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Sledge’s One-Year Fitness Challenge: Weeks Five, Six & Seven

Starting Weight: 420.6

Ending Weight: 407.0 

Total Loss: 13.6

It’s been a long time since I made a blog post giving an update on my weight loss and the truth is, I didn’t make the post because I was frustrated. Weeks five and six saw no weight loss at all from the previous week and it upset me so much that I just stopped weighing myself in all together. I kept up with the exercise and the diet, but I could feel myself getting discouraged by weighing myself in every morning and not seeing any progress. 

Then this past week I had a rough broadcast where I did some INSANITY and, for whatever reason, had the image of where I used to be fitness-wise stuck in my head all night. When I used to do these workouts and breeze through them without needing to stop for a break. Now I’m at a point where I can hardly make it 30 seconds before needing to stop and for some reason that really got to me. I ended the stream abruptly and seriously considered not doing this anymore. But thankfully I weighed myself in the next morning for the first time in a couple of weeks and saw an incredible amount of progress. As of writing this we’re at a total weight loss of 25 pounds since we started. I think I’ve found a really nice routine now that’s producing some great results as far as my nutrition goes. Hopefully I can keep it 

Last night marked the 50th day of workouts and I’m really optimistic that the next 50 days can produce even greater results. I don’t really want to set a “goal” as far as weight loss goes because if I start to plateau again, which I probably will, I don’t want to get discouraged. But I have an idea of where I want to be in 315 days and I’m really excited for the future. I’ve said that way too many times in these posts. Fuck. 

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Sledge’s One-Year Fitness Challenge: Week Four

Starting Weight: 420.6

Ending Weight: 415.2

Total Loss: 5.4lbs

I have to say, this is probably the first week since we started this challenge that I legitimately impressed myself. Why? This week was a fucking nightmare for the stream. Three days in a row I had crippling internet issues. The first night my internet dropped completely and never came back on and the other two nights it would drop for about 2 minutes every 30 minutes or so. I’ve seen AnneMunition deal with internet issues and I’d kind of chuckle at how mad she’d get. I now understand why she gets so frustrated. I’m a smaller broadcaster who doesn’t make any money from this so I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to have that happen when it’s your full-time job. I will say though, one thing that is frustrating for me is that the internet seemed to drop RIGHT when a handful of new viewers joined. So naturally I lost all of those viewers. 

So how did this impress me? Well, it didn’t. But my reaction to it did. One of my biggest issues is keeping up with my nutrition/diet when I’m stressed. It’s also really easy to slip up when the stream goes down because then I can’t do the workout (on-stream anyway) and when I can’t do the workout, it’s far too easy to justify breaking my diet. But I didn’t do that. Now I will say that the week was not perfect. The majority of my weight loss this week came in the last two days or so when I started the Insanity workout. Apparently that shit really works lol. So I’m really looking forward to this upcoming week since we’ll be doing more Insanity everyday. 

Side note: Anne followed and even stopped by the stream last night. That was cool as shit. This was probably the roughest week I’ve ever had stream-wise in the five months I’ve been doing this and that random act of kindness made the entire week a lot better. I hope all of you had a great week as well and I look forward to what this next (insane) week has in store for me. 

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Sledge’s One-Year Fitness Challenge: Week Three

Starting Weight: 430.0

Ending Weight: 420.6

Total Loss: 9.4lbs

Not a bad week for weight loss. Since I spent the majority of my first post explaining why I started the challenge rather than recapping how my week went, I’ll go ahead and do a quick overview of that right now. 

Both of the first two weeks went really well as far as the workout itself goes. The first week didn’t go as well with my diet. I ate pizza two of those nights (and far too much of it) and that resulted in me not losing any weight. The second week was much better, but not nearly as good as it could’ve been, so I only lost about two pounds. 

