32. All Over the Place

Prior to writing this I think it is important to let you know that I am making no effort to focus. Typically I go into a post with some particular idea in mind and try to break it down. Even then I end up far from my original points, in this post I have no real point to drive to. I will in fact probably talk about a variety of things I have already talked about, things that mean nothing to anyone but me, or whatever else jumps into my head. I have had a very stressful 3 months and I don’t really feel the need to focus right now. So read on if you’re interested, but I am not sure you’ll kick yourself later if you miss this one.

My current work is extremely stressful lately. It is one of those jobs that has good months and bad, and it is nearly impossible to predict when you are going to have a slow month. I have managed to string almost of quarter of scrapping by together. I don’t mean that I am in danger of being fired to the best of my knowledge, or even that at the end of the month we are in serious danger of not paying our bills, but it keeps being one of those things that makes you wipe the sweat from your brow and say “that was a little too close.” I don’t like to make all my business happen with a week left in a month, it cuts into my sleep. It cuts into my patience. It generally turns me into a short tempered idiot, which as I am have mentioned is something I am working hard not to be anymore. I also tend to make rash and stupid decisions.

Just this week I was panicking about how slow December has been, and is a fit of frustration driven bad decision making I bought a bag of spree’s and ate it. Now some of you are thinking it’s bad because I broke my calorie goals, not so. The entire bag was 550 calories and I just had to not each lunch, and have a slightly smaller dinner…. However, it is important to note that I have not had that much sugar in one sitting for over 5 months. I started feeling sick about half way through the bag, but because I was angry and frustrated I force fed myself the remainder. I lasted about 20 minutes, then promptly emptied the bag back out, along with my breakfast, and had trouble keeping food down the rest of the day. Smart huh?
I get like that. Every single time things are going horrible wrong I get that way. I stay strong for a time, praying and saying how things will work out. Then time passes. Then more, and before I know it panic is bouncing back and forth in my brain like a game of Chinese ping pong. I lose it, and do something gloriously stupid. Sometimes it’s eating a bag of candy, sometimes it’s running till blisters burst on my feet (something that is very hard to do at this point), and it all goes back to faith. Sometimes I think you’d have trouble filling a Dixie cup with mine. It’s something I am working on, and I feel like a make it a little further every month before I panic, but so far I have broken every single time.

What’s more is that when I brake it is almost always a day or two later when everything turns, and the pieces fall into place and my family is provided for, for another month. After a few years of this you would think I would be able to have a little trust that things would work out if I just put my head down and kept working to the best of my ability. You would think that, but you’d be wrong. I think part of what makes the idea of faith some impossibly hard for me is its very nature. When it comes to the changes I have made to my body I needed to make myself aware and accountable, so I could take control and I could make the changes. I used “I” four times in the previous sentence. When it comes to faith what I was taught and continue to learn is that you have to give up that control, hand the reigns of your life over and trust that things are going to be ok, and not just ok but things are going to be good. It is a hard thing for me to understand.

This is how the typical cycle goes for me. 1st of the month, “ok God, I have faith that you will provide for me and my family, I am going to go out there and make the most of everything you provide.” 10th of the month, “still holding strong God, but maybe it’s about time you make something happen.” 20th “alright I’m driving, not sure what’s going on, maybe I did something wrong but I’ll handle this, we’ll try again next month.” A day or two later, “well… I did it again, I lost my mind, lost faith, and was proved wrong.” I want to be stronger than that, but that is the truth. I make it almost to the point where things work out and fall flat on my spiritual face. I’m young. I’m weak, but I am trying very hard to learn and grow. I need to be strong, I want my child to see a man whose faith is a rock, who knows without flinching that he and his family are well provided for.

I don’t know what kind of man I am. I know what kind I want to be, and that that person and the person I am now are not the same. What gives me hope is that I know who I am today is closer to who I want to be than who I was 6 months ago, and that has to be a good thing doesn’t it?

31. New Ideas

So with the myriad of changes I am attempting to bring about in my life there is a concept that I would really like to keep in mind in all my interactions. Basically the idea is that just because something isn’t a big deal to me, doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. This is the fundamental underpinning I am building my attempt letting things go. I don’t want to get all wrapped up in being frustrated with other people doing what I believe is stupid, or get angry because my values and goals are not the rest of the worlds.

So let me give a few examples from my marriage. My wife and have hugely different opinions on a lot of things, and very different reactions to a variety of situations, one of which being how we react to getting sick. For my wife she typically takes a day or so off work to rest and recover. During which time she tends to feel like crap and just rest. In the most recent instance she was telling me how bad she was feeling and stopped mid sentence and said “I know it’s no big deal to you, but..” Which is where I cut her off, because the truth is it is not a big deal to me. I have to be extremely ill before I let it get in the way of pretty much anything. I don’t mean throwing up, I mean hallucinations. This is probably not the best way to deal with being sick, but for me when I get sick I never even consider not going to work, or doing my work outs. In my mind the best way to get past some virus is to burn it out of my system with work and exercise. However, what I am realizing is that for some/most people this is not going to get them better, and while vomiting and sickness are minor distraction to me, for my wife it’s a much bigger deal, and that’s fine.

The flip side of that coin comes in with my struggles to lose weight. Self control is a huge deal for me. It seems like it shouldn’t be, because I manage to get up the motivation to run, or do my weight training everyday, so you would think I would be able to keep myself from eating something bad for me. For whatever reason I can’t. I can keep myself from buying food I don’t need, but if it is in the house I WILL EAT IT. For my wife, she can have all kinds of snack food and candy around and have no problem eating a handful of chips, or a serving of Sour Patch Kids. For me the only way to deal with a half full bag of sour patch kids is to consume it, and I will, without fail, 100% of the time. I can not stress this enough. We could eat some of the candy, and she could hide it so I wouldn’t eat the rest, and I would search the house till I found it. This is not an exaggeration, I have done this. Much the same thing will happen if sun chips happen to be inside my walls. It starts with me telling myself I would just like a handful, getting one, eating it, then deciding another wouldn’t hurt. This goes on until the bag is empty. My wife has a hard time understanding it. She has frequently told me I need to get some self control, not understanding that for me the most self control I had was not buying it. If it was in the house it was a big deal, I was going to eat it, and while I am slowly limiting that absurd reaction in myself it is still a big part of me. After a long conversation she has been great about helping me out by taking the chips to work, and keeping that sort of thing out of the house.

I guess all I am trying to illustrate by those examples is simply this. What matters to you doesn’t mean a thing to me, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Just because there is something in you, something that makes you tick, or some trigger than you can not overcome but no one else seems to have a problem with, doesn’t mean it’s stupid or pointless. A friend of mine who is trying to lose some weight too comes to mind. I called her up to see if she had been working out, she grudgingly told me she hadn’t because of a huge number of factors that were stressing her out and distracting her from her goal. In the middle of her explanation she started in on the “I know, I know, I can’t let life get in the way…” ect.. I think she feels the need to say that because I am so OCD about working out. However, while I may be in a place where I have the discipline to work out everyday, not everyone is in that place. If you’re not ready, willing, or wanting to do what I do, it doesn’t mean it’s no big deal. There are things I make into a mountain you would consider a mole hill and vice versa, so I’m not going to make light of something someone else considers a huge obstacle just because I can move past it, because tomorrow the situation could be reversed and I would like benefit of the doubt.

30.

My wife and I found ourselves at Disney World again today, and we decided to take a picture that we had taken about a year ago. I just pulled up the last one and figured I'd so a side by side.

