Obligatory "Before" Pictures

Before we move on to part three of the Chronicles, I thought I might share a few pictures of big me. Always helps to have some context. Now, by some standards, I'm not "huge." But rest assured, I was unhealthy.

This was me on July 4th of last year: Notice the puffy face and big gut...

Here's another summer one of me getting sprayed with the hose. The water was cold. Big gut is kind of the theme for these "before" photos.

And here we are again with the big head. At Starbucks eating cookies of all things! Hey... I loves me the cookies.

So yeah...I was probably average according to good ole boy Southern standards. However, I was on high blood pressure medicine. I got sick a couple times a year. I also got winded doing...well...just about anything.

I will post more pictures as I work through my story so you can see the progress. By the by, I am literally one pound away from my goal weight as of this writing!

The Weight-Loss Chronicles, Part 2: The Plan

So I’d decided to lose weight. Now what?

I needed a plan. A good plan. A sustainable plan. ”Sustainable” had to be the key. A lot of people want to go on diets that are, at best, short term solutions. This is why I don’t like diet shake plans. They are so expensive and you’re not going to do shakes forever. Are you? Going to just drink shakes until you’re eighty? No, you aren’t. You can’t. If I was going to do this I wanted a plan that I could stick to for the rest of my life. So here’s what I did.

I watched what I ate and changed my diet. Duh. At first I just sort of asked my wife about what I could eat on the Keto diet. “Can I have this?” “No.” “Damn it!” “What about this?” “No” “DAMN IT!” So what was I not having? Grains, cereal, rice, potatoes, sugar, starch, candy, etc. It was pretty much everything that I’d lived on for most of my life. So what could I have? Meat, cheese, dairy, vegetables, nuts…wait vegetables? Oh gosh…

Honestly, our weapon of choice those first few months was a wonderful cookbook called The Primal Low-Carb Kitchen by Kyndra Holley. We ate out of this almost exclusively for a couple months. It’s got a lot of great recipes for stuff like mashed cauliflower, almond flour biscuits, lemon chia-seed pancakes…great stuff to replace what I was eating at the time. The best part… it tastes pretty good. We also utilized Google extensively for low-carb options of our favorite foods, like pizza. These were smaller portions too. I was often hungry still, but I’ll get to dealing with hunger later.

Eating differently meant we had to shop differently. We had to replace all of our frozen stuff with fresh. We had to stop spending money on two boxes of cereal a week as well as bread and a bag of ciabatta rolls. The good news is that we didn’t really spend more than normal. All that frozen pizza adds up and swapping it out for actual ingredients didn’t bust our budget. (But yes, we are cooking more – which can be a challenge, I admit. We’ll get to that later too)

Probably the most important thing I did was put my eating on a schedule. I would eat three meals a day and one “snack” or “desert.” Breakfast would be around seven or seven-thirty in the morning. Lunch was promptly at noon. Dinner was then at five. I let myself have a bowl of low-carb ice cream for desert sometime during the day. Snacking was cut out almost completely save a small handful of peanuts or a cheese stick. I didn’t let my crazy work schedule interfere with my eating schedule.

The schedule was so important because I was grazer. I would eat almost every hour on the hour. I did not eat healthy, either. I would eat breakfast, then an hour later a bowl of cereal. An hour after that I might have a small bag of chips and so on. I was programming my body to think it needed food every hour. So, naturally, my stomach told my brain I had to eat. My body was using all of the food I shoveled in my mouth and not any of the fat on my body. I had to get control of my appetite.

I did not allow myself any “cheat” days. Changing your lifestyle is a lot like breaking an addiction. You have to make a clean break. I recommend that a person stick to a new eating plan as closely, as ruthlessly as possible. Get that self control. Get to know how your body processes what you eat. Get that into the habit of saying “no” to all the extra crap. Break the control that sugar has on your body and mind. Once you know yourself and can control yourself you can loosen the reigns a bit, but give it a good two or three months first. I'm at the point now where some days I'll eat breakfast, a really late lunch at two or three in the afternoon, and no dinner whatsoever. This allows me some wiggle room with what I eat.

I saw results almost immediately. The number on that scale would plummet every week I weighed myself. It was a great motivator to keep going. There were some harder weeks (we’ll get to that as well) but overall I had the proof – which they say is in the pudding. And I’ve had a lot of pudding, ya’ll.

Next time: Redefining Hunger

The Weight-Loss Chronicles, Part 1: Catalyst

I always knew I’d have to lose weight someday. I’d been overweight for most of my adult life. My doctor was always bugging me, telling me I had to lose weight and get healthier. My mom, a chronic worrier, was worried about my weight. I knew I had to do something at some point, but I always told myself I had time. I did have time, I figured. My uncle dropped dead of a heart attack when he was in his mid-forties. Dropped dead on a racquetball ball court. He was a habitual drinker and smoker. I figured I had time.

Then one day I woke up and I was thirty-seven.

I was explaining this story to a younger co-worker and he just laughed, “You woke up and you were thirty-seven?!”

“Hey, it happens,” said an older co-worker. Indeed it does. I woke up one day and I was thirty-seven. I don’t have any more time. I said to myself. It has to be now or never. I needed to get healthier and I needed to do it before I hit forty. I didn’t want to die of a heart attack and collapse face-down in someone’s engine block while changing their battery. I could only imagine the customer complaint from that.

“Uh…dis dude is dead. Is someone else gonna come out and change my battery? And who gonna clean my engine? I just got it all shiny now he got his face melted all over it. Who gonna pay for dat?”

Yeah…I wanted to make my demise a little more dignified. I remembered the previous year…trying to mow the lawn in the hot summer sun. My heart pounding, face red, praying to God, “Please don’t let me die in my yard.” In those moments I wondered how I was ever going to mow the yard next year.

I had other things I wanted to do too. I wanted to retire at some point. Maybe get to travel with my wife. Give my daughter away at her wedding. See my grandchildren. Become a successful, full-time You Tuber. Maybe stave off death until my mid-seventies instead of embracing it in my late forties or early fifties. I don’t have any more time.

So I started dieting. Not just “dieting” but deciding that, from here on out, I was going to eat differently. No more processed sugar. Limit carbs. No more three or four bowls of cereal a day along with candy bars every time I went to Dollar General. No more subsisting almost completely on pizza. My wife tells me that the official name for the diet I was going to do was “Keto.” Low carb, high fat. 

I can still eat bacon, you say? Sign me up.

So January 1^st, 2016, weighing 258 pounds, suffering from high blood pressure, most assuredly pre-diabetic, I finally started to do something about my weight. I wanted to get down to 200 (maybe 190, but I’d see how things went) by the end of the year. I hated eating vegetables and I hated exercise but the truth was staring me in the face. I don’t have any more time.

Alright…let’s do this.