I chalk a lot of that up to the stress of post-TwitchCon (wondering if I “networked” properly) and also trying to ease myself into the diet instead of going all-out immediately. There have been a lot of positives over the past month or so, like winning the Highlight Contest on the Twitch subreddit, but unfortunately some negatives as well, such as the head of marketing of Twitch criticizing my “networking” on the subreddit. Overall though, both on Twitch and in my personal life, it’s been a really positive last few weeks. 

This third week I killed it as far as nutrition went and the scale thankfully showed that. There was a moment of weakness on Wednesday where I broke my diet because we had a bunch of crazy shit going on at work, but every other day was solid. Despite doing well on my diet, unfortunately this third week was the first time that I was unable to workout LIVE on Twitch due to internet issues. I was up until 2am trying to fix my internet when I had to work at 6am the next day, but nothing I did helped. It’s something I certainly anticipated happening (my internet tends to just stop working randomly at least once a month), but I just hoped it wouldn’t happen so soon. Now obviously I won’t be able to say I worked out LIVE everyday on Twitch, but I’d like to at least have a video uploaded for every day of the year. So I’ll have to take that to YouTube until the new Twitch VOD upload system is implemented. At the end of the day, as disappointing as it is to have that happen, the challenge is more about improving my health than actually doing this live every single day. It’s inevitable that there will be more internet/hardware issues in the future and possibly even injuries or illness that will prevent me from working out. But I promise you I will try my best to fight through all of that as best I can. 

I’m still just as motivated heading into Week 4 as I was the first night I did this, which is exciting and not something I’ve been able to say since the last time I lost a ton of weight three years ago. I hope to see more of you around during the workouts and possibly even some people participating. I appreciate all of the support as always and I look forward to what the future holds! 

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Sledge’s One-Year Fitness Challenge: Week One & Two

Starting Weight: 432.2lbs

Ending Weight: 430.0lbs

Total Loss: 2.2lbs 

First off, I apologize for this post taking such a long time. My day usually consists of: get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, stream. So in between all of that it can be hard to make a lengthy post on Tumblr (plus I’m super forgetful). Anyway, I should probably start this off by explaining WHY I’m doing this challenge in the first place. 

I’ve struggled with my weight for awhile now and it’s been difficult for me to find the motivation to get back into shape. In high school I was a first-team athlete in football and set weight lifting records. When I graduated, I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself so I decided to attend community college until I could figure out what I wanted. In the meantime, I stayed in shape by working out with the high school football team and help coach them at the same time. I did that for two seasons and ended up getting into the best shape of my life. I weighed 250lbs I felt fantastic. Around that time one of the assistant coaches suggested I try to play college football at his alma mater and invited me to go meet the head coach of the football program. Still not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to go for it. I put more physical and mental effort into trying to make the team than I ever had in my life. I had reached a PR in squat press at over 600lbs. I was faster than the starting running backs on the high school team. I went all in. 

Then the worst happened. One week before the tryout I got injured. I didn’t make the team because of it. I got depressed and stopped monitoring my diet. There was a second tryout two months later and I gained all the weight I had lost back and weighed 300lbs again. Didn’t make the team again, this time due to my own laziness.

That was really the first time in my life I had put forth that much effort into something and failed. Up to that point, if I wanted something, it was as simple as working hard for it. You work hard for it you’ll get what you want. That’s not how the world works. I was unapologetically humbled by the reality that there is an element of luck involved. That reality sent me into a three-year depression. I dropped out of college and moved back home. I got a 9-5 job that I hated and disappeared into my work. I stopped caring about pretty much everything and I gained over 100lbs in a year from 2013-2014. The stress from working a job I dreaded going to everyday caused me to gain weight at a rapid pace. I tried multiple times during that period to lose weight; sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks. 

This went on for a long time with no end in sight. Then I found Twitch for the first time. I first started watching LIRIK and fell in love with the entire idea of streaming and decided to try it for myself. I had saved up a lot of money and quit my job to pursue this potential new career three days after my birthday on May 23rd, 2014. But that was the problem. I looked at it like it would be a new career. I guess because I hated my previous job so much that the idea of getting to do something I love for a living blinded me to the reality that it’s near impossible to make a career out of streaming. I didn’t want to believe I could fail to make a career out of something I love twice. So the numbers distracted me and eventually streaming started to feel like more of a chore than anything else. Around August I had burned myself out and I stopped streaming with no real plans to get back into it.