29: Image 7

So it’s been awhile since I wrote a good post. I have been very busy and it’s been hard to knock out the kind of time I need to really sit down and think about some things. However, I am now getting close to my goals and it brings up an interesting problem for me. You see part of what makes losing weight bearable for me, even though I hate every step, is the satisfaction of watching the numbers drop from the scale, and the inches from my waste. Hopefully soon there wont be anymore inches or pounds to drop, but it creates an interesting problem for a person like me.
I am obsessive compulsive. I talked earlier about how I was probably diagnosable when I was younger, but it has evened out with age, but it has by no means vanished. I think that is a big part of what has allowed me to make this happen. When I can turn that focus onto something positive I can get just about anything done, and done fast, unfortunately it tends to be focused on minutia, or negative things. So when I get to the light at the end of the tunnel I am faced with a interesting problem. The only reward for my efforts will be remaining the same…

There are basically three possible outcomes when I hit that mark. I increase my calorie intake to normal weight maintaining levels, continue to run, continue to work out, and live the rest of my life healthy. I may yo yo up and down, letting my weight have huge 40 and 50 pound swings for the foreseeable future. Or I get so stuck on the idea of limiting calorie intake, I put the blinders on and never get satisfied with the person I see in the mirror, and take it too far. I would like to sit here and say that I will even out as I hit my goal weight and live happily ever after, and that is what I am working for. However, it is in my nature to do things like the third options. I have a long history of taking things way too far. The simple act of writing this out, much like the rest of the blog, is part of my strategy to avoid that behavior.

The only reason I even bring it up is because of my mantra throughout this process, and my own self esteem issues. First off, from the beginning I have set myself minor goals while always having a finish line in mind. What I mean by that is, that I would tell myself “Boy I weigh “X” and when I get to “Y” that will be a big accomplishment.” In that equation Z is always my goal, but Z being something I wont reach for months, I need short term goals to make it feel worthwhile. When I hit that Y goal, I would indulge in a moment of victory and almost immediately think to myself “well that was pretty good, but really I haven’t accomplished anything until I get to (insert my new goal).” The thing I am faced with now is that my new goal is Z. My last goal. What’s more is that I don’t really know exactly what weight that should be.

The second thing that goes into this is my self esteem. Which is to say, my lack of it. Throughout the process I know that I am looking better, feeling better, and getting healthier week after week, but I still see the same old me in the mirror. I drive my wife half crazy asking if I am still looking ok, or if she things I put some weight back on. Essentially, I am physically shedding the bad parts of my body, but the mental parts aren’t leaving quite as fast. Slowly I am starting to gain some confidence with the changes I am making, but the mental game is not keeping pace with the physical. More than anything, more than hitting my goal weight, or fitting snugly into the bmi, I want to feel comfortable. I don’t want what other people are thinking about me or my body to even cross my mind. I want to get to a place where others opinions of my body never even enter my brain. To get there I have to first have to get comfortable with myself. I have been husky, fat, or obese as long as I can remember, taking my view of my own body out of that frame of reference is a lot harder than I thought.

28: Progress Reports: 1.

27. Image 6

So something else has occurred to me about that point at which I decided to change, a factor that with all the big stuff I was thinking on slipped my mind until I was talking to another race volunteer at the barefoot 5k I attended last weekend. We had the awesome job of standing at the 2.5k mark and telling the people who wanted to run the 5 to go left and everyone else to hang a right. We also had to go to that point about 30 minutes before the race actually started, so we had time to talk.

Naturally, given the event, we talked about how and why we started using barefoot shoes. He had been a long time running and didn’t really use them much, but got back into running to drop 15 or 20 pounds he’d put on since college, which led to me explaining my own experience with barefoot running and weight loss. After a lot of back and fourth on the topic he mentioned something that jogged my memories on how I felt in my own skin when I was up at my heaviest. He was joking about how it must feel like I was suddenly without a winter coat, and it made me realize that I had felt something very close to just that.

People with my type of body have the ability to put weight on all over. You don’t really develop a gut, there isn’t any one part that gets super huge, you just sort of swell all over. It makes it easier to carry and ignore extra pounds. I got bigger and bigger, but I had never really had that idea that my gut was getting a little to big for comfort, or I really needed to address my love handles or moobs. I was swelling but everything remained proportionate and I was told I carried it well. It did in fact feel like I was carrying it well. Until it didn’t.

Around the time of my daughters birth there was a distinct change in how I felt in my own skin. This was not a mental feeling or some self conscious nonsense, this was purely physical. One morning I got up and noticed my body. That is a weird sentence, but I don’t know how else to say it. Prior to my feet hitting the ground that day I knew I was big, but never really felt like it was a burden to me. Once I hit that point though, I could never not notice that layers of fat I was hauling around.

It went from me feeling like me, to me feeling like I had a snow suit on 24 hours a day. Except this suite was weighting, and jiggled when I walked, pinched when I tied my shoes, and made moving through attics (part of my job) a nightmare. After a day or two of dealing with this new found self awareness I did something that will stick in my brain forever. I got home from work, stripped down to my underwear, stood in front of our full body mirror and jumped. I had thrown cinder blocks into lakes that make fewer ripples. While this alone didn’t tip me over the edge to make the changes, it certainly put a bit more weight on the fix it side of my decision scale.

26.

I get angry. I get extremely angry. I am not sure all of the roads that led me to being like this, but the point is I get really, really, mad. I do not take it out on my wife, I do not take it out on my child, I am not prone to yelling, and I do not start fights. When I get extremely mad I tend to be very biting, and short with everyone around me. You can see it on my face, but I am not going to blow up on you, I may belittle you somewhat, but will probably apologize quickly and feel like an idiot and get even madder for letting myself get out of hand.

Like I said I don’t know when it started. I have vague memories of my Mom telling me I had a temper and yelling at her that I didn’t, which is a great illustration of the problem. I kind of wish I got angry in the traditional way, pressure builds, you blow up, everything goes back to normal for a while. With me it’s better to think of it more as a reservoir. I can hold a massive amount of it before it spills over, but it seems to always be slowly filling and filling, the pressure getting higher every day. For a time it’s not noticeable because there is so much room to fill before you can even tell it’s on the rise. Because of this once I realize there is a problem it is more often than not, to late to calm back down. I know it’s coming when someone starts talking to me and I am picking their words apart in my head looking for some point of weakness to exploit, something to say back, or trying to find some snide tone in their sentence. I am primed for conflict.

What drives me most crazy about this is that like a reservoir it’s not something that can just be undone with the realization that the problem is there. It will be with me for days once I get to the breaking point. I work very hard to drain the rage, but once it’s topped off there is a lot of frustration to rid myself of, and not to many outlets.

More than my weight, this is something I want gone from my life. From a health perspective it pushes my blood pressure all over the place, keeps me awake for hours at night, and causes me to make certain decisions during work outs that cause a variety of minor injuries. From a life perspective it makes me hard to be around and generally unlikable. I want to break my things when I get that way. In the past I did, I believe a power ranger or two suffered a terrible fate, to my immediate regret. Shameful.

I have been making strides to fixing this, and I was/am doing really good, but the last two or three days I find myself in that state of agitation for no good reason. I am frustrated, finances are tight (this will never change), my job is in a slump (frequent), and I am hitting another work out wall (like clockwork). I am getting mad. I know this because my wife asked me to do something and my brain started asking “what’s that supposed to mean?” questions about everything she says. So far I have been able to shut it down, but I find that every time I do I stack another Jinga block of rage on the tower.

I need to find constructive ways to deal with the anger. For most of my people related triggers I am getting better at dealing with them. I am trying to really look at things from the other persons mind set. They still might be an idiot for doing what they did, but in their mind it was needed, it was appropriate, it was justified. Nothing I think or yell out a car window is going to change the fact that they thinks they’re right. So why waste the time in being angry that they aren’t as smart as me? This has gone a long way and helping me remember that I am in fact not superior to everyone around me, which keeps me from losing my mind do to other peoples actions (mostly).

Life however, is something that seems completely out my hands, and not being able to exercise control over it frustrates me greatly. Frustration can boil over into rage quickly for me (see: simple drum pattern that escaped me). More than over eating, more than blaming my weight issues on genes, more than any of that I wish I could change this. It is a point of shame for me. I should be able to keep a level head, let the little things wash over me, let go of the things I can’t control, and think before I react.

I have decided to approach this in the same way I approach weight loss, as it has affected my eating habits for years. For example I may be going along following some diet, then something makes me really mad, well I don’t destroy me toys anymore, so maybe I just destroy my chances at losing weight, and in anger eat 6 hot and ready original glazed (has happened). So I am going to take the anger apart where it starts and try to rebuild a functional human on top of it. I will most likely not be posting in as great of detail on this topic, as it involves people at a level I don’t think is appropriate to just dump on to the internet, but I am going to fix this, because I don’t want my baby to grow up wondering why her dad is so mad all the time.

