What is the Vanity Handicap Project?

On my 48th birthday, I decided I would lose 50 pounds by my 50th birthday. 50 pounds. 104 weeks. That’s less than a half a pound a week. That’s totally doable. 

That was almost a year ago. I should have lost 20 pounds by now. I should have 30 pounds to go. I’m not far off. And I’ve really only started to get focused on the fitness aspect of the VHP. 

(The Vanity Handicap Project is so well known by now that I can abbreviate it to VHP already, right?)

It wasn’t on my 48th birthday, but generally, I always wanted to be a scratch golfer. 

I was fine in high school. All-conference my senior year, but I was clearly not Division 1 material. 

After coming home to work in the pro shop after my freshman and sophomore years, the amount of golf I played decreased from “quite a lot” to “not a lot.” And then I started working. And then a moved away to the big city to work more. And then before I knew it, the number of rounds of golf I played dropped form double digits a week to MAYBE double digits a year. That went on for years. 

Then I moved back to my hometown, back to my home course, and I started playing more and more golf. Playing more golf led to playing better golf. My handicap dropped to its lowest point, “peaking” at -1.5 a couple years ago. 

Since then, I’ve played some good golf, some bad golf and some stupid golf, and while I believe I should be maintaining my handicap at that level or getting it even lower, the results have shown that the opposite is the case.

My handicap is unfreezing at the start of the 2022 season at -3.0. And that is the LOWEST it has been since it unfroze at the start of the 2021 season at -2.7.

So, as I get older, the chances for me to improve my handicap three strokes to get it to the elusive 0.0 are diminishing. I figure I’ve got two years to get it done. 

That coincidentally coincides with the two years I’ve given myself to drop some pounds off my body. I know weight loss is not the best metric to gauge how healthy one is being, but I’m going to be diving so deep into the data on the handicap portion of this thing, I can only do so much reporting about the vanity part. 

So twice a month I’ll post updates about both my handicap and my weight loss. Hopefully they are both heading the right direction.