[cyslespitocop]

That's one of the things that you have to identify in order to keep it from happening again, even with the success Atkins will give you.

For me it was a collection of early habits that I had. When I was a kid I was reasonably healthy but chubby, if that makes sense. I played sports and such, I was never a super tub but I always had a bit of a buddha belly and I was never super muscled. I was a bit of a loner due to being moved around all the time and never really latching onto friends and having people to do things with.

A lot of my time from age 9-13 was spent by myself in my room reading, or playing with toys. Toys kept me from eating, but reading was where I would get into trouble. I used to sit in my room with entire packages of sliced american cheese, slowly reading while eating it. Reading became and still is one of my eating triggers. Finger foods or anything that you can eat with one hand while reading a book is what you could frequently see me doing. Ice cream and the cheese were probably the two biggest culprits for me in regards to that. I'd tack other things onto that, but those were the two main culprits. Sometimes I would bring in the sandwich meat as well and just wrap cheese around it while reading the hardy boys, or else get a box of Nilla Wafers and the carton of ice cream. If you let the ice cream melt up a bit you can dip Nilla wafers into it and mow down pretty handily with one hand.

Breakfast was the other big killer for me as a kid. My mom was pretty free about what we could have for cereal, and when I was a kid my little brothers and sisters were about 7 years younger than me, so there was always "kid" cereal around, and plenty of sugar as well. One of the things I did that REALLY got me some problems was the powdered sugar. One of the things that I don't blame my mom for, but that I wish she would have put a halt to, was the practice of mine of having Chocolate or Strawberry milk with Captain Crunchberry cereal, soaked in powdered sugar so that you could scrape the spoon on the bottom of the bowl, then pull it up thru the cereal and have the cereal sitting in a bed of sugar goop.

Then I joined high school and got a bit better. I was in football as a linebacker, wrestling at the 189lb upper weight class, and then track as a shotput and 100m sprinter. That was the first two years of high school, where I got in better shape, and was just about reasonably close to the picture I posted where I am the shirtless idiot. Then in my junior year the person wrestling the heavyweight position graduated, and my wrestling coach and football coach got together with me. They wanted me to wrestle heavyweight, and my football coach would be ok with me helping to shore up the defensive line. Both of these positions meant I would have to increase my strength, and that I would no longer have to worry about maintaining a weight below 189.5 lbs.

They worked me out a weightlifting regimen designed to increase my muscle size, and we went to the Nutrition store and bought me some of that Whey Protein GAINER, which is something like 800 calories and 40 carbs per serving. With their assistance, I went in my junior year from 189 lbs and a reasonable build to about 250 lbs, strong but definitely with fat all over me. I stayed at that weight until the last football game of my Senior year, when I broke my knee horribly and was on crutches for almost the rest of the school year.

I never changed my eating habits while I was completely sedentary, and when I came off the crutches I weighed about 307 lbs. I graduated and went to Purdue University, and managed to starve diet myself as it was the only way I knew how from wrestling, with ephedra, back down to about 230,,, where I pretty much stayed for awhile until my brother died. That kicked me back up to a give up attitude, and I pretty much took my share of the insurance money we gained from his loss and ate it.

I think I ate take out for every meal for an entire year, at which end point my Atkins begins. I found my weight out around december of '04 at roughly 317 lbs after a steady summer of 16 inch Italian subs, or Meatball subs, X-large pizzas, chicken strips with triple ranch, ice cream and cookies every day, and entire 12 packs of regular soda.

I found out about Atkins, cut down from over 300 to about 260, then bought a membership at the YMCA and started working out like I had in high school, and cut back down to the Shirtless Idiot picture. You all know the rest. I kept it off till the motorcycle accident in Sept 07, when I got back up to about 260 or so... and went back on Atkins in April of '08. It's now July 23rd, and I'm 188.7 lbs and not going to let my early poor eating habits enter back in.

One of my tricks that kept me at my atkins weight the first time for 3 years was setting in STONE some alarm weight limits for myself. I was 175, at 190 I started keeping a food journal again, and if I hit 205 it was time for full induction again. 205 lbs was my serious alarm weight, if I hit that, everything I was doing stopped and there was a complete review of what was going wrong.