25.

There is a post I have been writing for the last several days, weeks if I am completely honest. I have been writing and re-writing it, to keep from having to post it. I am working on trying to stop the over reaction and rage that comes over me from time to time, and much like losing weight I am using the blog to figure things out with that. However, my weight gain was something that I couldn't really hide from the people around me so it wasn't so hard to write about what was always on display. The anger and frustration are completely different. People probably get hints of the how I am, but the depth to which it goes isn't something I spread around because it's something I am ashamed of. I will be writing it anyway, and now that I was able to write this I have no choice, I will post it. Not tonight, but soon. The more I write on the frustration the more I realize all the big character flaws I have feed into each other, each a building block of my overall failings. So every-time I remove one, I find another right below it. The anger thing is getting better, but everytime I get a handle on it, it seems like some interaction or something that comes out of my mouth lets me know just how little progress I've made.

My habits and flaws didn't take a day to form, they wont be gone in a day either, but I am not going to let it take me years, I am going to go after this with intensity, I am going to take apart everything that will be a bad example to my daughter and change as much of it as I can.

24.

Something I have been thinking about a lot lately is the man I would’ve been. The kind of person I was on the path to becoming before things took a turn. It’s a topic I often hear about from my family, namely when the refer to me being like the old Rob. The old Rob being the one who never experienced the anger, depression, or sadness of losing a friend. The one without the weight of debt, insecurities, and general lack of confidence. I have invested a lot of time into trying to figure out what that kid would’ve have grown into, and the conclusion I think I’ve come to is that he would’ve been a very pleasant young man, but he wouldn’t be me.

Before I was jaded I was a much friendlier sort of person. The kind of person that made eye contact with everyone, the kind of guy that always used your first name and gathered up friends like grain. I was up for anything with anyone at anytime, which is so very far from how I am now. I think if I had continued on that path I would be surrounded by a veritable hoard of friends, constantly in contact with all of them, and there is a very real part of me that regrets not becoming that person. However, I’m not sure I would ever had developed the extremely close relationships I share with those few friends I have now. I don’t know if being everyone friend would be better than having a few friends that I know without question will always be there for me.

I think I would’ve been a person who had a lot of convictions, without really fully understand them. That may not have been the case, but that’s how I was before. I knew all sorts of things about life and the way a person should live without ever really exploring why I “knew” them. I knew that certain things and people were bad and wrong without ever taking the time to understand their problems or life. I don’t think I would like being that sort of person. I may not radiate the warmth I used to, but I do make a genuine effort to understand why people are the way they are, and even when I truly can’t stand someone I do not wish or want to see that person fail or suffer. This still confounds me, because in the not too distant past I wished all kinds of bad things on the people who I hated, but as I continue to change I may not want someone involved in my life, but I still hope they can be happy in their own (so long as it doesn’t involve me). I don’t know if I would have kept my holier than though attitude of my youth, I want to believe I would’ve become empathetic, but I don’t know.

I think what I really want to do by looking at who I was is find ways of bringing the best parts of that person back into who I am now. I want to find a way to let go of that instant suspicion I have for everyone I meet, I want to have that infectious good nature and humor I once did. I find it coming out from time to time and it makes me feel great. I want to be able to walk into a room of people I barely know and make everyone comfortable with me, rather than be the guy that hides at the edges and rarely falls into an awkward conversation only to bolt at the earliest opening. I was never that person in my past, but over the years I have built this shell up so thick I get tongue tide and strange to the point of absurdity when I am with a group of people. Or what’s worse is the trend that has been getting stronger and stronger where people see me looking around and actually get freaked out. Apparently I often look like I am about to break with my sanity and start throwing haymakers at anything that moves when I am in crowd of people.

The truth is far less edgy. I am honestly extremely nervous about making myself look like an idiot. Maybe I do this by dropping a joke that bombs, spinning some fish tale that gets so out of hand no one could possibly believe it, or in recent years just believe that everyone was starring at my shirts and jeans that were obviously to tight for my bulk. I want that easy comfort and confidence I had before I built up such a hatred for the world at large.

I have been trying on that old smile lately. At first I think it was more of a twisted facsimile than the genuine article, but with my little baby at home I think she has reached in and drawn it out. That in combination with the confidence and comfort I am starting to feel in my own skin have let me get some shadow of the former thing back.

23.

Not knowing what to do with a truly huge amount of anger can have some pretty negative effects on someone’s personality. Following the loss of my friend I was a lot of things, but what I hid behind and fueled was my anger. I denied that I was angry, insisted that I was torn up, sad, and missed him, but I was not angry. After all I had been taught from a young age that god only took people when it was there time, and that he had a plan for everything, so being mad at God was only foolish, and if I couldn’t be mad at him who could I be mad at?

This was the question that occupied the primary processing time on my conscious mind for the next few years. I tried to be angry at the doctors, but I couldn’t maintain that because they were nameless and faceless, and besides I truly believed they had done everything in their power to heal him so the fire I was trying to light under them refused to kindle. I tried to turn it on my fast dwindling number of friends as I purposely drove them away, but I knew it was me leaving them not the other way around. So I ended up turning on myself.

Hating yourself is a complex business. You have to find new reasons and new things to hate in order to keep the rage going, and when you use that rage to hide from the depression that’s on the other side of it you have to keep going. I wont get into too much of what went through my mind, much if it truly absurd but I think an example may be useful. It started with a constant beat up session about how fake of a person I was, how I was play acting at being a good little Christian boy, how I was dressing the part of one of the cool kids when I was just an outcast (self imposed), and why couldn’t I just be the piece of crap I really was? This led to me changing everything about the way I dressed and interacted with people around me, hiding several of my habits, telling lies to friends about things that didn’t matter, only talking to perfect strangers about things that really bothered me (yes I was that person for a time). I would change myself completely for a time, then get fed up with how fake and stupid I was, how much of a lie I was living, how ugly and horrible I was becoming, and change everything again.

During this time I starting getting picked on and beat up by several of the juniors at the school, which gave me a pretty good place to seat my rage for awhile. I would be all smiles and jokes whenever anyone talked to me and when I was alone I would be angry, burying it a little deeper every time, forcing the smiles and jokes to the surface, getting more and more ridiculous in with groups of people, making sure I was the class clown. Everybody knew me and like me, but I would never hang out with any of them after the bell rang. I can remember starring at myself in the mirror for nearly an hour at a time my face set in hate and murmuring all the reasons I didn’t deserve to live.

Eventually I worked up the nerve to talk about the anger I had with a few people older than myself, and inevitably they would tell me I was actually angry with God. I refused this for the longest time. My pastor told me I was wrestling with God, digging my heals in and refusing to listen and understand (I have this problem with many authority figures lower on totem than God). Slowly it wore me down until I did a test run on aiming all the pent up fury towards him. When I did I found it flaring white hot, I didn’t understand why he would do such a thing to him, me his family all our friends, it wasn’t right, or just, or fair, and didn’t seem like an act from a loving God. I don’t know if you would call what I did prayer, it most consisted of me screaming at God while I was driving around when no one could hear me. It took a long time but eventually the anger started to cool and I started making strides to understand that I would never really know why he was taken.

When that anger started to fade it let the flood gates open on a whole host of emotions that had been completely ignored for years. All the sadness I never dealt with was back like it was the week after we lost him. I got very depressed. I think this is when the comfort eating really began. I had been sneaking (so I thought) off to fast food joints and to get soda for a long time, but things got truly out of control when I started getting a little relief from eating, or having a coke or three. For awhile it was no problem, but as I got older and less active I think the results became obvious.

I think whats so hard to this day about that entire scenario is that I still have to deal with all the ghosts of that time. My temper is still one of my main problems, depressions is something itching at the back of my head right next to anxiety and a huge lack of confidence, my faith has taken a hit that on darker days I am not sure I can recover from. However, as I’ve been exercising control over one very specific part of my, namely my weight, I believe it’s time to start working on the rest of these problems, not simply because each one could drag me back down into weight gain, but because of the person I want to become, the man I have to be for my wife and child.

