now, 10 years later, I’m finally getting on track. I spent all that time on up’s and down’s like most people. Exercise didn’t exist until my friends got interested in Dance Dance Revolution about 2 years ago. I give credit to the game for getting me up and really moving for the first time ever (I was tricked, mind you).

Finally, this year when the doctor said I should consider blood pressure medication at 28 years old, I said enough was enough. I changed my diet pretty drastically to the low fat, high veggie, med grains, avoid processed foods, and drinking only water. I tricked myself into exercising again by enrolling in a fitness center class at the community college. The trick is that my attendance and participation equal a grade that affects my GPA, and that is some good motivation! I’m making an effort to take at least one PE class per term, and walking in the park next to our house twice a week until I’m capable of doing more.

To directly answer your question: I worked in exercise by taking a class and choosing to stop wasting time in front of the tv and using the facilities available to me.

As for changing, I’ve lost about 40 pounds since January ‘09, my %fat went from over 25 (I measured it for the first time in march and it was 25) down to a current 17.5%, have lost several inches from my waist and dropped a shirt size. I have also switched to primal eating since stumbling upon your website about a month ago, and now eat 5-6 smaller meals a day rather than the 1-2 HUGE ones and almost constant snacking from my previous life. I don’t miss grains at all, though I do find them hard to avoid unless I cook for myself (telling people you have a wheat allergy is a great help… and it’s true, we get inflamed from them, right?). I had the withdrawal’s that I see people talking about from the sugar and I powered through it by trying to figure out why I really wanted it. Often I would find it was a stress reaction and not a true desire and could eat a vegetable or fruit to calm my need to eat something, then spend some time working on getting rid of the stress… much more effective than eating a pint of ice cream until my body was too distracted to feel stress.

Good luck to everyone, and thank you Mark for this amazing resource!