I have achieved a lot in the last year and I’m feeling better than ever before. I have a year’s worth of data that shows my progress numerically.

I started out at 237 lbs and 38% body fat. I’m currently 165 lbs and 12.2% body fat according to a 7 point caliper measurement from last Saturday. I have lost over 70 lbs of pure fat and maintained pretty much my entire muscle mass.

I worked out tremendous amounts over the last year. I walked four times for a total of 4 and a half hours. I used the elliptical machine at work and at home 93 times for a total of 74 hours. I have burned over 46,000 calories with walking and the elliptical machine. But these numbers are nothing compared to what I did with running.

Since January I ran 250 times for a total of 1,426 miles in just shy of 189 hours. I have burned 168,000 calories. I have completed numerous races, I even ran a marathon with a Boston Qualifying time no less.

I counted calories and tracked my caloric intake for 6 straight months where I wrote down every single food item I ate. I put myself on a 1,800 calorie diet and stuck with it until I was happy with my weight.

But none of these numbers compare to the improvement in how I feel about myself and how I feel about my life. I’m feeling better than ever in my entire adult life. I’m happy, full of energy and I can’t wait to get up tomorrow at 5:30AM to go out and run again. My wife is happy that I no longer say that “I don’t want to go to the zoo ’cause my feet will hurt from all the walking”. My kids are happy that I can run around the yard with them and I can throw them around with joy.

My transformation was not a stunt. It was not a diet fad. It was not a “I want to run a marathon in my life just so I can say I did it”. It was a lifestyle change. And I have the bitter reminders in my family photo album to make me remember just how miserable I looked a mere year ago. There is absolutely no way that I will ever go back to being that guy. Ever!

So I would say that at this point I’m at 1 year down, another 50+ to go…

My mom and sister

Growing up I was never fat. I was actually downright skinny when I was a young boy. My sister on the other hand was always the “chubby one”. I grew up in a very nice family with loving parents and a great younger sister. We sure had our fights and I was usually the one who got punished for them as I was the older one, but all in all I had a really nice childhood. My sister wasn’t the only one who suffered with their weight in my family. My mom has always been on the heavy side and she blamed it on her upbringing. Her grandmother and single parent mom always kept encouraging her to be plump “just in case you catch a disease you’ll have plenty of reserves”. This was their mentality and it certainly had shown on my mom. She definitely had been obese for as long as I could remember.

Me and my sister

As I was growing up I have witnessed my mom’s struggle with weight and her constant goal of trying to get slimmer and lose it all. She even went to “fat camp” where they put her on a zero calorie diet for several weeks to try to get her to lose her weight. And she did lose some, as to be expected, but she gained it all back once she came back home. It was a constant, never ending battle for her. I have also witnessed my sister’s struggles with her weight and the constant nagging and denial of sweets and snacks from my parents that came with her being overweight. I was clearly the lucky one. I inherited my dad’s “skinny genes” while my poor sister was stuck with my mom’s “fat genes”. But not only I inherited the “skinny genes” I also got a good dose of my dad’s running genes.

My dad was a runner. He went to college to earn his degree in cartography and civil engineering which naturally lent itself to be on the college team of foot orienteering. If you don’t know what foot orienteering is, don’t worry, I actually had to look up the English term myself as me being born and raised in Hungary it’s not a term I have actually learned or used in English, ever. Think of it as cross country running and map reading at the same time. You have to navigate and visit several points through terrain with nothing but a topography map and a compass. First to visit all points wins the race. The sport started in Norway and it is apparently a lot more popular in Europe than in the US but I just checked and there are several local orienteering events even where I live. Having said all this, my dad did compete at college level and he did OK.

Mom pinning the bib on my friend

For me, running started when I was 10 years old. I had a friend who was training at a sport school three times a week. I was never really good at any of the team sports at school and I thought I would go with him to training and see how I liked running. It turned out that I actually enjoyed running very much. I liked it enough that what started out as a Monday, Wednesday, Friday activity in the afternoons has turned into a five times a week training within a year.

On my way to victory

By the third year into my running career I was one of the top runners in the group and I have moved from my regular junior high school to a special magnet school for athletic talent. I was swimming three times a week before school and ran on the track four to five times while ran cross country in the woods once a week. I was clearly on my way to becoming an elite athlete. I won numerous track meets and cross country events on the regional level and I was national age group champion in 4,500 meter cross country amongst 13-14 year old boys in Hungary. I have clocked 9:26 on track for 3,000 meters (5:04/mile pace for 1.86 miles) and my personal best in 10,000 meter road racing was 35:14 at age 13.

So what happened? I got tired. I burned out. By the time I entered high school I felt like I was done with running. School was taking a toll on me, I went to another magnet school, a bilingual high school where I had to learn English and my classes were taught in both English and Hungarian. I just couldn’t take running any more so I quit. And I never ran another mile unless my life depended on it for almost 20 years. The one thing that I never changed though were my eating habits.

I thought I was still growing and burning calories just like I did when I was running. I was going through chocolate and pizza like it was nobody’s business. I slowly but surely started to gain weight. Before I knew it I was getting chubby. My classmates started to make fun of me even though I wasn’t that fat. I was overweight from my lean mean running machine look but by today’s standards I was barely overweight on the BMI scale. But when you come from 140 lbs, 175 lbs starts to look pretty hefty. The last time I wore size 31″ waist pants, the size I’m currently wearing, were freshman year of high school.

If I was on The Biggest Loser Jillian would have a field day with the fact that my mom passed away when I turned 15. She would blame my obesity and overeating on the fact that my mom died. Mom mom had breast cancer and she passed away at age 39. I really don’t think her passing had anything to do with my obesity. I simply stopped exercising and kept eating the same way I used to. But my mom’s death had a lot to do with the fact that I finally turned my life around. The closer I was getting to age 39 the more I started thinking about how short life is and how much more I wanted to do in life and how living the unhealthy way in an obese body would not let it happen. So while I wouldn’t attribute my obesity to “fat genes” inherited from my mom I certainly credit her death as partially the reason why I started my transformation. As for my sister, she has turned her life around about 14 years ago when she finally became fit and she has been the skinny one ever since while I became the family fatty.

But things are turning around once again. I’m on my way to regaining, hopefully, most of my genetic given speed and running ability while losing all the excess weight while my sister is getting bigger and bigger by the minute. I expect that by the time I visit her in August she’ll be bigger than me. You might wonder why would anyone say such a cruel thing about their sister. But this time it’s a good thing as she’s pregnant and expecting a baby at the end of September .

So there you have it, my secret running past. While I certainly have lived the life of a couch potato for the past 19 years I certainly was blessed with some great running genes that are hopefully helping my new, leaner, fitter me to try to achieve my goal of running a Boston Qualifying marathon time in October.