Yeah I know, I wish there was an easier way to lose the weight that quickly too but their isn’t really. I am just recovering from the Flu, which is the first time I’ve had it in about 15 years. That was a great streak I had going of FLU free years but 2010 has been a particularly bad year for my family and I and ending it with the FLU just seems like a perfect fit.

As you have probably noticed already the post count for the year is around 12 which for me is terrible. My goal for 2010 was 52 with at least a new post every week but life happens and priorities change. Weight loss weaponshad to take a backseat to other online projects and offline situations. As a result, posts, comments and readership dropped (surprisingly not as much as I had expected though).

The other thing that happened…weight gain. I managed to pack on a lot of the weight that I had lost over the past few years and am back up to 205 lbs. That has also added to the stress of putting up posts on this site. How could I offer advice about losing weight when I was gaining weight myself. I couldn’t and can’t, not until I start losing the weight again and I get back on track.

For now I will just be sharing my expereinces in what I’m doing to lose weight and get back in shape. I’m not an expert in this, I have no professional training but I do have a lot of expereince which I think is just as important.

I want the weight loss weapons blog to become an interactive place again, I will be responding to comments, linking to other related fitness and health sites and changing the theme back to a more user/comment friendly one I think. After this is the perfect time of year to do it as the rest of the world will be making resolutions I guess you can consider “improving this site” my resolution.

What are your thoughts and what would you like to see on this site in 2011.

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My first post was called…..”my first post” and that was almost 3 years ago. I remember it well as I was so excited to just to get it started. After many weeks of reading about blogging I figured I was finally ready, this post was my first attempt at it and as you can see I had big plans for this blog.

The post I enjoyed writing the most was called Being the Butt of the Joke. For me it reflected a very important lesson I had learned about setting boundaries with people and accepting abuse.

I think the best discussion that came from a post was the one where I asked a simple question and stated my opinion. The question was which is more important when first starting a weight loss plan Exercise or Diet?

The post I wish I had written was called The Fat Voice by Mary from A Merry Life. I had that same voice for a long time. It’s a good read from a great blog.

I’d like to think that all my posts are helpful in one way or another but the most helpful one in my opinion was the post about HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). It included a nice little 8 week schedule for doing HIIT and improving your times every week. If more people would adjust their diets and use HIIT they would see results much quicker I think.

I can’t really say that I’m proud of a post title although I think “Meet the Man Behind the Scale” was pretty good back when my logo was just the numbered part of a bathroom scale. I am however most proud of my domain name. Weight Loss Weapons – Arming you one post at a time! – Come on you have to admit, that’s pretty clever

Finally the post that I wish more people would have read was Accepting Personal Responsibility I think it has such a great message and at the time was going against the popular opinions that I had been seeing on other weight related sites. It still applies today.

OK now it’s your turn to take the challenge. If you have a blog click here to see the rules. Have fun with it and remember to leave a comment below with a link back to your own 7 link challenge post.

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This year I finally got a new car! After 10 years driving my old Pontiac Sunfire I picked up a new Ford and I love it. Paid for in CASH!!! I might add, which was a huge change from 10 years ago when I leased the Sunfire and financed the buyout afterwards ( Never again!). Dropping that amount of money in 1 day is both exciting and nauseating at the same time.

I was able to make the purchase thanks in large part to my online income which has really taken off. I’ve learned a lot about the IM business and all that time I’ve spent creating, promoting websites and services has really paid off. I am now proud to say that my online income matches my offline income which is huge!

My weight has been steady over the last year not great but measuring success isn’t always about the numbers. For example I’ve learned how to properly use herbs in our family dinners to provide flavor without adding sugar, salt or fat. That in it’s self is great but I’ve also learned to cook, I mean really cook not just re-heating. This has been a huge savings to the wallet and the waist line.

Some Failures and Scary Moments

Now for the lows First and foremost my job. The company I work for was hit pretty hard by the recession and was looking for ways to cut costs. Meaning job cuts.
Many departments were affected and mine was no exception. At one point I was offered a package or a chance at one of the few remaining positions. I turned down the money and was offered the job, many of my friends were not so lucky.

This all happened 2 days after I bought my car. Life has a way of bringing you back to reality like that.

Around the end of May I re-injured my knee playing basketball. Not the end of the world but it took a lot of the momentum out of the progress I was making with improving my cardio fitness.

As always though I try to find something positive from a negative situation and I used the off time to develop and very simple and effective workout routine. I will be using it as part of my new 8-week fat loss program, so you can look forward to some progress reports and if it works as planned I may turn it into a downloadable eBook.

That is pretty much it. It’s been an interesting year and I’m looking forward year 33 being even better.

How is your year going?

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Follow Me on Twitter

Twitter has been exploding recently and everyone is using it including myself. I mainly use it as a tool for social interaction to ask questions and to find interesting new sites and stories. Most of my tweets are about what I am doing in my daily life as well as my latest posts on weight loss weapons and some of the other sites I run.

I go under the name @steve_wlw and I invite you to follow me. If you are interested in deals and saving money I am just starting to tweet about these exclusively under @debtslaying you can follow that as well.

I look forward to chatting with you

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My Gravatar Image

3 guys with blogs that have heart are Andrew from Andrew is getting fit, Israel from Fat Man Unleashed and John from John is Fit. I aspire to be like them.

