191; Pete's Progress

This morning I checked my Facebook and there was a photo of Pete tagged.  I stared at it for a good long while because it's so amazing to see how far he's come.  This is the photo:

It think it's from 4 years ago.  We were riding out to a motorcycle event.  We have a daring shutterbug who takes photos from his camera mounted on the handlebars.  He was probably about 330 pounds then.

This was from September 2010, the same year.  We were in North Carolina a the Biltmore tour.  He was carrying my wine because I was too tipsy to trust myself.  This is the trip that made him really think about his weight and consider the gastric band.  He was tired of losing the weight, getting burned out from the drastic exercising and then gaining it back.  He said that the car ride (we drove from MN to NC, SC, GA & TN, then back home) was uncomfortable and when the car was uncomfortable he knew that he had to do something.

This is Pete now:

We had lunch with my niece last month.  See how small his face is?  This is the whole him:

Amazing, isn't it?  Truly amazing. 

2 years out, he's kept his weight within about 10 pounds of where he wants to be.  He feels best at about 180-185.  But at that weight, he looks somewhat thin, but that may be because we were all so used to how "full" he looked when he was overweight.  He goes through periods of exercising 6 days a week and then will burn out and stop for a couple of weeks and then go back to exercising, but in a different way.  The difference between before and now is that with the band, he's reminded not to over eat when he take a break form working out.  He also doesn't let himself get above a certain weight and starts working out again when it gets close to it.

Bottom line is that he no longer snores, he doesn't need blood pressure meds and his blood sugars aren't high.  He will likely always struggle with consistent exercise (as will I) and cycle on and off the gym to take breaks.  But he's healthy, he's happy and he looks awesome!