How I got Fat

Where do I begin with this?

I have been fat for as long as I can remember. I wore the husky pants as a child. Corduroy pants were popular for me because they had a little bigger cut. I eventually settled into a 36 to 38 pant while in Jr. High. I grew in height but I stayed soft in the middle. When I was 16 and 17 I was soft around the middle but not terribly fat. I think I weighed around 217 pounds when I graduated high school in 1990. Then I went to college.....

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the term, "the freshman 15". Well for me the "freshman 15' was the freshman 65. Yes, I said 65.

I started to gain weight the summer before college but once I stepped on campus.... I exploded...literally. I gained 65 pounds from August 1990 to May 1991. I gained fat so fat that my skin ruptured with some hideous stretch marks. They still are on my stomach 15 years later.

How did I gain that much weight? Well, here is where I lied to myself for years. I told myself for years that something had to be wrong internally for me to gain that much weight. It had to be my hormones. It hard to be my thyroid. It had to be this....... It had to be that.......

It took 15 years for me to admit to myself that nothing was wrong. I got that fat because I ate and drank myself into that condition. I never missed a meal in the dining hall. I could have as much as I wanted and I had no one around to tell me no. I ate enormous amounts of food. Omelets, cereal, hamburgers, sandwiches, potatoes, rice, whatever. I ate it all. Ice cream...... ate it too.

I also ate in my dorm room. I had a single person room so I had no one there to say anything about my eating. I would eat whole bags of potato chips. I would eat whole jars of peanut butter. I would order pizza at 10 at night (I was raised in the country where there was no take out available). I would swill Coke all day long. I was destroying my body with food and I didn't even know it.

Looking back, It is simple to see what was happening. I was alone at college and I wasn't emotionally ready to be there. I was suddenly a small fish in a huge pond and I just couldn't handle it. I tried to comfort myself with food. It didn't work.

I started to feel more isolated. I never adjusted to my new life and eventually I left college. I graduated from a different college in 1996 but I never really recovered from that period in my life. I have viewed myself as a failure for a long time because of that period in my life. My confidence was shot. I believed that I would never be able to take the weight off because I was just too weak.

My weighted slowly climbed to 324 pounds in January 2005. I had half heartily tried to lose weight many times over the years but I never stuck it out but things changed in January 2005.

I went to Las Vegas in January 2005. I love Las Vegas but I was miserable on this trip. I had no energy. I felt so bad that I honestly didn't enjoy the trip all that much. I did have a good time because I went with my family and my best friend Will but I just didn't "feel it".

If you have ever been to Las Vegas you know that you do a lot of walking and I did some walking. And it was killing me. I bailed on hanging out with Will as much as I should have because I was tired (if you ever read this Will, I'm sorry). But that's not the embarrassing part of the story. Here it is...... I had become so fat that the insides of my thighs were bleeding because of the friction caused by walking. I can vividly remember watching the blood wash down the drain and feeling defeated. If you could hit rock bottom fitness wise, then I was laying at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. However, a funny thing did happen. I decided not to lay there like I am prone to do. I decided to get up and do something about it.

The first thing I did was go to the Dr. and get a complete physical. That is knew that I was now tipping the scales at 324 pounds. It was not a complete shock to me that I weighed so much. My Vegas pictures confirmed this number. I will see if I can get some posted in the future so you can get the idea of how fat I was. For the record, I am 6 feet tall. That's important to keep in mind because you need to know that to picture how round I am.

Back to the physical....... I had everything tested. My cholesterol was fine. One of the tests showed that I was on the road to diabetes but I figured that already. But one of the tests showed that my testosterone was low. It was determined that it wasn't because of a tumor on my endocrine gland so I began hormone replacement therapy. This made me happy because I now had an excuse. It was my testosterone. It was not my fault. This played right into my lazy hands (I am lazy, more on that later). I did start to eat better because of the threat of diabetes and I lost 14 pounds from February 2005 to September 2005. However, in September I had my eyes opened courtesy of an Endocrinologist named Dr. Habra.

I ended up in Dr. Habra's office because the follow up testosterone tests were not good. I was taking 10 grams of testim gel a day and my blood testosterone numbers were going down. It made no sense to me so I started to see specialist dealing with these issues. I ended up in Dr. Habra's office and he hit me with the cold hard truth. He told me that most to all of my problems would clear up if I lost weight. He told me that I would die at an early age if I didn't change. Diabetes would get me eventually. Heart Disease would get me eventually. God knows what else would get me eventually. Basically I was a ticking medical time bomb that would go BOOM sooner rather than later.

Dr. Habra ran many tests on my blood and the results were discouraging to me. My testosterone was fine. My testosterone readings were low because of my level of body fat. A more advanced test showed that my levels were normal but my fatness was throwing off the basic test. Dr. Habra stated that he could keep seeing me but it would be a waste of money. I didn't need a doctor. I could treat myself. I could treat myself because it was MY FAULT that I was fat.

Knowing  that it is your own damn fault kinda strips away the bullshit. All the excuses are left by the wayside and it is just you looking into the mirror. I looked into the mirror and finally saw someone who could do this. Something inside me just clicked. I wish I could explain it fully but I suddenly "got it".

The day I started was September 29Th, 2005. I weighed 310 pounds. Today, May 3rd, 2006 I weigh 250 pounds. I have much further to go in my journey (another 50 pounds) but I will get there.

That thing inside of me is still clicked.