About

After noticing that the first thing I look at when checking out a new blog is the About Me section, I realized that I need to get one for my own!

So, here goes:

My name is Lee and I am 30 31 years old. I live in Atlanta, GA with my fiance Jason and our Golden Retriever, Murphy. Jason and I got engaged in June of 2009 and are planning an June 2010 wedding. I am originally from the Washington, DC suburbs and moved to Atlanta on a whim about 7 years ago.

I was always on the heavy side growing up. I wasn’t obese, but I’d say from about junior high until several years after college, I had at least 20 pounds to lose to put my BMI in the normal category. For many years, I ate what I thought were healthy foods and worked out and just didn’t understand why I couldn’t lose the weight. I think it was in 2004 when I had a breakthrough. I read the South Beach Diet book and suddenly things made sense. Previously, I had been relying way too much on low-fat processed foods. I thought that since they didn’t have much fat, I could eat as much as I wanted to. I began to change my diet around and incorporate whole grains as much as I could. I also began lifting weights in addition to the cardio that I had been doing. It took a few months, but after a while, the weight seemed to just fall off. All in all, I lost about 35 pounds.

Truth be told, I probably went a little overboard. I never had an eating disorder but my thoughts about food and dieting became more and more obsessive. I never really counted calories at this point, so I couldn’t tell you if I actually wasn’t eating enough but my body began to show physical signs that maybe I wasn’t. My hair got thinner, my period lasted 2 days if it came at all for the month and I was cold all the time. This point in my life was pretty hard. There were so many conflicting thoughts. On one hand, I was wearing clothes in sizes that I had never even dreamed of wearing but on the other hand, I knew that I wasn’t being healthy. Cliche as this may sound, it was New Years Eve (I think 2005 or 2006) and I was at a bar with some friends and we went around in a circle and told our resolutions. I remember saying mine was to stop being so weird about food.

And I did. I stopped. For a while it was fine. I was still eating well, but not hyper-focuisng on the ingredients of everything I put in my mouth. I started running and completed many distance races. After a while, though, I began to pay less and less attention to what I was eating and it caught up to me. I eventually gained back about 15 pounds. I’d love to be able to lose some of those regained pounds but am not going to let myself do so in an unhealthy manner this time. It’s a struggle, but I’ll make it work.

I started blogging in late 2006 when I was training for my first (and only…so far) marathon – The ING Georgia. After that race was over, I stopped blogging for a while but eventually came back anew with In My Tummy.