Joel1
0
Dear Diary,
Skylar talked to me at lunch today! He is so hot! I hope he asks me to prom!
Kidding.
Yeah, I'm a dork.
Ok, so this first entry is going to be my autobiographical account of my journey thus far.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been a “fat kid”. As a matter of fact, one of my earliest memories in life is going to the pediatrician when I was four or five years old and sitting on the cold examining table covered in tissue paper with my shirt off. The doctor came over, gave me the once over and said “He looks healthy but he’s got get rid of this frog belly.” So, pretty much the smartest person I had ever encounter said “What a fat kid. He’s flawed. He probably lazy and eats sweets all day!” At least that’s what he said in my mind.
Back then people thought that way about fat kids. Metabolism…more like metabawhatism? If you were fat it didn’t have anything to do with genes or what you eat. You just ate too much, and didn’t move enough.
Thing is, I did eat too much, and rarely moved. Ok, so stereotypes aren’t always completely wrong. So I went home and ate comfort food, and watched my comfort cartoons while lying on my comfortable couch.
So, at five, I supposed I should have gone out and figured out whatever nutrient based knowledge was available. This would have lead to a much more fruitful and happy childhood. There are only a couple of problems with that. You see, I was five, and driving was the best part of a dozen years away, and driving to the library was not really an option. Even if I had been able to find information, the food guide pyramid of the mid 80's is about the worst thing I could have followed (eat tons of carbs! 8-10 servings!).
I went to school. I was in kindergarten. I knew all about the four food groups. I knew about how you need to eat lots of the bread group and hardly any of the meat group. Vegetables are good. Eat those too. I heard about that for about two hours over the course of an entire school year. It was pretty uninteresting also, because serisouly, my teachers didn't care about that stuff, but it was in the standard, so they served their quota. And then every Saturday morning I would watch 5 hours of cartoons, where every other commercial was for Super Mega Choco-Bites, now with more frosting! Delicious Super Mega-Choco-Bites. The cartoon moose or whatever would give some kids a bowl of sugar, and then the kids would be ready to kick the winning goal or skydive or some other extreme activity completely unrelated to cereal. Who do you think won the war to influence my eating habits?
So from the time that I found out that I had a frog belly until the time I was…well until now, I have always thought of myself as a fat person. Not a person who is fat. I was fat first, and a person second.
This basically shadowed my whole existence. Whenever I had a crush on a girl, it didn’t really matter, because why would a girl want to hold hands with a fat person? Whenever you lack confidence in your legitimacy as a person, the world is a hard(er) place.
People don’t know any better either. I mean, when I would jump up on Santa’s lap at Christmas and he would say “You’re a big fellow aren’t you? Bet you’d like a football!” he didn’t know that he opened out a wound.
Fast forward now about 20 years. In those years I played sports (I was pretty athletic, surprisingly) my weight yo-yo’d and I gained more baggage. I also got married to a beautiful wife, and had the best son ever. I started a career in engineering, and have moved through the ranks quickly, largely due to my people skills and humor I learned as a defense mechanism over all these years.
I worked with a guy named Rob for a couple of years in the early
2000's....man thats weird to say. Anyway Rob weighed maybe 10 pounds more than me, and was about an inch shorted than me. He was pretty active, and smoked for years, but had quite five years before I met him. He was about 10 years older than me too. Well Rob had high blood pressure, and was always feeling tired. Long story short, after a stress test, Rob got a quintuple bypass. So combine that with my hypocondreia, and I was having strokes and heart attacks all the time (in my mind). Actually I did have something called heartbeat sensations in about 1999, and that freaked me out, so that opened that can of worms right back up.
So, in about 04 I started realizing that I was ruining my body for years to come. My son was born in Feb of that year, and I started trying to lose some weight, but not real serisouly. It was like, I will eat yogurt for breakfast, and then a whole grease crust pizza for lunch....and I will workout, um....by walking a mile, once a month. So I really didn't see any results.
Now, January 2006, a youth group I am working with has a series based on reality TV, and the sub-series they are starting is "the biggest loser". So myself, and 3 other guys, and 2 gals, start losing weight. Between the 6 of us, we lost 230 pounds in 16 weeks. Pretty awesome. It was really good support, and got me kick started.
However, around the 12 week or so, I started feeling so much better, and didn't want to have a starting and ending point to my training and diet. It was at this time I really studied nutrition and excercise. I got a personal trainer to help me out, and read everything about sports nutrition I could get my hands on. And from that time until now, I have been doing my routine (except about the last 10 days or so...I will write about those sometime...). I am working at establishing a healthy lifestyle. Yeah, I still screw up, and yeah, I want to do better. Honestly right now I am on a backslide, but I guess thats why I got a username on this forum, that I have been lurking on for a month or so.
So here's to accountability. This place seems great, and I know it will be the answer to providing the support I am after to keep up my hard and long work. Because the long and winding road of weight loss does sometimes make my feet hurt.
The answers to the stickey are my fattest point I was 330. I am currently 280. I want to get down to about 230, and evaluate things again. I have not put a time frame on this goal. However, I do have a short term goal of losing 20 pounds by September 1. They both are random, but it is pacing myself at 2 pounds a week, and its a good intermediate goal. To meet my goals, I am eating 6 low cal, nutrient filled meals/snacks a day. I workout 6 times a week, 3 weight training, 3 cardio. Planning. I need to plan better. Whats that saying? if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I started January 14th.
Skylar talked to me at lunch today! He is so hot! I hope he asks me to prom!
Kidding.
