Publicly shaming myself to good health

My favorite meme and a metaphor for my life.

I am a heavy guy. Not someone who "struggles with my weight," and battles that emotional baggage every day kind of heavy. I am just a dude whose natural eating tendency's result in excess weight. Occasionally I'm lazy, occasionally I have to set aside certain exercise for health reasons, but excuses aside at the moment I am a heavy dude.

But that is not my natural state, at least that is what I discovered late in college. A dozen years ago I discovered how much I love running. Not only running but just cardio exercise like activities in general. Put a set of weights in front of me and you're pretty much returning me to high school math class, but if my bones could handle it I would run all day. 

When I single in my super semester of college I ran every day, and eventually I got up to ten miles a day. The best part about it was I could maintain my far from perfect diet and still lose weight because I was going the distance. 

Shortly after college a series of unfortunate apartment placements, midwest weather, and losing my motivation stumbled me into ballooning up in weight. Every few years I'd get the motivation to burn down 20-30 lbs but distractions snuffed out any hopes to sustained. 

Cut to 2016 and I'm way heavier than I've ever been, to be specific I was 266 lbs. Even with successful past models of healthy living staring me in the face, I just couldn't find the motivation to lace up my sneakers. That is until a favorite vlog of mine announced a side project to build a healthier life over 100 days, and share their progress on YouTube.

100 is a magic number. Not only is it nice and round, and lives beautifully on the base-10 scale, but it reaches just passed the point of establishing a habit or routine. Three months of a routine have proven to be the trick for me in the past and every time I've looked to kick back into gear, I saw three months as the first benchmark... although finding the motivator to get to 90+ days. But this 100 Days vlog idea... yeah that's something.

As of this posting I am on day 16 of my personal 100 Day Health Challenge and so far it is exactly what I needed. Every day I try to reach 10,000 steps monitored by my phone, eat healthier with no junk food snacks, and push myself to do some level of cardio exertion (running, biking, hiking, rollerblading, etc) and then close the day out by sharing my publically efforts on YouTube. Unlike the Vlog Brothers who I got the idea from, I am not a vlogger. I am just a pragmatic guy who knows if I do this in public there is a 95% greater likelihood I will stick to it. Also I'm not pulling in experts and looking at overall health in any scientific way like Vlog Bros is, I'm looking only at daily personal goals and weight as an indicator of success.

As a side note, I love that I picked the unhealthiest time of year for an American to take on such a challenge. Setting that aside my motivation stall-outs I'm running this gauntlet through Halloween candy, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the overarching pie season, I have real obstacles in my way. If I can maintain my ambition at this time of year, I can do it year round. Of course weather might kick me back here and there, but 10K every day is something I can and will do.

Only 84 days left, maybe I'll follow up with a blog post but if not, anyone interested in following me can subscribe to my personal YouTube channel and look for posts around 9-10pm nightly. I'm not a vlogger but the public shaming of owning my weight and battle to manage it is certainly the motivator to be true to my goals. That's it for now, wish me luck.