Breaking Bad Habits

 By: Charlie    8:06 AM     No comments

There's a scene in the second season of Breaking Bad that tells my story better than anything I've found. Jesse and his new girlfriend Jane have just been handed his share of Walter White's most recent drug deal - a duffle bag filled with $480,000. After picking their jaws up off the floor they begin to talk of a future together in New Zealand. Jesse wants to see the land where the Lord of the Rings was filmed and Jane...

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 By: Charlie    5:30 PM     No comments

Today marks my 36th anniversary on this planet and is a big reason that I'm Pounding Poverty. I was keenly aware that I'd hit the back stretch toward 70 this year when making the decision in late 2013 to pursue this weight loss. My adult life has been a string of rationalizations for poor health habits that relied on youth for validity and was being rapidly backed into a corner. It's a little hard to say, "I'll do that next...

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Pounding Poverty hits the road - literally

 By: Charlie    8:56 AM     No comments

Pounding Poverty was pounding the pavement this morning where exercise meets justice at the city of Lexington's annual Freedom March. This was my ninth consecutive year attending the Alpha Phi Alpha, Inc., Unity Breakfast along with 1,500 of my closest friends. If you live in Lexington and have never attended these events then you are missing an inspirational tradition that truly honors the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,...

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Standing on the gray box of doom

 By: Charlie    6:10 PM     No comments

I never rushed a fraternity but heard tell of something called "Hell Week" that I'm sure was less than pleasant. On Week 2 of this journey I have experienced something that can only be described as Hell Week. Enter the gray box of doom. Personal training in Week 2 of this challenge moved into high gear when Warren the Trainer introduced me to a simple, gray wooden box, about 2 to 3 feet tall and asked me to step...

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Everybody is good at something...

 By: Charlie    12:04 PM     No comments

We are good at lots of things in my beautiful home state of Kentucky. Nobody outshines our passion for basketball, bourbon, and horses, for example. Those are some of the more famous Kentucky icons but we are tops in lots of other great things like natural beauty (caves, hikes, lakes, gorges), food (fried chicken and hot browns), and fishing holes (Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake are the two largest man-made lakes east of...

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The hike that changed my life...

 By: Charlie    7:10 AM     2 comments

Ask not for whom the dinner bell tolls; it tolls for me. After a couple of weeks of preparing, soliciting donations and talking a lot of smack about how much I'll lose the time has come for me to stop putting my food where my mouth is and start exercising. Hopefully none of my sponsors will be too offended by my waddling out of the starting gate a couple of days early. That's right, we've bumped up the starting date for...

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10 Things I Won't Miss About Being Fat

 By: Charlie    10:19 AM     1 comment

Everyone knows the obvious reasons for losing weight. Be healthy, live longer, look better, feel better, yada, yada, yada. But what about the less tangible things that actually impact your daily life? Here's a list of things I won't miss about being fat... 1. Airplane Seats - Every time I board an airplane I think there are hidden cameras and Ashton Kutcher will pop out any minute to tell me I've been Punk'd. Surely this...

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