A Change in the Winds?

For these past 6 months, I have been investing a fair amount of time (though not enough) into getting my dad into shape. As of this summer, he was turning 56, and weighed in a at a hefty 240 pounds, despite being only 5'10". He was quite out of shape, and was suffering from some knee trouble which kept him from walking and doing chores without pain, let alone exercising. The other issues came from his poor self-discipline and awful diet; he was taking in very large excesses of calories, and often ate only 1, maybe 2 meals of packaged or processed foods daily.

Towards the midway-tail end of summer, we finally began to do some basic exercises; he isn't incredibly coordinated, so we had to go through every single nuance of the bodyweight squat, fat man pull ups (i've never used this term around him though) and pushups. We spent about 1.5-2 months just developing his ability to go through basic joint warm ups and routines without a huge struggle.

When fall began, he had begun sporadically writing down what he ate, and we tried to have him exercise 3-4 days a week, topping out at a jaw-dropping 4, and sometimes getting only 1. Up until today, we didn't think that he had made a ton of progress, but he has cut back tremendously (gradually, but still tremendously) on how much he eats, getting in more meals with quality food, and not gorging on liquids and processed crap. I cannot say that he's anywhere close to eating "clean", but the progress has been stable from what i can tell now.

The thing about this project was that i was attempting to use the knowledge i had accumulated over the past 18 months of research and discussion with others to help someone that i care about. However, before 6 o'clock this evening, i was quite confident that i had been failing at this, until my dad emerged from the bathroom, naked (at least covering his giblets, but you know) and told me to read the scale, since his eyes aren't so good. I was astonished to see that he had dropped 18 pounds in these 4 months (mostly water weight, but hey, it's progress!) and was now down to 222.

We know that things won't get any easier, but at least this should give him a confidence boost for the future; hopefully with the emphasis solely on performance and improving his diet until it's somewhat clean, he will be lighter and fitter for it.