Deja vu all over again: Starting Over

First, whether you are just tuning in for the first time or perhaps someone who has been walking this path with me for a while now, hello, nice to see you, and apologies for, just now, a certain mix-and-match aspect here in which I have spruced up the initial 2007 posts from this blog and combined them with a new flow of daily posts beginning today. As always, there is a method to my madness, and here my approach is informed by the following:

• I have been reflecting for a while on the importance of reviving this blog and, with it, I hope, my personal health, and today is the day on which I am moving from reflection to action.
• Unlike some things I might write about, this particular topic is one for which my personal history as I have recorded it here seems important, to the extent that anything that is so personal is important.
• I am also in the process of making this blog and some of my other blogs available in the Kindle store, where it seems appropriate to provide some history as well as a daily post on the current state of things.
• The Kindle blog template allows a reader to see the last 20 posts, so what I am doing here today is combining the first 19 posts from the blog with today's post. On subsequent days I will add 4 additional old posts with a new daily post, until all of the old posts have been posted. And if you wish to go back and read the archival material at any time it is easy: just navigate to the Big Man Getting Smaller page at http://bigmangettingsmaller.blogspot.com/ on your computer (rather than on your Kindle) and you will see a month-by-month pulldown menu under the "Blog Archive" heading in the upper left-hand corner of the page. That menu will deliver you to any post you can't find easily here.

Of course my real purpose in reviving this effort is that i have been doing the yo-yo thing again, and this blog and the accountability that comes with it have provided me with the most successful period of nurturing my personal health -- a good solid year beginning in mid-2007 -- that I have experienced at any time in this 50-something stage of my life. Writing about my goals and my progress has been enormously beneficial for me in the past, and from the feedback I have received I know that it has been helpful for others as well. So, it's good to have you hear with me again.

If you read some of the earlier posts you will see where I began, and where I got to. Today I am about midway, okay maybe a little above midway between those two points, at 254. A big guy, to be sure, but only about 20 pounds above that happy Clydesdale weight at which I ran marathons, a 6-minute mile, and sub-39 10Ks in the mid-90s.

My goal here is overall health rather than specific weight loss alone. I am never going to beat up my ankles and knees running marathons again, but I want to be able to exercise -- and simply to be able to walk around and live an active life with my children, grandson, friends, and loved ones -- without pain.

But there is a weight loss goal, too: a pound a week for the rest of this year and a total of 30 pounds to bring me down under 225 by the end of 2009. I can do it, and in tomorrow's post I will focus on how I am going to do it and how the process will fit in with the other goals and activities in my life as of mid-May 2009. I'll see you then.