Audio 1

So my wife is out of town and I have some serious time on my hands, so I set up the mic and hit record. The following may in fact be so scatterbrained as to be impossible to listen too, but I have yet to avoid my own embarrassment, so I will not start now.

Image 5

Yet again a short convo with a friend of mine brings something to the front of my mind that I have left out, but when I think on it has a huge impact on what I am doing. When I spoke with her last she brought up being jealous of certain things that other people were able to do and that weight seemed to prevent her from enjoying. When I stopped and thought on it for a bit it occurred to me that I have referenced it holding me back in many areas but hadn’t really explored the idea on its own thus far. I think a lot of it came out in the post regarding the swimming parties of my high school days, but there are a lot more recent examples that I think are more telling of the kind of walls you put up when you get uncomfortable in your own skin.

I think it’s important to make sure to spell out that I do not believe anyone was ever excluding me, or looking down on me, or showing me any sort of negativity because of my weight, I am in fact the only one who separates myself out. This past Christmas my immediate family got together for a few days. It was a lot of fun, we all hadn’t been together in a long time, and it was fun to get everyone together for once. I have always felt a little separate from everyone; it’s just part of my personality. I was a basement dwelling loner growing up, and that is still pretty prevalent in my personality, but I can’t help feeling like the odd one out when my Dad and brother’s in law are all in the same room. My dads in good shape, and my brother’s in law are both really skinny, even if I got rid of all my body fat I still think I’d be bigger than either, and while I don’t think the three think about it, I know I do whenever we’re all together. I feel like I’m that fat kid who the fit kids tolerate, but at the end of the day I’m not really part of the group, just the clown that’s tolerated for comic relief. I can guarantee none of them actually feel that way, but when you live so long looking in the mirror and not believing the person looking at you is who you really are this is part of it.

When the camera’s come out you feel obligated to be the clown (I would probably be the clown anyway but I would like the choice), or you just do whatever you can to escape the lens. When there is pretty much anything going on you’ll find a way to decline being involved because you don’t want to be the third wheel to their good time. In truth they probably actually want you around, but you can never just be comfortable.

On that note my friend mentioned something to me she noticed. I have/had a tendency to inject an unnecessary laugh after everything I say. From what I hear that has mostly stopped. Until she said it I had no idea, but once I was made aware, I in fact did not seem to need the little chuckle as a period to me sentences. I don’t think that is a product of being overweight, but a product of insecurity, which in my case stems from how uncomfortable I am in my body. With my continued efforts to lose the weight I am finding a noticeable increase in my confidence.

One thing I don’t do very much anymore is stack myself up agaisn’t every other man I know. At that same Christmas get together it occurred to me more than once that my wife was the one among the siblings who drew the short straw and got the fat spouse. I couldn’t help thinking she probably looks at my sisters and wonders why she got the guy who enjoyed cheeseburgers way more than a mountain bike. She wouldn’t think that way either, but you feel like you’ve let people down when you’re always letting yourself down. When you know you shouldn’t eat the large fry, but temptation wins out in the short term, and you feel like a slob in the long. So when you see how other people don’t seem to have a problem staying south of 200 you can’t help but be jealous. Whether that be of their confidence, bodies, lifestyle, or whatever doesn’t really matter. It’s just a symptom of knowing the person of in the mirror falls short of what you know you should be.

Workouts 2

Taking a short break from all the heavy stuff I wanted to talk a bit about a recent work out breakthrough I had. I have talked at length about the “wall” I run into when I am working out, and how it can derail almost every effort to improve myself. I have been able to break through several of these barriers, and with a bit of determination I will continue to do this. However, while working out a few days ago I stumbled on a very interesting problem I have with working out, particularly as it relates to strength training.

Let me give you a little background of what I’ve been doing to give this discovery a little context. For nearly 3 months I have been doing the strength training portions of p90x in conjunction with my bike riding and running. I do a workout every other day. For those of you who have ever put yourself through one of these workouts you know how terribly painful they can be. The first time I tried to do the program I got so exhausted, I was worthless after about a week. When I decided to bring strength training back into my workout plan I figured p90x was the way to do it. No need for big weights, no need to buy a bunch of equipment. So I started, I kept logs of every workout, every rep, and weight, and I made just to eek out one more rep than the previous weeks workout whenever it was time to repeat one. I did this for two months, it was ridiculously hard. I got stronger, I got better, and I was able to increase the amount of reps I could do on a given workout substantially. I was even able to pull off some unassisted pull ups and chin ups after about a month in a half. So why now, in the 3rd month, are my reps way down?

When I started the 3rd cycle I realized something that I had really known I was doing, but chose not to acknowledge the first few months. I was not doing the work outs correctly. I’ll give you a few examples. When I was doing push ups I would do them fast and shallow. I wouldn’t go down quite far enough, or keep my back quite straight enough, making them just a bit easier than they should be. If I was doing curls I would let my arm swing back a bit so when I curled I would have a little momentum to help me out. If I was doing chin ups I might let myself all the way down so my feet could help me spring up. There is a phrase that people throw around at AA meetings “Fake it till you make it,” looking back I think that’s exactly what I was doing.

I hate doing p90x, it is not fun, it hurts, and it leaves me exhausted. However, I made myself do it every single day for the last 60 days regardless of how I felt about it. I didn’t always put in the maximum effort, and I may have been cutting corners on individual work outs, but I finished all 24 every time. I think what happened a week ago was the slow transition from the fake it to the make it stage. While I was doing the “chest and back” work out I was doing the push ups and thought to myself “you’re really not pushing yourself on this, if you’re going to do this you might as well work as hard as you can right now and make the time spent worth it.” It occurred to me that if I didn’t push myself to my limit on every individual exercise I was wasting all those hours I was putting into the workout. The result was nearly halving my total rep numbers. I may have been able to post big numbers when I was doing the workouts wrong, but when I did them right, I couldn’t do as many, so the time commitment didn’t change, but I could feel the change the next day. My chest and back burned like it was the first time I did the workout.

This mentality has infected the rest of my workouts. I have cut back on the weight in my bicep workouts in order to do every workout without flailing. It may not be best for my ego in the short term, but I think it will pay off down the road. I am doing half the crunches I used to as well, but I am making sure I can feel every single one. It makes the work outs much harder, but now that has gone from being negative in my mind, to not exactly positive, but definitely heading that direction.

19.

The fear of the lord. The phrase is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, it shows up in Proverbs and is supposed to the beginning of wisdom. Fearing the lord is wise, but I went past that in the months after I lost my friend to be afraid of God, and there is a world of difference between fearing the lord, and being afraid of him.

I think what it goes back to are several of the things you learn as a kid in a church going family. The power of prayer is something that is talked about in sermons, Sunday school, and pretty much all Christian venues. Let me just make a quick note before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am Christian, I do believe in God, I do not believe that the several crisis of faith I had or continue to deal with make less of a believer, so when I refer to Christians I am not pointing fingers I am in fact part of that group. Anyway, prayer. The phrase that comes foremost to my mind when I think of prayer is “knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” The idea that the squeaky wheel gets oiled. What was never said, but sort of assumed was that if you pray hard enough, long enough and enough times, God will listen. When you are very young it feels like God sort of a genie figure and if you want something bad enough and ask long enough he’s going to make it happen no matter what. The unfortunate consequence of growing up with this mindset is what happens when prayers seem to go unanswered or something happens that is almost the exact opposite of what you wanted.

When it is something that seems to have little impact, lets say your young and want your soccer team to win, if you don’t you can tell yourself you just didn’t pray hard enough, or maybe a kid on the other team prayed harder. However, when something bigger happens, and you’re a little older it starts to get harder to deal with the unanswered prayers. Maybe someone in your family has cancer, and you pray ten times a day with all the sincerity your heart can offer, but time goes on, the tests keep coming back positive, you pray harder, and it just keeps going downhill. When that happens the first time everything you were taught about prayer gets shaken. Now if you’re older and have taken more time to study and learn about God you may be able to tell yourself that it is part of Gods plan and you just don’t understand it, or that you never really believed hard enough and because you didn’t have that unshakable faith God didn’t answer your prayer, but what if you do have that faith, and you say that prayer, and you go to sleep with a burning faith that God has heard you and has given you the peace in understand that he will answer you, and when you wake and all that peace and faith gets hit with a wrecking ball?

