Read Joey’s Inspiring Fitness Journey
My name is Joey Edens – a little over 5 months ago I was toting around 363 pounds on a 6’1 frame. I am now at 268 lbs (and counting) and the difference in how I feel is almost inconceivable. In my younger days (ages 18 through 26 or so) I had been in reasonable shape, very physically active and attentive to what I was consuming for the most part. In my late 20’s, however, my wife and I had a son, had begun the domestic life, and were not paying nearly as much attention to our health as we should have been. I began eating whatever I wanted and all but ignoring the gym. I would have bouts of going back to an active lifestyle but would quickly give up when things did not change as fast as I wanted them to. To make matters worse, I smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol to excess frequently. In 2006 I sustained a back injury and everything went downhill after that – this led to leaning on pain medication to feel normal, and as a result the laziness was amplified. Several times I had tried to rehabilitate my back and then re-injured it, and I began to feel like I was on a wash/rinse/repeat cycle of never being healthy again.
Fast forward to 2018 and after endless cycles of trying to change and then failing – I decided that I wanted to stop feeling horrible, stop feeling depressed/sluggish every day, and just start pushing myself into a positive direction. I had a theory that if I just dropped weight, a lot of the back pain that I had been experiencing would dissipate, and I figured “what could it hurt to eat right and exercise…if I don’t like it, I can always just go back to feeling horrible” Then it struck me what a ridiculous thought the last half of that sentence was. And so it began – I started walking once a day at first, then twice a day. It was ridiculously difficult initially – my feet, knees, and back would be killing me almost nonstop.
I walked through the doors of Fitness 1440 around the last week of May 2018, after shaping up my diet to include roughly 30% of what it did before. I was about 340 lbs when I began working out at this facility, and it has made all the difference in the world. I honestly never thought that I would feel this good again, and I hit the gym about 6 days a week, on occassion twice a day. There’s still some tough pain days – and there probably always will be, but at about a quarter of what they once were. I look forward to every day in the gym, every workout, every extra pound lost. And I want to say thank you to Jacob for breathing life back into this place and being partially responsible for me being able to get my life back on track.
IF I CAN DO THIS – YOU CAN TOO! 🙂