COMFORT FOOD: I was working construction, and I got laid off when the economy took a crash. I was eating for comfort: pizza, hamburgers, fries, chicken nuggets ... and I was drinking, smoking, chewing, everything.
Smoking Cessation 101: Since I was laid off, I couldn't afford to buy cigarettes or chewing tobacco, so I stopped cold turkey. I loved the mental challenge. My wife and I helped put on a fundraiser for a sick little girl in 2007, a classmate of my kids'. I put in money for a three-month membership to a gym and started going five or six days a week.
A SLOW START: I could run maybe half a mile or a mile. It was another mental challenge to force myself to go to the gym, and it was fun. I was losing weight slowly. I wouldn't even step on a scale; I was mainly trying to be healthy and get myself motivated. After the first month, I started thinking, why do I run and then put junk food back in? So I slowly incorporated healthy food into it.
Zero to 26.2 in three years: I used to think running was ridiculous. But last winter, I'd wake up and throw on some long johns and sweatshirts and run 5 miles when it was 10 below. It's kind of healing; it clears my mind. It helps me mentally with two jobs, four kids and a wife. I don't know if I would be able to do all that and handle it without being healthy. I just signed up for Grandma's Marathon with my three older brothers.
Couch potato no more: I got a job two-and-a-half years ago with Fed Ex grounds crew at the airport, and more recently a job as a service tech for a pool company. I work at Fed Ex 4-7:30 a.m. I'm home by 4:30 or 5 from the pool job. We have dinner, I work out or run, play with the kids or do yard work, hang out as a family, put the kids to bed at 8, and go to bed at 9:30. I don't get a lot of sleep.
Picture-perfect: My oldest son says, "You look so different now from the pictures on the mantel." The kids come running with me sometimes: I'll go for a 5-mile run and the older two will bike and I'll push the younger two in the stroller. What I like to eat is different now. I love spinach. Now everybody teases me if I have a chicken nugget: "Oh, do you have to go run five miles now?"
Sheila Mulrooney Eldred is a Twin Cities freelance writer.
Contact us If you or someone you know would be a good candidate for "How I Got This Body," e-mail us at body@startribune.com and include your name, age, contact information and an explanation of your fitness story.
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More from Star Tribune
More From Star Tribune
More From Variety
Business
The summer after Barbenheimer and the strikes, Hollywood charts a new course
'' Barbenheimer '' is a hard act to follow. But as Hollywood enters another summer movie season, armed with fewer superheroes and a landscape vastly altered by the strikes, it's worth remembering the classic William Goldman quote about what works: ''Nobody knows anything.''
Home & Garden
Gophers football coach P.J. Fleck lists 'resort-style' Edina home for $3.9 million
The award-winning house was built in a French European-meets-California modern style.
World
Mexican film wins top prize at Moscow International Film Festival while major studios boycott Russia
A Mexican film has won the top prize Friday at the Moscow International Film Festival, which took place as major Western studios boycott the Russian market and as Russia's war in Ukraine grinds into its third year.
Variety
Why you might have heard Paul Simon's 'The Sound of Silence' at Spanish Mass
One song has stuck with Julio Cuellar Gonzales for practically his entire life. Among his first memories of church in the 1970s in Villa Serrano, a town in the Bolivian region of Chuquisaca, Cuellar remembers singing a specific version of the Our Father.
TV & Media
Minneapolis native Poppy Harlow parts ways with CNN
She was a former co-host of the network's morning show.