That is the position I found myself in the morning of my friends death. I believed God heard and would answer, I believed more completely than I had anything before or since. Being a good Christian boy however, I didn’t believe I could be angry, it somehow was all in His plan I just didn’t understand. I told myself that he had answered my prayer, I asked him to make my friend better and that now he was in heaven never to suffer again. While I believe that’s where he is to this day, that is not what I prayed for, and if that’s what I thought was going to happen there would’ve been no sleep that night. AS the days went by and I thought more and more on it, I felt the anger bubbling under. Believing I could not direct it towards God, because what he did had to be right that little spot of anger grew and grew, and I directed it inward more and more, hating myself and finding reason after reason to despise myself, this remains with me even today. The other result was slowly but surely growing afraid of God.

It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean, but I will do the best I can. Basically what I started to think was that because of some flaw, something inherently dirty of evil in me that when I asked God to answer my prayer with every fiber, He would take it as an opportunity to teach me a lesson. That I was actually inviting divine ire by drawing His attention, this notion seems incredibly self important now, but at the time I couldn’t understand why He would give me that peace and thrash it to pieces less than 8 hours later. Why He would seem to hear my plea and then take my friend.

I still struggle with bringing things to the Lord. I feel as if by asking for something I am inviting a world of trouble down. Laying it down at His feet is something I have not been able to fully do since that day. I envy those who can give it to God, allowing the worries of the world to slide off and letting God take up the weight that would crush them otherwise. For me, every time a new item of stress falls at my feet, I just toss it on top of the growing mountain and try to grind it to dust myself. It creates a stressful environment. Praying about things that really matter to me is something I have to consciously force myself to do. When my wife became pregnant, it was exceedingly hard for me to ask God to watch over her, to protect her and my wife and make sure they were both healthy and happy. The only thing I could think is that by asking and drawing attention, I was inviting the devastation of birth defects, still birth, or complications for my wife. I did pray for them during the pregnancy. I prayed everyday. In the delivery room with my wife the day Jordan was born was the scariest thing I have ever gone through. Not so much for the trauma of birth, but rather because of the fear for my wife and my child. I was still scared that one or both of then would suffer horribly for my short comings as a Christian.

I don’t believe this is what the bible teaches, or the way God intends his children to live. I do know that I am not the only one who struggles with this fear however. It’s hard not to when you believe there is an all powerful, all knowing being watching over you and everyone else, whom loves you more than you can fathom, and still lets the most tragic portions of your life occur. What has begun to occur to me at this point in my life is that I am not the only one affected by the tragedies in my life. My friend’s death was a tragedy for a huge number of people. The ripples of his loss have undoubtedly touched thousands in thousands of different ways. For me it was nothing but hardship and pain that forced me to grow up faster than I wanted to, but I have no way of knowing the effect it had on everyone else. Where people ended up as a result for good or ill, how it may have changed the course of someone’s life, and where they’ll or I will end up as a result. In the short term of tragedy all I can see is the pain and rage “I” feel. In the long term I have no idea. I am still working on having the faith to leave that to God.

Looking Back 1.

Before I get into this religion, depression, and stress thing, let me just say I am not sure that this is at all related to weight gain, weight loss, or much of anything I have been talking about, what I do know is that it’s a huge part of my life and I am pretty sure that it is tied in with my self image and thus my overall health, anyway. Thinking about writing about God and the events let lead to my very real anger with him, I find my hands getting a little shaky and my chest getting tight. I do not like to relive or think about that aspect of my life, I prefer to completely ignore it in fact. I don’t mind spending long hours talking with anyone about a wide range of religious topics, but I do not often want to get into my own. Most days I will tell you I know what I believe, if fact the first 4 times I wrote this sentence it just said “I know what I believe,” but when I really think on it that’s a lie. There are certain truths I believe in that have never once changed, but there are a lot of things in relation to those beliefs that have been shaken, torn down, ripped away, or vanished overnight.

When I was a sophomore in high school I lost one of my best friends. This was the first real assault on my faith I can remember. The loss is not something I can convey in a simple way, so forgive me if this drags on, but I want to say what I mean. The loss is something that still hurts, still something I can honestly say I think about at least once a day. It is hard to believe its getting close to a decade since it happened. This friend was one that I grew up with, without getting overly descriptive of my hometowns streets he more or less lived in my back yard. I have pictures of us when we were both babies. Our friendship had some rough patches growing up, lets just say I am not the best friend to have, but regardless of any nonsense or fighting we got into on Monday by Tuesday it didn’t matter. About the time he got sick we were in a period of our friendship when weren’t as close as we had been. I still hung out with him, still talked to him, but we had entered high school and he had a large group of friends in our class, while I was hanging out with a few kids in other classes, but mostly kept to myself. Looking back I think I got frustrated with him for not being such a big part of his peer group. I was jealous that he was finding all these new people while I was pretty much restricted to the guys my sisters knew, and wasn’t really able to fit in with most of the kids my age. I guess I never thought he was going to be able to friends more fun than me, young, arrogant, and stupid (me).

When he got sick the friendship we had was as strong as ever. The first time I heard about what happened to him, his first symptoms, I assumed that it was something that would be resolved in a few days, some pill, or some surgery that would take care of it. I did no believe for a second that it would be anything remotely serious. You don’t when nothing serious has ever happened before. As the days passed and we learned more and more about what was really happening, it phased me not at all. This was my friend, in my little town, and nobody my age ever had anything serious, and if they did they beat it and in no time everything was back to normal. My little sister had several problems and the doctors were always able to take care of her, it was scary but she was always able to get the help she needed, and it wasn’t going to be any different for my friend. I hung out more with him in the few weeks leading up to losing him than I probably had in the previous 6 months, and I thank God for that. We talked about the girls he had crushes on, we talked about getting better, he never had a negative thing to say about what was happening to him. He was ready to get better from the day he got sick.

I hate writing this. A day came when I had to go into work for a few hours and when I was walking home, I walked passed his house on the way home and was going to stop in and say hi, but as I came up on the house, all the lights were off, no one was in the house, not thinking to much on it at the time, I went home. When I got there my mom told me that there had been some problems and they had taken him by ambulance to the hospital. I didn’t think too much on that, he was going to be ok, I knew that, everything always turned out. So I got a shower, did my homework, and went to bed. That night I prayed more intensely than I ever had that God would protect my friend and heal him, so he could get back to being himself. I think I could tell you that prayer word for word now, but what is sharper even than the memory of that prayer is the feeling I had after it. I had never felt so assured after a prayer before or since. I was 100 percent convinced when I went to sleep that he was going to be ok.

When I woke up the next morning I felt good. I headed upstairs to get a shower. I remember seeing my mom. I don’t think she fully gasped when she saw me, but she had my dad come over as well. I wont get into everything they said, though that memory is far sharper than I like as well, but standing there in front of me they told me I had lost my friend, that he had gone in the night. I want to be able to describe what happened to me when they told me that, but I don’t think I can. I wasn’t ready for that level of loss, I felt betrayed, I felt broken, I felt so angry at the loss and at the feeling of peace I had not 8 hours earlier. There is a lot more of this story to tell. It changed the way I love the people in my life, it started a chain of events in my faith that are still playing out. I still love my friend, and I still miss him, I wish he could’ve met my wife, and held my daughter. I will continue to think about him every day, and one day tell my kids about him, and God willing see him again somewhere down the road.

A short topic change

There is something that was brought to my attention inadvertently by my loving wife. When I started this blog is was very much intended to be a spot for what the header says its for, to more or less unload some of the things that are banging around my brain. Lately that almost exclusively revolves around my current adventure to enduring real and lasting change in my overall food intact and energy expenditures in order to stay healthy for years to come. However there is some things that are conspicuous by their absence. I have talked in limited ways on the depression I have suffered, but have never real got into the source. I have also never got into the downward spiral that has had a lasting impact on my life that is my struggles with religion and my personal relationship with God. Finally I touch on stress frequently but I don’t believe I have gone into this enough.

