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.