No Fun

So around a few months back I realized several things about myself. The first being that I am a nearly constant liar, not so much to you but mainly to myself about a wide variety things, but for the purposes of this paragraph we will focus on weight. I am big, and I am in fact probably genetically inclined to be big. So for the last 4 or 5 years as my weight has slowly swelled to the size I was when I decided to try and head the other direction was substantial.

On the road to where I am now I have tried a truly staggering amount of things to lose weight and have found that I can blame every program and diet for my lack of weight loss and in some situations my weight gain while on them. When I did P90X I got crazy strong but lost no weight, this was because I almost completely ignored the diet, and in fact started eating more than normal because I was burning the extra calories. I ran, I cut carbs, I trained in MMA style fighting, and a large number of other things. Nothing worked and it had to be the programs, not my near addiction to energy drinks and anything with sugar in it, oh and McDonalds breakfast, Pizza, pasta, and a giant number of other things.

Well at the end of May my daughter was born. This is something that made me actually sit down and consider the ramifications of being fat dad. Not just the eventuality of heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and a variety of other ailments, but more pressing was the idea that I wouldn’t be able to participate in the wide range of things I want my daughter to be able to do.

My wife has taught ballroom dancing, and has been schooled in ballet and I am pretty sure when my baby turns into a little girl she is going to see her mother and want to learn. As fat dad I am not going to be able to do more than watch her learn from her mother, when what I want to do is learn with her, maybe even teach her a few things. I have taught a few martial arts and defense classes in my past and I would like to pass that to her so she could break the arm of any boy who decided to let his hands wander. As fat dad I imagine I’m going to be to winded and tired to do much more than watch my daughter distance herself from me. This is a small taste of the things that went through my head.

What I did next was evaluate myself. Not from the lens of self pity I had been for years, but I made a conscience effort to really look at myself. What have I been doing to myself? Why? Why did I weigh the absurd amount I did? Why did that number keep going up? Why didn’t my pants fit? This was one of my top ten most depressing events of my life, because at the end of the several weeks of reflection what it came down to was me. No one else, nothing else.

I was the way I was because I let myself get there. No self control, no denying myself anything whenever I wanted it. I looked back at the weeks and months before and wrote down what I ate, everything I could remember for several days, and the amount of food was just stupid. It is shameful, and make no mistake I am ashamed of the way I had been living for years. More years than I really want to write down. It’s embarrassing to confront that part of yourself you lie about for years, it sucks, a lot, but for my daughter and for my wife I am going to take the blinders off. I really don’t want to though.