What I find so interesting about these things being so very absent from the blog is that they are so tied together in my life and will always either act as the fuel I need to bring me through the toughest situations, or the weight around my neck that drags me down a hole I dug.

I am not sure how to get into any of these topics individually or in fact how to explain how intimately they all tie together. I think there is a real good chance that I as I get into this I am going to spiral into some pretty wide ranging topics, frequently get off point, and likely confuse anyone reading it more than anything else, but I also think I really need to get some of this spelled out in a way that lets me really understand my own brain a little better. The entire time I have been making changes to live a healthier and better life I have been telling myself what I need to make the changes stick is honesty, I can absolutely not lie to myself. So it freaked me out when I realized that not only had I never written about this (do know that there are certain things that have happened to me I would never put in a public forum) but I had never really considered the impactions just for myself.

I am now talking in circles. The next however many posts it takes I am going to be trying to work my way through this mess, I have no idea whats going to fall out of my head, but I am hoping to get a better grasp on what makes me tick. If you happen to get some sort of insight into my psyche that I seem to be overlooking feel free to let me know.

Image 4

Another story from the high school years has been banging around my head the last few weeks and I figured I might as well put it down here, or else keep dealing with past embarrassments. This one spans my late sophomore through my senior year and the main problem with this incident was finding anyway to avoid my peer group seeing me without a shirt on.

A girl that went to the school in my front yard decided to start throwing parties about the time we all got drivers licenses and much to my dismay she lived at the local lake community, water side no less. This sucked because what it meant was that any party that took place between the months of may through September would most likely involve swimming. I actually love swimming, I really like being in the water, always have, but I hate taking my shirt off. Due to the myriad of issues I have discussed before this was not something I would do willingly. So I had a wide variety of plans and excuses to avoid this. That is why I tended to have a injury that I was unwilling to show anyone occur shortly before these get together so I couldn’t get into the lake. I would frequently show up late, sometimes waiting till they were midway into whatever movie they picked that night just to avoid the lake. Sometimes I just wouldn’t show up at all.

The reason I bring all this up and why it has been kicking around my head lately isn’t because this was particularly hard on me, but rather because of two things. The first is that it illustrates how I frequently limited my social interaction and fun because of weight, the second is regarding another person who also went to these parties and had a blast.

To the first thing, it is really stupid how much even I wouldn’t do just because I assumed all eyes were on me because I was what could be called husky at that age. Not even close to as bad as I got in recent years, not really that bad at all looking back, but it stopped me at so many corners from having the fun I really wanted to and doing a lot of things I would have otherwise enjoyed.

The second things really ties in with the first. There was another guy that came to almost all these things and he was quite a bit chubbier than me at the time. However, he had absolutely no reservation about losing the shirt and diving right in. Enjoying the party from start to finish. He in fact never had reservations, if it was a game of shirts and skins I dreaded the later, but this guy didn’t bat an eye. He knew he was a bit on the heavy side (he wasn’t fat, neither was I at the time, but chubby for sure), but it just didn’t interfere in his life.

This is the real problem anyone with weight issues has to deal with. This is what I believe has more to do with my steady weight gain than almost any other factor. The mental muck up this causes can range from a stumbling block to a solid wall, preventing me from living my life, which lands me alone at home, sitting around and heading for some kind of food to comfort my frustration at not being part of anything. If I had a free pass to change something about myself, I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism, I wouldn’t ensure that my muscle remained rock hard forever, I would kill the part of my brain that made me believe that everyone in a room was starring and scrutinizing me. Pretty self centered mindset when you think about it.

I am not in the shape I really want to be in yet, I haven’t hit my goals, but I have come a good way towards them, and what I am learning is that losing weight has nothing to do with this part of my brain. I still assume everyone is looking at the fatty (IE ME), I am terrified of anyone catching a glimpse of me with my shirt off, which is the reason why I run almost exclusively at night or have to put medical tape on my nipples (prevents chaffing on distance runs) when removing my shirt would be much simpler and far more effective. The truth is there are a few people out there who would notice my not completely fit body, most likely people like me who fixate on body image, but they would forget it just as fast. The truth is my mind is the only thing really holding me back.

About a week ago I went to a waterpark with my family, this is a big fear of mine. I can never decide what is more embarrassing, going shirtless or being the dude with the shirt on in the pool that lets everyone know you’re to embarrassed to take it off. What I decided was that it was going to have work the same way as controlling my eating habits and work out habits, to make any kind of meaningful change I was simply going to have to change. So me and my farmers tan went for a walk. The first ten minutes on the lazy river with my wife and baby nearly gave me an anxiety attack, but slowly I realized that I didn’t really care of someone whose figure wasn’t exactly perfect went around in a speedo, then I needed to just enjoy my time with my family. I never got comfortable exactly, but I did have fun, and managed some time in the wave pool and a ride or two with the wife, shirt not included.

Workouts 1

This is a detour from the typical post I throw on this thing, but as I have been running more and more it seems that something has been coming up so much in my mind its worth writing about. With luck putting in writing will help get it out of my brain, thus eliminating the war that is ranging over my will power ever single time I work out.

I noted two post back about how I have recently learned that I can in fact run again, and thanks to a combo of barefoot shoes (oxy moron?), and less fat to haul around, I am finding that I am capable of running for greater distances than I ever believed myself capable. My body is able to deal with the miles without to much complaint, and recover fast enough to do it again the next. However, I am getting off topic, what I am more concerned with the battle that goes on mentally whenever I run.

When I decide on the mileage I am going for before the run I am fired up, it isn’t going to be a problem and I am going to knock out the miles without event. This is what I tell myself every single time I get ready to go. Lets look at the 6 miler I did last week. I hadn’t gone that far before and I was determined to do it this time, and knew I could. Until I was about 100 yards into the run that is.

The first mile is always an argument in my brain. It starts pretty quickly with me asking myself why in the world I think I need to run that far. I come up with several good reasons pertaining to weight loss and overall health as well as achieving personal goals. To which I am happy to inform myself 4 miles would most definitely suffice to meet those very same goals, and while six may be notable it is completely unnecessary, and boy I would like to avoid the soreness I am most definitely going to endure as a result. When the argument starts I am firm in my goal, but about half way into the second mile I have decided that 4 miles will actually be fine. It will still be above my calorie burning goal and six will just suck, why even bother.

This decision typically lasts until I am mid way through the 3^rd mile. It’s strange. It may be what people always referred to as runners block, but I doubt it as I am far to aware of the pain in my legs, and my labored breathing to be in some trance, and the fact that I am having an involved conversation with myself about it also indicates that I am not exactly rising above my physical limitations. The fact is by the time I get within a half mile of my recently revised goal that stalwart attitude I had before the run starts to assert itself subtly. It typically begins with me thinking how I am not going to run six, but I am almost done with 4 and I could totally make it another mile. I don’t have to or anything, but I could if I wanted. Maybe what Ill do is just start in on a 5^th mile and run till I don’t feel like it. It could be 100 feet or another full mile, but I already met the goal anyway so why not? My brain thinks in run on sentences fyi. The stalwart sides keeps the give up side distracted with this line of thought so long I typically finish the 5^th mile before I realize it, and if I am gonna do 5, I pretty much have to do six.

What is so ridiculous about this is that it does not matter how far I am going. If I decide to do six it happens, but it also happens if I decide to do 3, its just more of a cliff notes convo because my brain doesn’t have the luxury of all that extra time. Its very annoying to have to change your mind so many times whilst doing something you’d really rather never do in the first place, but maybe now that’s it written I can start to get past this latest manifesting of my OCD tendancies.

Image 3/Side effects 4

This is a post I am not sure is worth writing. I am not sure this is something that necessarily contributed to my remaining overweight, or even made me want to stay fat. I think it’s more of a flaw with my body in general, that gaining a lot of weight only made worse. Seriously I am sitting here and I don’t like thinking about this, because it’s something that is now part of the way my body looks and will always look, it’s not going to change with the weight loss and it was there before the big part of the gain, and it sucks.

