About FitDailyLife
First of all, I want to thank you for taking time out of your valuable day. I built this site as a passion project after I found my success story. Time after time of sharing my successes with friends, family, and strangers, I found myself just as fired up as the day I started. After a while, I knew I had to do something with this. I had to tell my story, and help others start theirs.
While you visit, understand that your story may look very different than mine. My goal with Fit Daily Life isn’t to tell you exactly what to do, but to give you what you need to find your own ideal healthy lifestyle. To be mindful of how your body works.
I will be primarily talking about fitness and weight management, but this is really about focusing on what is truly important in your life. So I will likely be expanding this site to include other areas of life, but right now I just really want to focus in on these two very important topics.
My FitDailyLife Story
I’d also like to take a moment to share my story of how I got to this point in managing my weight. It’s a story I’m immensely proud of, and love to share with others. There are many more details to this story, especially pertaining to what I do on a daily basis. These missing breadcrumbs are interconnected like a web, which makes blogging the perfect avenue to continue to share what I’ve found to be successful!
Early Years
When I was a young adult, I was 5’10 and 135lbs. A bit Skeletor-ish, to be honest. I lived in desert climate, drank a gallon of water a day, and walked.. a lot. It wasn’t by choice, it’s just what happened to be.
I didn’t drive back then, so if I wanted to go anywhere, it had to happen with my own two feet. That included school, which was 2 miles away. Couple this with extremely hot and dry weather, and you can see how I naturally drank a gallon of water each day.
Fast forward 15 years to being married, having a stressful desk job, a car to take me places, and eating too much. I had grown to be over 202lbs. I was a little self conscious, but there were definitely plenty of people that were heavier than I was. I wanted to be thinner, but it wasn’t a priority for me. That was before the..
Anxiety Attacks
The first anxiety attack I experienced came out of nowhere on an uneventful day.
I was in a standing meeting when I felt like something was terribly wrong. I was dizzy, my left arm hurt, my chest hurt. I thought to myself: “I know these symptoms, I must be having a heart attack! But I haven’t collapsed, and if I turn out to be wrong?… I can’t afford a meaningless ER visit.” So I tried to tough it out, to get through this meeting.
Still dizzy, I couldn’t breathe well. Thinking it was stress induced, I left the meeting without excusing myself. I wanted to get a sense of what my body was trying to tell me. Despite the risk of going outside, where no one would find me immediately if I were to pass out, I felt that being around people was making me feel worse. I took a lap around the building. I didn’t feel much better.
When I finally decided to tell someone, I was rushed to the ER. They did a bunch of tests and found nothing. They said it was likely a panic attack.
Now as an aside, I would find out later that a panic attack is essentially when there is an event that triggers from a traumatic memory of the past. An anxiety attack is your body trying to tell you that it is in danger somehow. Both can manifest in various forms, such as heart attack-like or stroke-like symptoms.
Weeks went by and I went through the scariest and most difficult moments of my life.
There was one anxiety attack in particular where I was laying in my bed, fully believing I would be dead within a couple of hours. I fell asleep, not expecting to wake up. I was in such torment – I was okay with it being the end. I prayed constantly for God to either bring me healing, or take me home. My prayers did not go unanswered.
The Diagnosis
My wife was seeing a doctor for routine checkups who incidentally was a sleep specialist. She strongly advised me to see her doctor to find out what was going on. From what my wife told her, this doctor had a strong hunch on what was happening before my examination.
It didn’t take long that I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. Those many nights of waking up gasping for air weren’t caused by anxiety, I wasn’t breathing! It was actually the sleep apnea that was causing the anxiety attacks. My brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, which was causing my body to let me know it was in trouble.
The doctor gave me four options: CPAP, Oral Device, lose weight, or surgery. CPAP and Oral Devices ended up being far from perfect solutions, and I did not want to go through surgery. That left losing weight, which is not something easy to do quickly.
Over the course of prior years I had casually tried losing weight. I tried Paleo, which I actually liked, but was very restricting for long term. Calorie counting seems like a good solution, but is too difficult to track correctly.
The Attempt
I struggled. My wife and I saw things differently. She saw a serving size as the desired amount of something she wanted to eat. I saw it as what was on the package.
She needed sweets in the house so that she wouldn’t have cravings. I needed them not to not be there, so I wasn’t tempted by the sight of them.
Food is an emotional and comforting thing. A way to bond with people. If my wife grabs some ice cream while we’re watching a show, I want ice cream too. If she grabs a few snacks, I want a few snacks.
I felt stuck. I felt like even if I changed my eating habits for a day, my emotional bond with my wife would put me in situations that would tempt me back into my usual eating habits.
I was at an ultimate low. I felt like I would surely be dead within ten years if nothing changed.
Now, my wife sometimes went out of town to visit her family. This time, she would be away for four days. I thought to myself, “this is my chance to really change something!”
Four days without worrying about whether or not I was making her feel bad about herself.
Four days without being jealous of what she’s eating.
Four days to focus.
I took everything I knew about dieting, and threw out everything that wasn’t common sense – and I leaned into it.
I didn’t narrow down my food choices by jumping on some fad diet. I didn’t try the nearly impossible feat of hitting between 1200 – 1500 Calories per day. I kept it simple, I listened to my body. It came down to these simple things: consuming water, managing hunger, frequent movement, daily measurement, and taking the emotion out of eating.
Without taking any walks, my fitness tracker said I would take about 1000 steps per day. I gradually worked my way up to walking 8000 steps per day, by taking multiple short walks.
My Calling
I found myself in a trajectory that would continue past a fad and into something that I want to do for the rest of my life.
When my wife came back, it was challenging continuing on while her eating habits remained the same. She wasn’t interested at all in taking this journey with me. That is, until I dropped my first 10lbs within the month. That’s when she knew there was something to this. She wanted in.
We started to bond over the experience, and we began competing with one another. It brought us closer together and gave us one more thing we have in common.
Thanksgiving came around and we had good food with our family, just in moderation. We were intentional about how much we ate. Sure, we got a few of those “that’s all you’re going to eat?” But that just gave us an opportunity to share our passion of what we discovered.
Over the next several months we weighed ourselves every day and encouraged each other, and competed with one another. After we lost 15lbs each, we took a month break, maintaining the same weight, to let our skin have a chance to bounce back before we continued losing more weight.
We both started at ~202lbs, her being six inches shorter than me. We felt great and I reached my goal weight of 165lbs. I no longer gasped for air during the night, and the anxiety attacks disappeared.
At that point I wanted to create Fit Daily Life, but I didn’t feel like I documented my journey well enough. It was at that point I made a dangerous decision. I would stop everything and gain weight until I reached 180lbs, and then start my weight loss journey again. So I stopped all of my exercise and weighed myself every day, until I broke 180lbs.
Now I am primed and ready to take on this journey once again! Let’s go!