All of my life I have been a fairly lazy person in the physical sense.  I have never liked physical labor, and due to health problems as a child I couldn’t go out and play as much as other kids.  A good solid afternoon of outside play resulted in my being laid up for two weeks.  It was horrible.  So there is something I have never really dealt with before, and that’s weight gain from packing on muscle mass.

It’s been quite a while since I have written about my weight loss.  The last major post was when I broke through 100 pounds lost, and then I followed it up in Nov. of last year with a series about how to lose weight.  Since then I have been quiet, and there was a reason.

I was gaining weight back.

I got down to 278, a total of 122 lbs lost, but then I started creeping back up.  I blamed it on the holidays, but it just didn’t stop, it kept going up, and I couldn’t figure out why because I wasn’t eating that differently than before, and I was still working out, hitting the gym and so on.  So why in the world was my weight creeping back up on me and finally saw me climb back over 300 lbs to 305?  It was depressing me, and it was starting to just anger me more than anything.  I was getting discouraged and felt like giving up, but I kept going.

Then I started to piece it together.  I thought something had bit my leg, and I lifted my heel to look down at the back of my right leg and noticed something I had never seen before: muscles.  Not just a little bit of muscle, but like a whole lot of very clearly defined muscles.   Then I noticed my forearms and … veins?  When did my veins start showing?  And then one night while lifting weights in my bedroom, I saw my chest reflected in the glass of a picture I had hanging up as I was lifting the weights and … what the heck?  When did I get those muscles?

As I started to think back, I hadn’t been paying attention to my muscle growth.  Last August when I went to Boston on vacation I had just started bench pressing and was doing 95 lbs.  Pathetic, I know.  Just this week I moved up to 140 lbs on the bench press, and actually feel like I could probably move up to 145 lbs.  Last summer I was doing 290 lbs on the seated leg press and now I’m up to 350 lbs.  All of my weight work is considerably higher than it was last year at this time when I thought back to it.

I still wasn’t convinced I had packed on 27 lbs of muscle, but I knew there was one final test, and that was putting on shorts I hadn’t worn since last summer when I was 295 lbs.  I put them on and instead of being snugger at 305 lbs, they were looser.  I was finally convinced what I had actually done was put on 27 lbs of muscle … and now I don’t know what to do.

While I am loving the extra strength and stamina, it is still 305 lbs of stress on my heart.  I don’t care if its fat or muscle, 305 lbs is still 305 lbs.  The question is how do I balance this out?  I would be fine with keeping the muscle if I could just get more of the fat off, but it’s a tricky line to walk between the two.  So I am cutting back on the weight training some and increasing my cardio/walking in hopes of getting the two to equal out, but we’ll have to see what happens.

This is somewhat of a follow up to the whole series I did on weight loss because apparently too much of a good thing (i.e. weight lifting) can still turn into a bad thing no matter what it is.