Then sometime in the Spring I found AnneMunition. Up to that point, the idea of a true “community” on Twitch was a foreign concept to me. I was used to the spammy LIRIK type chatrooms that had no real communication between the chatters. I immediately took notice of how welcoming everyone was and how accessible Anne herself was compared to other broadcasters I watched. Most of the other casters I watched had a “celebrity” like aura about them; you couldn’t message them, you would rarely be noticed in chat, there was no real communication there between viewer and streamer. Anne had broken that barrier. That made me realize something: the first time around I was trying to be the streamer that I thought I NEEDED to be instead of the streamer I WANTED to be. Anne was/is, to me, the quintessential streamer. The streamer I wanted to be. 

I became incredibly motivated to start streaming again, this time with a different attitude. I no longer cared about the numbers or becoming successful. I just wanted to craft a community filled with people I could genuinely call my friends. People I could hangout with every night. 

Fast forward to TwitchCon 2015. Back when I had failed to make the football team in college I had used my injury as an excuse to fail. I had plenty of time to get back into shape for the second tryout, but I kept falling back on my injury to explain why I wasn’t successful. I didn’t want to make the same excuse for broadcasting. I didn’t want to look back and say to myself “well, I never made it because I didn’t do X.” So I went all-in once again and went to TwitchCon with the mindset of “networking” as much as I could with other broadcasters. I didn’t get to have as much fun as I could’ve, unfortunately, because I spent the majority of my time meeting streamers/staff and handing out business cards. But I still had a blast. 

There was a problem, though. I was exhausted at the end of the day. I couldn’t even walk and I struggled to get out of bed for Day 2. I constantly had to take breaks and sit down while at the convention. This was a huge wakeup call for me because I’m a school bus driver who doesn’t really need to do anything physical, so I could easily ignore the terrible shape I was/am in. All of that contributed to me realizing I need to make a change, but I remember the specific moment when I decided I needed to do something. 

I’m not a super emotional guy. It’s hard for me to talk about really personal stuff because that’s just not how I am. But a big part of this one-year challenge is trying to be as transparent as possible so you can witness all the struggles, successes and failures that people go through when trying to lose weight or drastically change their lives. At the end of Day One of TwitchCon, The Armory met up at a local pool hall. When we got done, Anne and I walked back to our hotel (apparently we were staying at the same place). As we were walking and talking, I remember looking to my right into one of the shop windows and saw our reflection. It was pretty embarrassing to see this broadcaster that I really admire and respect walking next to this guy who looks like a fucking monster. I don’t know why, but that fueled me with an outrageous amount of motivation to get back into shape. The only problem was how.

Then I saw the emotional induction of LethalFrag into the TwitchCon Hall of Fame, highlighting his two-year streaming challenge. A light bulb went off. As difficult as it is to stream everyday for two years, I wondered how difficult it would be to stream yourself working out everyday for one year. I could use a challenge like that not only to help motivate myself to actually do it everyday, but also to hopefully inspire others to do the same. The beautiful thing about the challenge is that the only thing that’s standing in the way of me and success is myself. Becoming a successful streamer financially isn’t a sure thing. You can do everything right and still not “make it.” If I do everything right with my fitness/nutrition over the course of the next year, it’s guaranteed that I will be in better shape than I am now. And I think it’s refreshing to have a guaranteed thing in a Twitch world that is filled with uncertainty. 

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post, but I wanted to get all of that out there. For those of you who read this and those of you who support me every night: I will never be able to show my full appreciation for everything you do for me. We have a long road ahead of us for the next year, but two weeks into the challenge, I haven’t even had an inkling of doubt creep into my mind and I credit all of you for that. I really do consider all of you to be friends of mine and I’m excited to see what the future holds. See you in the stream. 

- Sledge