So I've been taking classes at Kaplan now for almost a year. My degree plan is Nutritional Science because I have a huge...HUGE interest in health and fitness. I'll give you the background on why I am the way I am. Being a very active kid I was always "fit" or as fit as a kid can be. I always played outside, running, riding bikes or whatever else you could think of kids in south Louisiana would do. (Yea we swam in bayous and that crazy stuff too =) Well that carried over to high school where I took up sports to fill the time. Every sport I could play I would. I was always involved during all seasons. Even summer time we had basketball, football, and tennis camps. Not to include the mandatory summer work outs. Well in college I started to change my focus from fitness too parting like most college kids do. Ever heard of the freshman 15? Well that's a term used when new freshman come into school and put on 15 or more pounds because they aren't doing the same things they are in college in high school. The sad thing is it's true! So unfortunately I fell into that category after only about a year at school. One weekend I came home for a visit. Well my baby sister was in high school at the time and we hadn't seen each other for some time. I was walking around the house without a shirt after swimming and she said "Brother I've never seen you so fat. You don't have anymore abs!" Well there's no truer form of the truth than from a close family member. That lone incident changed my life. I went back to school and started a workout program. I also started a new diet. Now I'm not endorsing anything here because I know some things work for some that don't work for others but I'll tell you what worked for me. It was a book called "Body For Life" and it was a gateway to where I am now. I loved it. I read this book and wanted to run to the gym right away and start. There was nothing the author left out when he was writing this. It was informative, motivational, and had an all inclusive program where I didn't have to shop around to find all sorts of different information or piece together things from all over. It was the perfect beginner program which was exactly what I needed because every time you start something over the past in irrelevant. I was beginning a new fitness regiment so I needed a beginner program. Well this program worked and worked great. I lost weight and was back into shape in no time. The diet wasn't that expensive and it was really easy to follow. Again this is what worked for me. Now after getting back into shape you begin to fall into a routine. The routine is what makes people fall off the horse so to keep myself from falling off the horse I failed out of school! Well that wasn't intentional but it happened and I had to roll with the punches sort of speak. I needed a change anyway so I started working with a very close high school friend in an oil refinery and that really got me whipped into shape. You want to lose EVERYTHING you have, work in 100 degree heat, in a full fire proof jump suit, walking around giant engines in an oil refinery. That's shed the pounds in a few weeks! So I did that for an entire summer and realized that it wasn't the road for me so I started to look at other options. The military was the first thing that came to mind and I had a very close uncle that was in the Air Force so I gave him a call. After talking to him I set up an appointment with a recruiter. My logic was that I could stay in shape because it's a requirement in all services. Not to mention travel and school and medical benefits and actually learning a new trade, just to name a few of the perks. Now I'm not the type of person to believe in fate or chance or weird things like that but the day of my appointment was the day I got laid off from my job. Weird! So I enlist. I enlisted as a mechanic and I couldn't go to basic for about 6 months. You have to have availability and at the time lots of people were going. One day I swing by my recruiters office to have a chat and she put this cool looking poster in her window. It was a guy hurt in the snow, with another guy helping him, with a helicopter in the background, with writing that said "do you have what it takes?" I thought WOW! What in the world is this. So I asked and she said that it was Air Force Special Ops. I said "WOW! Air Force has Special Ops?" She explain that it was a very intense physical and mental training program and that only about 10% of the people that start it finish it. I was floored! I was ecstatic! I was hooked! I signed up! My old routine had just been upgraded to beyond supper size...this was cosmic. I trained for months running, swimming and lifting weights to prepare. I went to basic training and right into selection and made it through. I was 1 of 20 that made it from a class of over 90. After that, the next 3 years in the military, my job was to work out and study. The Air Force was paying me to maintain a fitness level that would kill normal people. Each day I would run miles and miles, swim for hours at a time, and lift weights sometimes multiple times in a day. I was hooked. I was addicted. There was no turning back from this. All I wanted to do was find new ways to go about it. Well, here's the next step. I know how to get into shape. I know what tricks and tools are the best to keep myself at that high level of fitness I found in this program. Now I need the fuel. I need to understand what I use to fuel my body. Hence the nutrition degree. What better way to take the next step than to go outside the fitness and dive into what we eat. I'm reading books on food and nutrition, I'm studying nutrition in my classes and I'm finding new things I never thought of before. And I'm blown away yet again. This food world is so deep that I now understand why there's actually a degree for nutrition. I can't believe where we as a society have taken our food...or at least things that we call food. I'm not going to rant on about our food this week because that's not where I wanted to go with this post so I'll save that one for next week. The message I was putting out with this one is that you should never stop growing. Never settle for things that you have already accomplished. Try each day to wake up and do something that you have never done. Push yourself to go beyond what you have already done. Don't let yourself fall into that routine where each day you get up and you aren't happy with what you're doing or you aren't happy with yourself as a person. Push yourself. Try new things. The more things we try to accomplish which we have not yet mastered, the more we grow.
B
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