogs and a particularly interesting post from Friend Making Monday has brought a lot of new people to the blog and to my How I lost 80 pounds post.  While that post is an important one in the life of the blog and goes a long way to explain how I did lose weight, it misses the whole fitness aspect.

See when I lost 80 pounds I was down to under 150lbs (just for a day or two) in September of 2010.  It was not necessarily a healthy weight for me.  I looked a bit of a waif when I look at the pictures now.

That is where a weight training program came in. I got to work on full body workouts and I got to eat, lots, but good things.  It was a HUGE thing to wrap my head around though.  After spending so long and so much effort into watching my weight drop, I then had to go and do a complete 180 turn and be ok with putting weight on.

It was harder than dropping weight at that point. Ah I’m 155, ahhhh I’m 158  AAAAAHHHHHH  I’m over 160!  It was a bit frightening!  It was  a lot frightening! 

But I was getting fit.  Not just thin.  I was becoming fit and strong.  I told Jodi ages ago that ‘We aren’t building the Hulk, we are building Batman’.  I wanted to be balanced.  Strong and fast (for hockey at that point).

Once I had put on about 10 pounds and was breaking the 160 mark I was finally getting to be ok with that new weight because I could see I was not having to buy bigger shirts or pants or anything.  The weight I was gaining was in muscle.

Every now and then I have a little flash back. I’m steadily between 163 and 166 now, but if I bump up to 167 I sort of lose it for a day or two on the cardio and eating to be back under.  The 160s have been very very gradual both to gain and to get used to.  But I think now my body is trained to weigh about that much.  I related this to a couple of people lately.  When I was big, I weighed 220 (give or take), it was just my ‘natural weight’  I could eat whatever and do the nothing I was doing, well just Karate and hockey once a week, and I would be 220.  If I got over that I felt fat and I would sort of auto correct.  Now I weigh about 165 (give or take) no matter what I eat and do as a workout I bounce right around that weight, when I’m 166 or so I’ll feel a bit fat and make the correction.

Does this post seem disjointed? That because I wrote the first half last night and am continuing now in the morning! Ergh.

And now continuing at lunch, so hard to write this way!

I think that in my own long winded way I’m saying that being skinny or thin, was not all that great for me, and I think that if I had just been skinny, I’d be much bigger again now than I am, because I would not have the muscle to burn up calories.  Getting fit and building muscle has kept me at a good weight because having the muscle means I need to eat more just as a rule.  I burn more calories just sitting here typing than I used to two years ago.  Holly over here, posted some things about body fat percentage, and I thought, those pictures are BS.

So…

This is me, at like 5:50 in the morning, don’t judge me.  As you know I had a fitness assessment done a few weeks ago.  According to the scale at the gym as an athletic body type I am at 7.7% body fat, just as a normal body type I am around 12 or 13%.  A far, far cry from what the people in Holly’s pictures look like.

So to try to tie this all back up.  I gained 15 pounds after losing my weight, but I gained no inches on my pants waist, it’s lots of muscle, and it’s stable. I weigh what I weigh and it hardly moves more than two pounds either way.

Gaining weight is not all as bad as I thought it was back in September of 2010, it, as I see now, was a necessary thing.  Just be sure you are gaining the right type of weight.

Did that even make any sense?  Writing a blog post in four separate sittings FTW!