What made the switch flip for you to start taking fitness seriously?

I wasn't going to share my motivation until I read a lot of these comments and didn't see any responses similar to mine.

My motivation: I have always been a bigger person. I have also always been an athlete. As a kid I had 8+ practices a week and 5+ games a week between baseball, basketball, soccer and football. Playing sports was the only thing I ever knew and it was really the only place I ever got acceptance. People knew me because I was good at sports and that is how I made friends, got girls and flat out how I identified my self.

Now like I said, I have always been a bigger guy. The kind of guy that people call "big guy" when they don't know there name. But I was a high level athlete and they could see that. Even when I met someone that was a complete stranger, people would tell them about how good I was at this or that. Other kids parents would invite me to go to the batting cages with their son, or practice shooting drills in either sport, or go running with their kid. Being an athlete was all I ever knew, and all I ever was. Even if people looked at me funny because of my body type initially, within minutes they believed everything they heard.

About three years ago I was starting a new job at a small company. We were all sitting around shooting the shit one afternoon and I told a story about playing basketball with all the guys from my University. A University that has for decades been ranked in the top 5 every single season. I am good friends with a lot of the players still and some of them are in the NBA.

I could see in their faces as I was telling the story that every single one of them thought I was flat out lying. It bothered me. I don't know if you have ever been telling the god's honest truth and someone is just staring at you with that expression but it really sticks with you. Again a week or two later I was out at a bar and I was talking to a girl and I again got the same reaction, this time I was with people to back me up, but she 100% thought it was a pick up move or me trying to play her. This continued to happen time and time again over the next few months.

One day I was looking at my self in the mirror, something I rarely do, and I realized. Holy shit everyone thinks I am lying because I look the way I do. I thought to myself, "honestly, if you saw yourself, would you believe that you were an athlete?".

I lost who I identified with as a person. I am an athlete. I always have been and I always will be. But no one else saw that anymore. I hated the idea of everyone I met thinking I was a liar, or not believing I was who I said I was. So I decided to change that.

I am now in my 30s and in as good of shape as I was in high school and college. I am at my physical peak or near it by all measures, mile time, vertical jump, lift maxes, flexibility, you name it.

I lost who I was and I went and got it back. I found myself again in the gym.

/r/Fitness Thread