This past Fall and Winter have been rough personally for me. I have gained weight quickly and no it’s not muscle. I have a ton of reasons why I’ve gained but they honestly amount to nothing more than lame excuses.

Getting To Know Who Am I?

You know it’s funny, I get about 10,000 to 12,000 visitors a month and only a handful of them really know who I am. My “About Me” page is really nothing special and doesn’t let you know what I am all about.

This is the picture from my about page. (The sun was in my eyes, not trying to look cool) and I would love to post more except I don’t have that many. I am the guy taking the pictures, not in them.

It’s pretty close to what I look like right now and somewhere in between my heaviest and my peak.

My peak being my wedding day about 7 years ago. I worked really hard to get into shape and hit the 175lbs mark the day before. This is what I looked like, not bad eh?

Over the last 7 years I’ve gained and lost more than 40Lbs. In that time I’ve had 2 children (well my wife did) and settled into a nice cushy desk job. A very common lifestyle pattern that has contributed to the gains.

Here is a picture of me at my heaviest or pretty damn close to it.

Vital Stats

Here are some quick “stats” about me:

Age:31
Marital Status: Married
Weight: 198lbs depending on the Scale
Height: 5’9
Hobbies: Spending Time With the Family, Sports, Reading, Making Money Online.

Who I am Online

I am pretty active online and frequent a lot of other blogs and social networking sites. Here are some of my “Ids”

Twitter: Steve_WLW
Stumbleupon: mclintst
Digg: mclintst
Blogcatalog: mclintst

When I comment on other blogs I use the name Steve@weightlossweapons.com most of the time. Feel free to add me as a contact.

Sites I own

I am fairly new at building websites but I’m enjoying what I am learning and it provides some extra income, with the economy the way it is every little bit helps. One of my goals is to eventually earn a full-time income online. Here are some of the sites I own at the moment:

Weightlossweapons.com and Weightlossweapons.com/blog

These are my first self hosted sites that I created almost 2 years ago. They have come along way from the when I started them.

Debtslaying.com

I started this site about 8 months ago when I became debt free and have changed the focus so many times since then it is ridiculous. I’ve settled on it being a place where I can post about deals and discounts that I find online as well as hot topics, financial issues and other related things that I find interesting. I also make money with this site through the adsense ads and my affiliation with Amazon.com (basically if you follow the link and buy items from Amazon I get a commission).

The current Debtslaying theme was inspired by Garry Conn, for anyone looking to make an honest dollar online blogging Garry is definately someone you should be taking advice from. The guy knows his stuff and will even help you set up a free wordpress blog if you open a new hostgator account.

Sealingyourdriveway.com

This is a site I started to post about all things related to your driveway. I was a driveway sealer for a few years and did a lot of sealing, rebuilding and driveway repairing.

Bissell-Carpet-Cleaner.com

I actually bought this from a friend of mine. Since I own a few Bissell products I thought it would be fun to see what I can do with it. So more changes are coming soon.

Contacting Me

If you want to get in touch with me about any of my sites, questions about general stuff or even if you want to send me products to review (which I do from time to time) you can email me steve@weightlossweapons.com.

Now that you know more about me, who I am and what I do. Let me know who you are? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to reply, going forward that will be my new comment policy.

Take Care,
Steve

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Here are just a couple of quick updates as to what I have been adding and trying out at my main site www.weightlossweapons.com as well as here on the blog.

I have added a new page called Strength Training. It basically outlines the best exercises to build strength using just your bodyweight. I am a big fan of bodyweight exercises mainly because anyone can do them, you don’t need to go to a gym and they get results. So check it out and let me know what you think. 

Increased Traffic

The Traffic on the blog has picked up quite a bit since I added the FREE Blogrush link widget.

The idea behind this is that you show blog posts from other sites on your related subject (here would be health, weight loss and fitness related posts). You earn credits based on the amount of traffic you have.  Every credit you earn means that one of your posts will show up in the widget on someone else’s blog. This can really increase your sites exposure.

The best part is the referral program. If another blogger adds the widget to their site using your referral code, you will earn more credits based on how much traffic they receive as well. It goes 10 levels deep.

I’ve had a couple of people sign up under me already which is great, but I can always use more. If you want to add Blogrush to your site you can sign-up here.

New Advertising

Now I’ll admit that I didn’t start this site/blog to make money. My financial goal has always been to make enough just to cover the hosting and domain costs. Allowing me to write about what I love for free. That being said, the Google ads just aren’t doing it for me. My click through rate (CTR) is decent but as Google looks to make more money for them and payout less to the publishers I need to experiment with other forms of advertising.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing some new CPC providers. The first will be WidgetBucks which should appear at the end of this post. They have a huge advertising network and will hopefully bring some products and services that will prove useful to my readers.

Bonus, it’s free to sign-up and they will actually give you $25 just for using them. Can’t beat that.

The other ad system is FAN (Fair Ad Network) that will show later this month. Another CPC ad network. They also offer targeted ads relating to health and fitness.

Affiliate Programs

None yet. I haven’t found anything good enough that I would recommend to anyone yet. I won’t post any links unless I’ve tried it and it actually does what it claims to do.

Remember if you have any questions about weight loss, or anything health/fitness related either leave me a comment or send me an email. I’ve received a dozen or so in the past couple of weeks and I’ll be posting some of the better ones later on.  (I will never give out your email or other personal info)

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