YMCA and Getting Fit

As has become tradition at my company, I spent the first 10 weeks of the year in a weight loss challenge. I did pretty well, dropping about 20 lbs in those 10 weeks. I've had to use the challenge each year to try to recover from the weight gain of the previous year. The trouble is, I gained a lot of weight last year. So, even with the good losses, I only managed to get back to the weight I STARTED last year's challenge at.
I had gotten on a pretty good roll this year. We got a family membership to the YMCA and the wife and I had both gotten into a pretty good routine of working out. After the contest ended, I lost my losing momentum, but had managed to hold on to my finishing weight for a while.
Especially during this last month, that fell apart. I got sick and didn't make a workout for almost two weeks. After that, I was making it maybe once a week. Even better, I've been letting more of the junk food back into my diet and eating out too much. I was starting to slide back up like I did last year, and I was coming home feeling too tired to exercise.
These last couple of days, I've been pushing myself to get turned around. I've made three days in a row of workouts at the Y and I can already tell a big improvement. I'm knocking the pounds back off that I'd picked up and I'm feeling a lot better in general. I know that I need to exercise regularly and vigorously if I'm going to get all the way down to where I need to be.
I got close just before my daughter was born five years ago, and I've lost ground each year since. With the addition of my son and a whole new round of sleepless nights, last year was really bad on the waistline. I really need to drop a good 35 lbs to be in decent shape (although I think the government says I need to lose 50 lbs, which is just crazy. Even when I was in pretty decent shape in high school, I was never that light.
Still, I've got a good way to go, but I've been there before and I know I can get there again if I keep at it. Of course, it's not any easier this time since I'm another five years older than I was then. But, the alternative is to give up, shoot for 300 lbs, and have a heart attack by age 40. Not the future I want to have, so I'll stick with the exercise.