I'm Fat

There’s no two ways about it; I’m fat. By any measure I can think of, any website I check, any “authority” I can dream up, I’m overweight. I’ve even gone as far as to ask my male friends who are roughly my height how much they weight and invariably it is at least 20 lbs less than I do.

In Idaho I biked to and from work nearly everyday. This definitely helped me stay relatively fit but even then, I always had a layer of squish around my waist and I never weighed less than 185 lbs. I think people thought of my as “healthy” and maybe I was but compared to my roommates who could out-run, out-climb, and out-bike me; I never felt it. I also didn’t compare favorably with my immediate family in this department; I am easily the least athletic and most pudgy of my siblings.

In early fall of 2005 I had a back injury that eliminated virtually all activity in my life. Though I had been bicycling to work, I was forced to quit and spent most evenings after work laying down trying to mitigate the pain. Through physical therapy and a few steroid injections, I gradually regained some degree of activity in my lifestyle but didn’t jump back into it quickly. I had grown used to do doing nothing but lying around and any benefit from years of bicycle commuting was quickly being erased. By the end of the summer in 2006, I had finished up with physical therapy and was probably back to 80%. I still couldn’t bike to work, though, and didn’t lead an active lifestyle outside of the back exercises I continued to do at home.

It wasn’t until a chance meeting with a scale late that fall showing me at 214lbs that I decided I needed to do something about this. I brought this topic up with my wife and, due to her own fight with familial weight problems, agreed that we needed to do something about it. We read books. We started exercising together. We became more careful in what we ate. And we lost weight. Not in the cataclysmic volumes that the books said but we both noticed that we left healthier and weighed less.

Then Christmas came and though we didn’t gain any weight, we didn’t loose any either. Due to a lot of factors, we reached a plateau of sorts and both of us have felt that we are still a good ways from where we need to be. After talking this over again and trying to figure out the best thing to do, we’ve decided to take things up a notch. We’ve developed an exercise schedule that is more active and we’re trying to find ways to measure the level of activity during exercise. We’ve decided to attempt a super disciplined approach to what we eat by weighing and cataloging ALL that passes through our mouths. We’re hoping that by measuring more carefully the food we eat and our level of activity we will be able to more clearly see where the faults in our lifestyle lie.

The catch in all of this is that it will require a high degree of discipline, one that we aren’t used to enacting in this area of our lives. Some would say that this regimented approach is simply setting ourselves up for failure and that most people aren’t able effectively stick with a program like this. Those people are probably right. My wife and I have discussed this at length and agree this will not be easy. But then again, for us, leading a healthy lifestyle never has been. If it was easy, we wouldn’t need to do this.

So this is where we start, again. This week has been a practice week of sorts where we are on our new exercise routine and beginning to weight and measure our food portions. Next week, we begin it for real.

If you believe in luck, then wish us luck.