I have always had bad skin. It dries to the point of bleeding, I had acne that could be described as horrifying when I was a teen, and it is generally easily irritated by all manner of things. So it shouldn’t have been any surprise to me when I found the first stretch mark. This started to happen when I was 16/17 during a summer when I was in the best shape of my life (excluding currently). I was getting strong, could run 10 miles and was very healthy. However, it seemed that my muscle growth was outstripping my skins ability to cover them. So the first place the marks showed up were on my biceps, shoulders, and chest.

What’s better is that the kind of markings my body gets aren’t those barely noticeable ones (in comparison) some women get during pregnancy these were deep angry red things, that looked like some large animal raked its claws deep into my flesh wherever they popped up. If I had trouble taking my shirt off before, you might as well have painted it on after the red lines started crisscrossing my body. It got so bad that I begged my doctor for some solution to get it to stop. When someone would catch a glance they assumed I had got into some accident related to farm equipment, which I never outright denied, because its better to have scars than stretch marks.

Now because of how far I let myslf go before I decided to get back on the straight and narrow, it appears as if I spent most of my youth in knife fights for all the ugly furrows on my chest, arms, sides, stomach, back, shoulders, legs, and just about everywhere else. If I managed to get ripped one day I doubt you would ever see more skin that a well fitting tshirt would reveal because my body underneath is some ugly to me. In truth I doubt most people would comment, and my wife (great to me) never mentioned it to me once, but in my mind it is all I see when my shirts off.

This is something that I am going to have to work on for a long time I think. I may be ready to stop eating like an idiot and to work myself to the bone, but I am still several steps away from seeing anything but my flaws whenever I look at myself.

13. Positive Negatives 1

I really hate how much present achievement sheds light on past failures sometimes. I try not to dwell to much on these things, choosing to write them down here and forget them, but this particular issue is something that causes a tightness in my chest out of shame due to a couple of years of self deception. I hate lying to myself much more than lying to anyone else, I try very hard not to do that, now more than ever, but in this little corner of my personality I couldn’t seem to stop

To the point. Recently I have started running again, I hate running, but my bike is plagued by constant problems. I seem to run over ever staple, piece of glass, or nail (3 of the 6 objects to have given me a flat this far) on the road. Doing enough damage to render the never flat tires worthless and the constant repair costs prohibitive. I have been willing to spend that money because of my distaste for running. It burns more calories per minute than riding, but because I had so much trouble completing even a mile it just didn’t give me the total calorie burn I needed. That was until the last 6 days.

I had another flat and asked my wife to grab me a new tire from walmart so I would be able to get on the bike quick as I was getting home late. What I didn’t mention is that there is a difference between a tube for a mountain bike (what I have) and a road bike and she grabbed the latter. So the sun was going down, neither of us wanted to go back to the store and I wasn’t going to ride my normal route at night anyway. I was not about to not burn those excess calories, so it was either a p90x cardio (murder me) or running (just torture). So I strapped on my KSO’s and headed out. I was able to do nearly 3 miles. This had me stumped, because the last time I attempted running (2-3 months ago which was when I started losing) about .6 miles in everything hurt, and by the end I was sore and felt like a train wreck.

This should’ve made me very happy, and it did at first, but what it made me realize is that the reason running those miles was so horrible was because of all that excess weight jolting my body with every step. Not the mono killing my endurance, not bad joints, just excess weight. I ran 5 miles today, something I haven’t done since I was 17. I think I could’ve made it 6, the only reason I wasn’t able to do this 3 months ago was because of my weight. I love my bike, it may be one of the best things my wife ever got for me, it started me rolling down hill to change, it let me work off the excess without making my body feel like it was falling apart. However, it feels really good to be able to mix in running again, and at a level surpassing what I managed as a teenager.

Side Effects 3

This is something I have been thinking about a lot since I talked with one of my female friends who is also struggling to get her weight under control, and it is the concept of getting comfortable with being the “fat one.” As with most of these posts this shows up in a few places but it generally consists of it becoming far easier to just be the fat one in your group of friends then work your way to normal, or past it to the fit one. There are certain expectations people start to have for the way you’ll eat and drink, and the way you’ll act. Once those expectations are in place when you go outside them there is some natural push back even if you’re heading in the direction.

When you are with a group of people you know really well, out to eat, or maybe just having dinner at someone’s house, they expect certain behavior from you. If you are in fact the fat friend, like me they’ll expect that you eat a lot, drink high calorie/sugar drinks and generally make a glutton of yourself. I don’t think anyone would say it outright but having a friend that does this is great for your self esteem. It lets you indulge a bit more than normal without feeling bad about it. After all at least you’re not eating as much as fat friend. I do not say this from the inside looking out, or to pass judgment on anyone else, because if fact I am just as guilty of this as the next guy. I have had several friends over the years I loved spending time with because I knew that even though I was letting myself go a bit, at least I wasn’t ballooning like so and so. It was a bad day when I finally realized that I had become that friend to several of my own peer group.
Side note: What is far worse than this is when you realize you’re the heafty one and you decide to watch what you eat, but only in front of other people knowing full well, that they know full well that you eat whatever the heck you want when they aren’t there, but because of social courtesy everyone ignores the fact the diet cokes at outback don’t offset your consumption of half of the groups bloomin onion, and everyone smiles and says good for you when you let them know you’re running again…. (this comprises several years of my life dang it)
In step with having a heavy friend around when you’re having a meal, it’s nice to have someone plumper than yourself around all the time. It is only natural for us to compare ourselves to others finding out what you have better or worse than the next person, for men it could be strength, hair, weight, ect.. for woman breasts, weight, general attractiveness. It is a natural as breathing. So I as the chubby kid fill a crucial niche in a social group. It isn’t the one anyone wants to fill, but it does allow you to have a lot of friends who don’t find you particularly treating.

Speaking of threatening, my friend I mentioned earlier brought this up to me, and while I never lost weight while I was close to my friends I think this is worth mentioning. She was telling me about one time in the past when she had really made a hard push for weight loss and started to really change the way she looked. She had always maintained a playful relationship with her friends male and female, and that sort of joke flirting that happens between friends and their friends spouses. Which until she dropped weight was considered playful and fun, but when she was fast on her weight to being skinny the claws came out. All the sudden the playful joking was met with sneers and sideways looks, and her friends became a lot less friendly. She had upset the order. She was supposed to be the fat friend and that’s where everyone was comfortable having her, including herself.

That really is the heart of the matter. When you have been the fat one long enough, when you occupy that part of the social order it is hard to get out of it. That’s where everyone expects you to be, that is where you expect to be. Once you realize that, it is even easier to eat bad, not work out, and generally let yourself go, because no one expect any better of you, so why should you expect better of yourself? This is the point I have to constantly make to myself. No one expects me to lose weight, and most people don’t really want me to. My skinny friends don’t want to lose the fat one, my heavy friends don’t like being reminding that they are still heavy and not changing it. I don’t want to upset any of them, so it would be a lot better for everyone if I would just stop trying and gain it all back. No one is going to rush to your aid and cheer you on through the rigorous and frustrating road of to losing all the extra weight, you have to do that on your own. There will undoubtedly be a few people around you they will give you support and cheer you on, but no one will do it for you, no one will make it easier, and no one will make you do it, in fact they’d probably be happier if you didn’t bother. So forget friends, forget family members, and do it for youself.

The Problems

In talking with people who want to institute the changes that I struggle to keep going in my life it occurred to me that I really need to expand on some earlier thoughts. I have referenced the idea of knowing exactly what is going into your body and how that can engender a powerful change as far as your or my general health is concerned. The flip side of that coin is learning to put the owness of getting rid of the weight and the rewards on no one else but yourself.

What I am not saying is that I am the only reason for where I ended up. There are a myriad of life events, biology, and various other tid bits out of my control that contributed to my eventual weight problem. What I am saying is my reasons for not losing the weight were in fact within my control, but far easier to play off as the reasons for my constant problems.

