You’re probably saying to yourself, “Now that doesn’t make sense. How can this guy be healthy and well overweight?” Well, let me clarify.

A few months ago, like I do every two years, I visited my doctor and had my physical (see, I’m sort of a good boy!). He checked me out, took my blood pressure, ordered various blood tests, blah, blah, blah. My blood pressure was at a normal range (120/75), and nearly all of the blood results were fine (he did notice that my HDL level was ok, but it could be higher, and my triglycerides were a bit high, but still acceptable). So, from a numbers perspective, I’m healthy. Yay for me!

But, as I mentioned, I’m obese. I am a Caucasion male in my early 40s, I am 6′ 1″, and I weigh 255 lbs. (116.6 kgs). For you Body Mass Index followers, that gives me a BMI of 33.9, which would be fine if I were extremely muscular. But I’m not. And from THIS numbers perspective, I am obese. This is a dangerous situation that I have put myself into. (oh yeah, before I go too much further, please let me take this discussion aside for a moment. I would like to take this time to apologize to ALL of my English teachers. I do try to follow all of the standards for writng in English, with one clear exception: I do end sentences with prepositions. I am not supposed to do that, I know this, but you should know that from here on out, you should expect to see that end with words like ‘in’, ‘with’, ‘to’ and many more) . Clearly, I have a lot of work ahead of me. And so this is my first challenge for improvement. The seminal start of my journey.

The good news is, I have a good foundation. By this I mean that I am generally healthy. I have my doctors approval to begin any sort of exercise program. I have a few activities that I really enjoy, and as the weather improves (where I live, it’s awfully chilly these last few months), I figure to be more active. But exercise is only the start.

Quite frankly, food is my issue. Too much food. I know that exercise is critical in weight management, but by my way of thinking, if I were to balance exercise to diet, proper nutrition and food intake is probably 70% accountable for one’s weight, while exercise likely helps out the other 30%. Again, this is a guess, butit’s my guess.

Mike’s Journey….what is that exactly? What’s the point? And what should readers expect on Mike’s Journey? All good, provocative questions ( and I know their may be more questions). Sit back and relax for the moment. All I ask you to do is read.

Mike’s Journey is about discovery and improvement. This makes sense, doesn’t it? My hypothesis is, the path to personal improvement must include a number (a large number?) of personal discoveries. And perhaps some of those discoveries will not be very pretty ones. But if I can discover something crucial that helps me to improve, then I suspect those painful discoveries will be worth the effort.

On the topic of improvement, I plan to leave nothing out. Any improvement will be considered (though perhaps not implemented). The first few areas of improvement include, in general, health, fitness, work and personal productivity, career and spiritual improvement. As new topics develop themselves, I plan to be open to including them in my plan. But for now, I’d say this is enough.

So please, dear reader, follow along as I begin my journey…..