Back in the saddle.

I think most everyone that knows me would say that I'm a very active and healthy person. I have a good diet for the most part and I'm pretty much a gym rat. I lift 4-5 days a week, play basketball, run sprints, golf, hike, bike, do yoga and some strongman/crosstraining related activities.

Despite all of this, I've been pretty much a walking M.A.S.H. unit for the past 3 or 4 years. Some of this has been preventable, but some of it, like my most recent experience, have been completely out of my control.

I recently had surgery to fix something. I'm not going to go into what at this point, as it's not the most flattering thing to have to talk about. Unfortunately, the surgery ended up being a lot more complicated than originally believed and took me nearly two months to recover from. I'm technically still going to be healing up from it over the next few weeks, but the major part of my recovery is done and I've gotten the doctor's okay to resume exercise.

Unfortunately, due to the pain of the surgery and recovery, I've been pretty much completely inactive for the past two months. I've put on weight in a bad way and my muscles have atrophied significantly. The silver lining is that all the rest has allowed the rest of my body to really heal up. Everything else (my back, shoulders, knees, etc.) feels great. The surgery itself didn't affect any skeletal muscle at all, so as far as that goes, I'm pretty much 100%.

Anyway, I'm going to start using the blog to track my progress.

Today, I'm just going to do some push ups, chins and some foam rolling and stretching on my lunch break. After work, I'll likely go for a walk. Nothing too exciting. I'm working back into it slowly as to not aggravate anything or make myself too sore.

My short term goals over the next month are to lose about 10 pounds and lose around 2 inches off the waist. This morning I weighed 198.6 and my loose waist measurement was 36.5", which was a WTF moment. The weight wasn't a surprise at all, but it seems to have all gone to my waist, which I just hate.

I'll likely eat around 2500 calories a day for now. My macro breakdown is typically around 40% protein, 30% carbs and 30% fat, but I tend to use a carb rotation in my diet where I eat more carbs on my workout days and less on my non-workout days. I'm not a no-carb guy, but I tend to stay around 100 grams or less on my non-workout days. Right now, I'm just going to work on cleaning the diet back up, which that alone should cause to me lose a few pounds over the next week or two.