Metrics

 I am the type of person who seeks out progress in all ways in my life (as many of us would).  Our kids are growing up happy and healthy, check.  Our paychecks get bigger each year, check.  The same goes with my personal physical fitness goals.  I want to see progress and since I see myself every single day, it is hard to visibly notice over an extended period of time.  This is why I need data and metrics to pull from. This need had me going down a path of discovery to find some early data when I first got started and I finally found it.  It was a simple body scan I did at Complete Nutrition and the initial results were not good.  I was coming in at 218 lbs and 28% body fat in October 2016.  That was eye opening that just a mere 5% away from being 1/3 body fat.  I considered myself an athlete and this hurt.  It hurt mostly my ego but gave me the kick in the ass I needed.  After a year, I have new metrics to report.  I am now at 198 lbs and at 16.5% body fat.  In doing the math, I have dropped 11.5% body fat (28.4 lbs of fat) and put on around 8-9 lbs of muscle as of October 2017. This is the kind of data I love to see.  It really puts into perspective what I have done in the last year and makes it worth the money, time, pain and fun I put into getting here.  In the summer of 2017, I had actually been down to my lowest adult weight at 188.8.  This was a great thing to see but did not understand what my body was made up of.  What was my BF%, what did my internal metrics look like (glucose, cholesterol, etc.).  Now that I have the internal blood work done, I have the next thing I can focus on.  Ideally, I wish I would have done that first but better late than never.

-N