Yeah, I'm a dork.
Ok, so this first entry is going to be my autobiographical account of my journey thus far.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been a “fat kid”. As a matter of fact, one of my earliest memories in life is going to the pediatrician when I was four or five years old and sitting on the cold examining table covered in tissue paper with my shirt off. The doctor came over, gave me the once over and said “He looks healthy but he’s got get rid of this frog belly.” So, pretty much the smartest person I had ever encounter said “What a fat kid. He’s flawed. He probably lazy and eats sweets all day!” At least that’s what he said in my mind.
Back then people thought that way about fat kids. Metabolism…more like metabawhatism? If you were fat it didn’t have anything to do with genes or what you eat. You just ate too much, and didn’t move enough.
Thing is, I did eat too much, and rarely moved. Ok, so stereotypes aren’t always completely wrong. So I went home and ate comfort food, and watched my comfort cartoons while lying on my comfortable couch.
So, at five, I supposed I should have gone out and figured out whatever nutrient based knowledge was available. This would have lead to a much more fruitful and happy childhood. There are only a couple of problems with that. You see, I was five, and driving was the best part of a dozen years away, and driving to the library was not really an option. Even if I had been able to find information, the food guide pyramid of the mid 80's is about the worst thing I could have followed (eat tons of carbs! 8-10 servings!).
I went to school. I was in kindergarten. I knew all about the four food groups. I knew about how you need to eat lots of the bread group and hardly any of the meat group. Vegetables are good. Eat those too. I heard about that for about two hours over the course of an entire school year. It was pretty uninteresting also, because serisouly, my teachers didn't care about that stuff, but it was in the standard, so they served their quota. And then every Saturday morning I would watch 5 hours of cartoons, where every other commercial was for Super Mega Choco-Bites, now with more frosting! Delicious Super Mega-Choco-Bites. The cartoon moose or whatever would give some kids a bowl of sugar, and then the kids would be ready to kick the winning goal or skydive or some other extreme activity completely unrelated to cereal. Who do you think won the war to influence my eating habits?
So from the time that I found out that I had a frog belly until the time I was…well until now, I have always thought of myself as a fat person. Not a person who is fat. I was fat first, and a person second.
This basically shadowed my whole existence. Whenever I had a crush on a girl, it didn’t really matter, because why would a girl want to hold hands with a fat person? Whenever you lack confidence in your legitimacy as a person, the world is a hard(er) place.
People don’t know any better either. I mean, when I would jump up on Santa’s lap at Christmas and he would say “You’re a big fellow aren’t you? Bet you’d like a football!” he didn’t know that he opened out a wound.
Fast forward now about 20 years. In those years I played sports (I was pretty athletic, surprisingly) my weight yo-yo’d and I gained more baggage. I also got married to a beautiful wife, and had the best son ever. I started a career in engineering, and have moved through the ranks quickly, largely due to my people skills and humor I learned as a defense mechanism over all these years.
I worked with a guy named Rob for a couple of years in the early
2000's....man thats weird to say. Anyway Rob weighed maybe 10 pounds more than me, and was about an inch shorted than me. He was pretty active, and smoked for years, but had quite five years before I met him. He was about 10 years older than me too. Well Rob had high blood pressure, and was always feeling tired. Long story short, after a stress test, Rob got a quintuple bypass. So combine that with my hypocondreia, and I was having strokes and heart attacks all the time (in my mind). Actually I did have something called heartbeat sensations in about 1999, and that freaked me out, so that opened that can of worms right back up.
So, in about 04 I started realizing that I was ruining my body for years to come. My son was born in Feb of that year, and I started trying to lose some weight, but not real serisouly. It was like, I will eat yogurt for breakfast, and then a whole grease crust pizza for lunch....and I will workout, um....by walking a mile, once a month. So I really didn't see any results.
Now, January 2006, a youth group I am working with has a series based on reality TV, and the sub-series they are starting is "the biggest loser". So myself, and 3 other guys, and 2 gals, start losing weight. Between the 6 of us, we lost 230 pounds in 16 weeks. Pretty awesome. It was really good support, and got me kick started.
However, around the 12 week or so, I started feeling so much better, and didn't want to have a starting and ending point to my training and diet. It was at this time I really studied nutrition and excercise. I got a personal trainer to help me out, and read everything about sports nutrition I could get my hands on. And from that time until now, I have been doing my routine (except about the last 10 days or so...I will write about those sometime...). I am working at establishing a healthy lifestyle. Yeah, I still screw up, and yeah, I want to do better. Honestly right now I am on a backslide, but I guess thats why I got a username on this forum, that I have been lurking on for a month or so.
So here's to accountability. This place seems great, and I know it will be the answer to providing the support I am after to keep up my hard and long work. Because the long and winding road of weight loss does sometimes make my feet hurt.
The answers to the stickey are my fattest point I was 330. I am currently 280. I want to get down to about 230, and evaluate things again. I have not put a time frame on this goal. However, I do have a short term goal of losing 20 pounds by September 1. They both are random, but it is pacing myself at 2 pounds a week, and its a good intermediate goal. To meet my goals, I am eating 6 low cal, nutrient filled meals/snacks a day. I workout 6 times a week, 3 weight training, 3 cardio. Planning. I need to plan better. Whats that saying? if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I started January 14th.
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Just kidding... well kinda. I have the same sort of problem with the stupid TV. I should cancel our cable so I don't watch it anymore (but I think my fiance would kill me if he couldn't watch ESPN, so I don't know if it's really worth it... lol)
