My Life Story, Part 1
Please note: I was recently encouraged to share a complete bio on my blog so that interested readers would know more about me and how I came to do the work I do today. The more I get into it, the longer it gets. It’s by no means essential reading to get what I talk about on this blog, but who knows: maybe somebody will find it interesting. Truth be told, I’m having an enjoyable time writing it.
I’m not trying to recount every boring detail, but instead trying to focus on the few major life events that led me to do the work I do today. It will take me a few installments to get all the relevant material written out, but here is Part 1. I hope you find it at least slightly amusing : ) . Here goes…
I grew up in Highland Park, IL, a suburb about 30 minutes or so north of Chicago. For the most part I was a normal American kid who played sports and was a decent student. 
Like most kids of my generation (I was born in 1971) I spent a lot of time in front of the television and grew up on a pretty standard American diet. Mom did a lot of home cooking, but there was also loads of fast food, hot dogs, chips, and Twinkies.
Thank God I remained as active as I did, because I was already a bit on the chubby side. I had a number of overweight family members, and I think if I had grown up in the internet/video game era (yes, we had Atari, but by today’s standards I’m not even sure that counts) it probably would have become much more of an issue.
But remaining active like I did, it fortunately never went too much further than that- though I did have a very visceral period of emotional eating which I think in many ways helped me really understand this problem, and which I’ll recount in detail later.
Probably the single most important thing that happened in this early phase of my life that positively impacted my sense of health and fitness (and that would eventually cause me to be so interested in this topic) was that as a freshman in high school I joined the swim team. 
I don’t know what it’s like in other states, but in Illinois where I came from (or at least in my high school) swimmers always trained double practices. What this meant was that every school day (plus Saturday’s if there was no swim meet) I was either in the pool or weight room at 6AM (and not a millisecond later or else we would experience our coach’s wrath in practice that day!).
Now I don’t mean to relish the point, but I will anyhow to milk it for what it’s worth. If you do the math, this means I had to be up every day at 5:15AM and out the door 15 minutes later. Sure, that’s early for high school you may be thinking, but it’s really no big deal- lots of people get up early (it’s got to be time to make the doughnuts somewhere).
