After breaking up with my fiancee (different priorities in life I had just started classes at UF and she wanted to move to Cali and start life in Hollywood). I was 195 @ 5'10, stalky build. My exercise was limited to home weights.
I switched to diet drinks and started running on a treadmill 2 days a week. In 3 months I had lost 30 lbs.
About two years later I started going to a gym on campus with a friend. (I'm not a person that prioritizes heavy lifting or considers lifting ability the end all to fitness. It's just the only stat that I have remembered after all this time.) But I was benching around 150 at my max and working out with 115-135. When I first started.
As the first year passed I continued to get stronger and more lean. I was just hanging out with friends and non of us were doing any research on eating, or reps, and just did a few different things in the weight room. While that way of working out isnt the best. It had two critical things that helped the most important factor was going with friends. It was fun hanging out and rotating in and out it let us get rest as well as not slack off and kept at a consistent rate of visits each week. My weight was 177 lean. And my bench was peaking around 200.
A guy from my work was a competitive bodybuilder and one day he offered to look at what I was doing during the week and see what advice he could give. He said I was benching too much (3x a week, and not complementing my work out with other exercises. Mainly my legs) He had me doing a more well rounded work out as well as benching once a week and dropping to a weight that I can do 5 sets of 5 at and adding 2.5 lbs to each side once I do that on the following week.
By the end of the summer I was back to 187 lbs still lean and benching 260 and by the end of the year I was able to max out at 6 Cadillacs (315) thats what the black guys in the gym say. Eventually school fun ran out and we all graduated, people moved away and I just kept the habit up, 2x a week.
The point of all this is, back before all this started I was a chubby guy that collected video games and today I'm a guy who feel asleep playing dukes of hazard on the gameboy color last night because I didn't want to be bored while taking my nightly dump and brought it to bed with me. Today while on my lunch break I had Game Sack playing on my phone. I'm basically the same guy I just cut out excessive food that was bad and got casually consistent about getting exercise and it made a world of a difference.
Often times people want to rush into weight loss and its very difficult to go all in. If your a soda drinker make a push to low calories drinks, after a few weeks that "diet taste" you'll likely prefer the taste of them than to sugary drinks. If you're eating fast food all the time don't go all salad. Do a slice of pizza and a salad instead of two slices. Instead of a burger and fries do a burger and salad.
Make the gym a fun activity, even if you are going solo you can check out girls/guys and watch some Game Sack on your phone.
