Okay, I finally have something I feel I would like to talk about. I guess I felt that unless I had something really interesting to say, that it was not worth the effort to put it here...

But that is not really the case, it's just that I have been real busy with work and I have been working on my interests. I have found that what really interests me of late is being physically active. Being active is a lot harder now that we are older. When we were younger we couldn't help it. Before we had cars, we had to walk or ride our bikes to whatever was on the agenda that day, even if it was to play video games at the local arcade, since those arcades were still many blocks from our homes.

But today time is what keeps us from being active. We are adults and we have responsibilities and commitments. And unfortuneatly they take a lot of our time. We have our jobs which take the majority of our day (not to mention the time it takes just to get to that job and back again), and then you have the time it takes just to live in your home. When we were younger most of use just showed up at dinner time and whoop.. there was dinner. We maybe did some homework later that night, maybe helped with some dishes, but come on... what did you really have to do????

If you have ever cooked a meal (microwaves don't count) then you know just making a meal can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. Hell it takes me 15 minutes to make a panini sandwich by the time I take out all the ingredients, plug in the panini maker, assemble the sandwich and put everything back in the fridge. But these are things we took for granted in the past that now take our precious time, like laundry, cleaning, and shopping.

But we all understand these truths to be self evident, and those of us who have kids have made the ultimate time sacrifice. They have decided (well maybe not always decided...) to sacrifice much of their own time so that their children can have a childhood that was hopefully even better than theirs. They more than anyone else, understand just how few hours there really are in a day.

I used to feel that I had sooo much to do in my life, that I did not have time to exercise. I realize now, that is a load of BS. I had time, I just didn't think it was important enough to commit myself to. I think it's really a matter of figuring out what is important to you. I never had really sat down and asked myself what was important to me, what would I like to be and be doing. I was really just going with the flow. I think the last time I really stopped and made a plan about my future was in 12th grade. Back then I had made some personal goals to myself mostly pertaining to where I wanted to be professionally, but I had never set any goals for myself personally except that I knew I wanted to visit Europe. Now that I have sat down with myself and examined who I have been, am now and might want to be; I realize that somethings which I thought were important to me aren't and of course that means with a new focus I can commit time to things which are now important to me, like exercise.

I always liked to play sports, but I was never really any good at any of them. I'm so competitive that if I can't be really good at something I usually don't try to pursue it with much gusto. So I never really got into anything much besides soccer (which I was ok at since it's an endurance type sport). I never thought about this much until I got out of high school, but the sports which I enjoy the most are endurance type sports. I've never been very strong or been able to build muscle easily, but I have always been run or bike for great lenghts of time.

Everytime I have lost copious amounts of weight in my life, it has been because of exercise. Sure it was a blend of diet and exercise, but I believe that the diet really follows the exercise. If you are really serious about exercise (at least an hour a day) that is such a dramatic commitment from the few hours we really have in a day, that you can't help but to better your eating habits. If exercise becomes one of the major things you do in your day, your not going to screw with it's good effects by eating those chips or god-forbid, supersizing...

So I have decided for many reasons that I am going to commit myself to exercise. Cycling and running are the main focus of my program, although I am also enjoying golf (carrying my bag of course for extra calorie burn) and even some weight lifting and core strenghtening. I'll get more into each of those in future blogs, but I thought I would get this one out there as my base.

Shogun says, "Get your ass off the couch and go walk to the store, then tell me if you still want those pringles."