The first thing I turned to was biology. There is a bit of a husky inclination in my gene pool. There is no one in my family that has that lovely luxury of eating anything they want and never paying for it. Our bodies turn out to be excellent at taking excess calories and storing them in fat. A couple hundred years ago this would’ve mean we were far more likely to survive in times of famine, today it means that if we don’t pay attention to every calorie that we shove in our maws, our body with happily shove them into stomach, thighs, and a variety of areas just in case we cant find any food for a month or two. This is particularly frustrating when you have people in your life who can eat whatever they see without a second thought and are incapable of gaining an ounce. Try to take comfort in the fact that if there’s ever a famine they’ll be the first to die.

Another convenient place I laid blame was on my job. I spend about 4 hours of my 10 to 14 hour work day doing nothing but driving. While my job causing me to sweat like crazy it really isn’t a calorie burner when I reflect on what I am really require to do. It is also the kind of job that requires me to be constantly rushing to a fro, trying to make up time and get to everyone I can in the short time allotted to me. It is really easy to eat a burger, fries, nuggets, and drink large cokes while driving. It is not so easy to eat salad while driving, and heaven forbid I spend 5 minutes in a parking lot on eating a 210 calorie versus saving that time and consume the almost 1300 calories in-between stops. When I write it out it seems even more absurd, but lying to myself is something I am excellent at.

The last big factor for me is depression. It is something I struggle with regularly. My life isn’t turning out how I expected it too, money is a constant struggle, I am frustrated with not being able to do something where I wake up happy to go to work every day and the feeling of spinning my wheels and never getting anywhere is overwhelming. It keeps me awake late into the night, and keeps my blood pressure in the pre-hypertension range even now. Part of my anti-depression medication was two all beef patties and a sesame seed bun. A constant in a world that still seems completely out of my control, doesn’t matter if I am going to have to pay the electric bill late as long as a get a few minutes of piece from the nearest dollar menu.

Here’s the conclusion I have come to. Nearly everything I believed was keeping me from losing weight, especially the 3 things mentioned, really were, but not one of them had to. Biologically I am handicapped when it comes to being then, I have to work a lot harder than the next guy to get the same results, I have to focus harder and push myself a little further to get to the same place. It is not fair, it sucks, but thems the brakes. My job is a constant problem, temptation to eat badly is going to be with me everyday. I counted the number of just McDonalds I pass in a day and it averages about 14. 14 opportunities for some short term comfort, and some long term failure. Depression and frustration with life are probably something that will be sitting on my shoulder for a long time. It is going to take a different level of work and determination to get that handled. The rub in all this is that all those things aren’t going anywhere. There isn’t going to be some dude that shows up on my door and gives me the secret to easy weight loss, there is no pill I can take to slim down with no change to my life. It comes down to me. I have to make the decision to not live that way ever again, to understand that life isn’t going to give me all the support I need to lose weight, that the only way I am going to make this continue to work is by working my body and working my mind, building up reserves of self control and discipline, working out when I do not want to, and eating less even when I REALLY want more, and doing it every single day for the rest of my life no matter what happens around me.

Image 2

I think I’ll combine two instances I remember clearly here because they both occurred during my sophomore or junior year of highschool, but combined to take me from self conscience to double taking at everyone who looked at me sideways and wondering how fat they thought I was. That’s right, not if they thought I was fat, but to what degree of fat I fell into for their particular sensibilities. I think it is important to note here that while I was in the on the thin line between Obese and Morbidly Obese according to the BMI, if you looked at me I don’t think you would have thought “Now that guy is Morbidly Obese.” To look at me I was fat, but I am one of those people who carry it remarkably well. So with that said I think that most of my assumptions about what people thought of me were primarily my own creations, but the two to follow did happen, and convinced me whenever I was looking someone else was sneaking a peek at my jelly rolls.

The first incident of confidence shattering involved a teacher embarrassing me in front of a lot of people including several girls I had a tentative thing for. I was part of MADD, or whatever its new acronym is now, essentially it was a student group against drunk driving so probably SADD, who knows, I don’t. Anyway, our group was in charge of setting up for the winter dance, so one day after school we all showed up with some other volunteers and the Spanish teacher (in charge of group) and began to decorate the gym in nothing but the classiest construction paper. It is hard for me to recall at this point exactly what I was wearing, but I know it was a t-shirt and pants/shorts/jeans, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is apparently this shirt came just to the edge of whatever fabric covered my lower half, so when I reached up to hold a banner in place while someone taped it, a portion of my stomach was exposed. This flaunting of flesh drew the attention of the Spanish teacher who said in a slightly louder than normal voice “Wanna do something about that Robert, no one wants to see you muffin top.” I stared at her and said something dismissive like “haha” or perhaps “wha” which she took as a misunderstanding on my part, not realizing I was hoping to side step the comment to avoid the crushing embarrassment I was feeling. So she decided to clarify the point by saying “We can all see your fat roll.” This drew the rest of the eyes in the room who had laughed off or ignored the first comment. I stood there silently while they finished taping the banner, my face beat red I am quite sure I tend to all but glow when embarrassed, then made sure the rest of the work kept me out of the gym or at least out of eye contact with anyone. I did not speak to anyone the rest of that afternoon.

Being older, and having somewhat thicker skin and a sharper tongue I would’ve shot back or just ignored it now. At that time though it was bad enough that I didn’t want to go back to school the next day, and came up with excuses to never go to another decorating session. It was also very hard to talk to anyone I knew for sure heard all that because when I did talk to them all I could think about was them thinking about my fat roll.

The second thing wasn’t as devastating, it was more a shot across the bow from another kid my age for no apparent reason. I was part of theater for the majority of my highschool career and part of that was coming in on Saturdays to build the set. I enjoyed this more than any other part of theater because I knew more about building than most of the other people so I got take more of a lead role. I don’t know why but I was big on wearing tank tops in public, I am sure I thought I looked strong, at least until this morning, it retrospect I probably just looked like a nerdy theater kid who thought he was tough. I was walking down to the auditorium with the a few friends, a mix of girls and guys, when one of the smaller guys got up next to me and turned to one of the other guys and said “I don’t know why Bob (they called me bob) wears wife beaters (they called them wife beaters) he’s not strong enough for that, he’s actually pretty doughy.” Again for a self conscious kid this was a devastator. I made the mistake of confronting him right there giving him the opening to refer to me as husky, it made the girls laugh, at which point I think I shoved the kid, which led to more laughter. If you want to feel small have someone half your size insult the one thing your most sensitive about in front of a group of people you want to like you, then stick up for yourself and listen to them all laugh at you. This is one of those things I buried deep because it still makes me mad how stupid and helpless I felt. Not to mention fat.

You would think this would push me to lose the weight as fast as possible to prove them all wrong and rub their noses in it. Nope, I wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of thinking they had made me change, no way no how.

Quick Thought

Let me start by saying that in no way am I claiming I am/was addicted to food in the same way an alcoholic needs booze, or a drug attic needs a fix, I am however going to use the comparison to try and make clear how I have to go about sticking to my plan. I think it is also worth noting that some people are actually addicted to food in much the same way as the previously mentioned addicts. Moving on.

Food can be very much like a drug. It can trigger the same responses as many drugs, and can get very addictive. The combination in a double cheeseburger for example lights up many of the same areas that are known to be affected in the brain during illegal drug use. I already mentioned the reward system and the feeling you get when you first bite into a particularly delicious and much anticipated treat. It makes you feel good, it makes you feel content, and it is something that is very hard to give up.

For me there is no little bit. There is no gradual diet change. If for some reason for the next few days I couldn’t eat anything but fast food, lets say someone held a gun to my head, that would be the end of this. I’d like to tell you I could do that and just get right back to eating my low calorie meals, but I know I couldn’t. Right now I am having trouble consuming bad food because my body has finally decided to get with the program and start liking the healthier stuff I put in it, but let me re-acclimate to the delicious grease, and tantalizing combo of cheese, hamburger, and a ketchup with slightly more sugar than its store bought cousin, and I would be leaving the world of turkey bacon and lettuce far behind. Shoot I would like to do it right now just reading about the taste extravaganza I am denying myself. So for me falling off the wagon is a very apt description, I would fall off onto a bed of golden brown French fries, and deep fried pastries, and eat my way to heart disease and diabetes, and I cant begin to tell you how often I have to remind myself of that just to keep this little life style change going…