What if despite all of my hard work I didn’t lose any weight? I’m a very results oriented person and I wasn’t exactly sure how I would react if my body just didn’t want to go into fat burning state or stay there. I was investing a lot of time and money into this program and I didn’t want to look back at this experience and say I failed.

Fortunately, the program has worked. Over the past 10 weeks I have not only seen my weight diminish at a steady pace but I have seen inches come off dropping three sizes in pants and two shirt sizes. I’ve seen my health get substantially better and I am now within four pounds of reaching my ultimate goal.

My health coach Amy has been amazing during this time helping me cope with the mental and physical changes I have undergone. Now with the end in sight she has me focusing on a transition plan of moving from fat burning and weight loss into a maintenance program where I can put the things I have learned into practice and manage my weight and physical activity to stay at the level I am at.

I thought I would be excited when that day happened. I thought like Rocky Balboa I would sprint to the top of the stairs slimmer and raise my arms in the air to the world showing that I was back and healthy. Instead I find self-doubts clouding my thoughts.

What if all the hard work I put into losing the weight goes by the wayside and I revert back to my pre-diet habits and begin to see the weight come back on? I am definitely not strong enough to deal with the yo-yo effects of dieting then regaining the weight and then some.

During the weight loss phase I’ve had things pretty simple. There are five small meals or meal replacements and one “lean and green” meal of protein and vegetables. It’s easy. I know what I am going to eat every day. As long as I follow the plan I will be successful.

Once I leave fat burning state and move into maintenance the rules change. I no longer have the security blanket of a structured eating program. Portion control and caloric intake is now completely my domain and the success or failure I have is a result of my choices. Given the fact that my food decision-making is what made me overweight in the first place I am not really confident in my abilities to be successful.

This is something I never anticipated, the fear of succeeding. Over the past week I have become very introspective wondering whether I would become a victim of success and see my new weight loss as a reason to celebrate with a big dinner and outlandish dessert. Would I reward myself for the weeks of exercise and getting back into shape with a few nights of sitting on the couch watching movies with my wife?

I started to question, what was my goal? At first I thought the goal was to lose weight. But the longer I have been on this diet the more I have realized that the numbers (either the amount of weight lost or my current weight) was not the goal. My real goal was to be healthier.

There is no way I don’t want to be healthy. I don’t want to go back to a point where I am not active or that I have to take medication to breathe or maintain a healthy blood pressure. I refuse to watch my body put on additional weight that would jeopardize my health or shorten the time I would have with my family.

Being healthy is not an end state but an eternal journey that I will need to maintain for the rest of my life. This program has taught me that I can be successful. I have been practicing for the past 10 weeks what I will need to do once I am out of fat burning state.

I have been given a set of strategies that will help me to survive in the real world where society promotes obesity and a sedentary lifestyle. This shouldn’t be a frightening thing. I have the tools to be successful; I just need to trust myself to follow the patterns I have learned.

The hard reboot was bad enough but the subsequent media check meant the reboot time would stretch into hours before service was restored. Not exactly the kind of customer experience I was hoping for when I bought the device.

Things were getting so bad that I began researching a replacement device that I could purchase to replace the NetGear ReadyNAS. In the ReadyNAS Pro I have six 1.5 TB drives configured as a RAID 5 enclosure. That gives me 7.5TB of online storage.

I have been diligent in updating the firmware on the device and give it regular cleanings with compressed air so as far as I was concerned I was being diligent in managing the device. Despite my best efforts, the device continued to cause me problems.

After yet another hard re-boot my frustration level had reached new heights. I had about reached the end of my troubleshooting patience when for some reason I decided to change the configuration.

Up to this point I had configured the ReadyNAS Pro with two gigabit Ethernet connections directly to a Cisco switch. I seemed to remember that I added the second Ethernet connection just recently. I wondered if perhaps I had a bad cable.

I removed one gigabit connection and waited. After two weeks I did not have a single drop off by the device. I wondered if perhaps I had a bad cable. I swapped Ethernet cables and again left the device to run.

Another two weeks went by with no issues with the ReadyNAS device. It did not appear that the problem was cable since I had used two different cables. I decided to see if the problem was connecting both Ethernet ports. I plugged both cables into the device and restarted the ReadyNAS.

Within two hours the problem appeared and the device disconnected itself from the network requiring a hard boot. After several hours rebuilding and checking the drives the ReadyNAS was back on line.

This time I am using just a single Ethernet port on the ReadyNAS device. While I might theoretically only be getting half the throughput in this configuration it is a lot more stable and that is better than raw speed any day of the week.

I am able to access my files across my Ethernet network using a variety of clients including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Macintosh OS X, and Linux. It is hard to express how great this system has been.

Where I used to burn DVDs and shuttle USB drives from box to box in order to share data between computers now it is as simple as logging onto the ReadyNAS and accessing the information.

Not only is the information always available but it has given me the added benefit of being able to maintain one copy of the information instead of having multiple versions stored on various computers on the network.

The ReadyNAS has been so bulletproof that it has nearly become invisible. That is the greatest compliment a network device can receive. It works so well that people just forget it is even there. It is as reliable as turning on a light switch.

Of course making that statement I immediately jinxed myself to a life of dealing with problems that cannot be resolved. Such has become the case with the ReadyNAS Pro.

Recently the device downloaded a new version of the firmware and waited patiently for a reboot. The rain storm that blanketed Arizona last week offered the perfect opportunity to reboot. A power outage took down the entire network and I spent the better part of an evening recovering all the devices.

The ReadyNAS booted and went through a diagnostic check due to the power outage. On an array of six 1.5TB of data that can take a long time. When the system finally came up things seemed to be working.

The following day the ReadyNAS suddenly just stopped working. The blue power light on the front of the box was lit but the system was unresponsive. It required removing the power plug from the wall for a minute before the system would reset.

Upon restoring power it went through another system check taking over an hour to come up. Approximately two days later the same situation occurred with the ReadyNAS having to be powered off by removing the cord.

This has since happened six times in a week. My first inclination was the unsettled weather had caused some problems. In order to eliminate that, I bought an Uninterruptible Power System which I will review at a later date.

After installing the UPS the ReadyNAS seemed to be working and I thought the problem was resolved. Today the ReadyNAS again hung requiring yet another unplug and subsequent data check.

I began researching the problem and found I was not the only one having this problem. According to the support forums there are a number of Net Gear users having similar issues. So far the company has not found a solution.

Some are suggesting it is a configuration issue but that seems implausible given the number of people reporting the problem. Others are suggesting RAM but that too does not seem accurate since many of the people reporting this issue including myself have not upgraded or changed the factory memory.

For now I’ll continue to monitor the issue and in the mean time I will need to find a replacement NAS system that is more stable. I cannot afford to use this as a storage device if it continually fails. I’ll keep you posted as this progresses.