More about me…

 Maybe you already viewed my profile but if you haven’t found that page and came across this one first, let me take a moment to say welcome and I appreciate you for stopping by and taking a gander of this very amateur but hopefully informational piece of literature. So here’s a little about me and my journey.

My name is Kevin, born and raised in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. I didn’t really do fitness until I graduated high school but I was very limited in my knowledge at the time. At that time I was doing stuff like P90X with a buddy. It’s a great program and I highly recommend it if you want that high intensity cardio style training. So that’s where I started, between that and running 6 miles a day, that was my workout routine and just having a see food diet. I was 18 and knew exactly zero about fitness and nutrition. 

So let’s fast forward a couple years to around 22 years old. Still didn’t know squat about nutrition but I had a gym membership now. Granted I probably hadn’t stepped foot inside of a gym in two years.  I did some weightlifting in college with a buddy that was in pretty good shape and had some respectable muscle mass. But I still had no idea about nutrition and I had discovered alcohol, all those empty calories. Anyways, 22 years old working out in the middle of the night at planet fitness in Kansas City, MO because I worked night shift and that’s when it worked best for me but I was so inconsistent on going and didn’t track anything foodwise and barely tracked my workouts. We all gotta start somewhere, even me. 

So around 2017-2018, I’m 25ish now at this time, I had moved around the country a few times to NE Michigan and the Cincinnati, Ohio area. Back at planet fitness and going absolutely bonkers on a regular basis. What do I mean by that? I mean that I was actually doing way too much on every strength training exercise and cardio. And my diet was still crap. You cannot out work a bad diet, yeah you can get in better shape but the results won't be there visually. I knew this but I was partially a non believer and partially didn't care. I got stronger but I didn't have the visual results of all my hard work I was putting in day in and day out. I was "using" a program and it was more of a Frankenstein of programs mashed together and doing a million sets of tricep pushdowns because I didn't understand sets and reps, volume and so on and so on. I did power through it and stuck with it for a good 6 months but after it was all said and done I still gave up and wondered what the point was because I knew my diet wasn't in check, so I essentially gave up.

Now we are more current time, April 2020 when I decided to give this journey yet another try. I had moved out to the west coast to the great state of California and then back to the midwest at the end of 2019. I been around the block once or twice by now. Anyways, its April 2020 and I reach out to a person that I went to high school with. Totally random but stay with me here. Why Kevin would you hit up a person from high school after 10 years? Because it was my literal first night of being sober in probably that many years and Iowa just happened to have snow on the ground. Addiction is a hell of a beast but with the right person or group of people, we can all overcome our darkest days. So, this chick and I are hitting it off and we start to talk about like how to better ourselves and what can we do in the here and now. Well the two big things you can do in the here and now is nutrition and fitness.

April 2020, the beginning of sobriety and taking on the healthier lifestyle and lucky me COVID shut all gyms down, what a way to start. What did I do? Great question, glad you asked! I spent my life on YouTube, sifting through all the hours upon hours of fitness and nutrition and what to do and what not to do. Take my word, there's a lot out there that is amazing and a lot of contradictory information and also entirely way too much false and damaging information. I took a lot of notes and watched a lot of videos then researched those videos to see if what they were saying is remotely accurate. I contribute a lot of what I learned to Greg Doucette and Jeff Nippard. Take your time and look up these two people and see what you can get yourself into. Now we are through the month of May and things are opening back up such as the gyms but its limited availability. I was working second shift and getting off at 11pm and the gym was 7am to 7pm. I had no desire to go before work because I wanted the sweet reward of sleep. Couldn't go after because they weren't open, quite the dilemma. I was really only going once and awhile at this point but at least I was going and that was better than nothing.

By the time June rolls around, the gym is back open to 24 hours and I can go after work. So that's what I did for the longest time, get off work and go to the gym. The plus side is you have plenty of time to do whatever workout you decide but the negative is you're tired from work. The chick that I started talking to was doing the before work thing and really liked that but I didn't think it was for me. At this point though I was finally working on my diet as well. When I started I was in the 190lb weight range so I had about 35ish pounds to lose. So here we go, we are on a cut for the foreseeable future. I had learned about calories and protein and had a relative idea on how much to eat and slowly tried to limit the junk food. I didn't change my diet over night and nor should you because you are setting yourself for failure. What I did is I would swap out like two meals a day for planned healthy meals that I meal prepped earlier in the week that way when I'm hungry I don't feel the need to run to taco bell for ease of access and a quick meal. Don't get me wrong, I still love cheap tacos. Alright, back to the journey. We meal prepping, we hitting the gym regularly, we dropping the weight and feeling good and clothes are fitting a little better. That is pretty much June, just trying to stay consistent in the gym and baby steps on the diet.

We get through July and still wasn't completely all in till about August, weight is still coming off, still eating junk food but the diet is better ever so slightly. I ended up spending a week in Albuquerque with the chick I hit up way back in April. She is sticking with the program and losing the weight as well and eating better too. So we go on vacation and the diet and exercise get put on hold. Let me be absolutely clear here, you will not trash all your gains and progress in a week. Enjoy your vacation, eat the food, see the sights and get back at it when you get home, its not the end of the world. 

So now its August and I am all in, diet is on point and I'm hitting the gym regularly. How did I get my diet on point? I bought a cookbook and used that piece of literature for the majority of my meals because I'm terrible at being creative. It made my life so much easier to track calorie intake and protein intake and I was able to stay in a deficit and have a general idea of how much of a deficit I would be in. But I still didn't have a legit workout routine, I just started working out before work instead of after.

So lets fast forward to new year, January 2021. I'm down to roughly 160lbs and I finally invest in a workout program. Talk about life changing. There is a thing as too much cardio and too much strength training. So I buy a program from Jeff Nippard and it actually has a couple of different routines in it such as a two day full body split, an upper/lower split and a body part split. Diet is still on point and still attempting to cut just a little more. So I chose to do the upper/lower split and my strength shoots through the roof and I love what I do because I had routine and structure and can track my workout better so I can utilize progressive overload. 

I manage to cut down to 154-155lbs by middle of March and was really looking for what I need to consume to kind of maintain my weight because I couldn't see myself enjoying going any lower. So I work on slowly eating more and just maintaining. That was pretty successful, put on five pounds in a week to replenish all those awesome carbs and fats and just filling out some. Went through some mental battles shortly after that because I wanted to start putting on lean muscle mass and make my way up to 170 and was scared I was just going to get fat again but I have to keep telling myself that as long as I'm in a slight surplus and not killing 5000 calories a day and more like 2800 to 3100 then I will slowly go up in weight.

So as of currently, I'm sitting at 161 and consuming 2900ish calories a day. The journey works both ways whether its bulking or cutting or maintaining. I'll add in some more posts about fitness and routines and more on food as well. I will also do my best on the emotional aspects, body dysmorphia and other highs and lows but I didn't want to touch on all that here otherwise this would be getting even more lengthy but here's a rough oversight of my journey and about me. If you made it this far, I do appreciate you taking the time and I hope you check out the other sections as they come.