Well, I won’t get into my whole personal history. Instead I’ll focus on the history of my healthy lifestyle journey. I mean, does being the oldest of 3 or being born several weeks premature have anything to do with my journey to create a healthier lifestyle? I highly doubt it.
Some background to help set the table. I grew up in a family where things like Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol, and Heart Disease run rampant. I have grandparents, aunts, my parents as well as myself diagnosed with these diseases. My grandfathers both suffered from Diabetes or Heart Disease respectively. My mother was diagnosed as Type II Diabetic when I was still in school. My father’s first heart episode occurred when I was in elementary school. What do those have to do with my journey? Probably not what you might think. You might expect that a child who grew up, from an early age, knowing the risks to living an unhealthy lifestyle that I paid attention to my health from an early age. You would be completely wrong. Despite knowing all the risk factors and complications that come from an unhealthy lifestyle I didn’t care. As a matter of
fact the more people, friends, family and doctors would harp on my risk factors the less attention I paid to my health. I wasn’t going to do anything because anyone else wanted me to. I was always the fat kid in class yet I refused to do much to change it because I wasn’t going to do what someone else wanted me to do.
Because of my refusal to pay attention to my health when I left school and stopped playing sports things quickly began to spiral out of control. They spiraled so much that at my worst point I was four hundred and fifty pounds though I’m only five foot, nine inches tall. I had a blood pressure that was in the one hundred and forties over about one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty. I was a time bomb looking for a place to go off. Eventually I was diagnosed as a Type II Diabetic as well. At that time my A1C test was capped out and my tested fasting blood sugar result was a 453. Please don’t think I am proud of any aspect of that. As a matter of fact I feel blessed and grateful that I was given time to correct those numbers.
I was a miserable person. I was unhappy with how I looked. I was unhappy with how I felt. I had given up on my life. Because my weight was out of control I had given up on everything that I had a passion for. I felt that since my health was out of control that I either didn’t deserve anything good. I believed that I wasn’t good enough to do things I wanted to because of my health and more specifically because of my weight. Because of my size I didn’t like to travel because I was embarrassed by how I didn’t fit in airplane seats. I didn’t like going out to eat because I had to literally squeeze into booths at restaurants but I was so self-conscious that I felt uncomfortable sitting at a table plus I had the added worry that I might break a chair and then be truly horrified. I blamed all the bad things in my life on my weight. I didn’t have a significant other because of my weight. I didn’t have the career I wanted because of my weight. I had begun to become bitter and angry all the time. I have always been very self-conscious. I have always been a parent’s ideal child. See I hated being dirty or disorganized. However, I had gotten to a point because of how out of control I had gotten that I stopped even worrying about my appearance. I became very unkept, dirty, grungy, and disheveled. I tried to hide in my own skin. I bought everything several sizes larger than I would need so I could “hide” in them. I hated any attention or recognition because I didn’t want anyone to have to look at me. I would later realize that I was using food as a socially acceptable form of suicide because of my unhappiness. I wanted the pain and loneliness to be over and literally eating myself to death was something I felt wouldn’t jeopardize my moral and religious beliefs and relieve everyone around me of any role in the suicide because it was slow and I could hide it.
That all changed one day by the grace of God. I had someone close to me pull me
aside and tell me that they were scared to be my friend because she feared I wasn’t going to be around much longer and it was painful to watch me go. She followed that up with a personal challenge. As I mentioned I hated being out in public because of being so self-conscious about my appearance so as much as I love sports I had never gone to see a live college football game in the stands. She said that if I would join Weight Watchers and lose one hundred pounds she would take us to a National Title college football game. See she had an older sister who was a Weight Watchers leader and it helped her maintain a better lifestyle and my friend thought it was worth trying for me. And just like that the stage was set. Challenge accepted.
I won’t get into every detail about the process save to say that because of my own track record with my health and how much I had given up on my ability to accomplish anything I set out to lose twenty-five pounds. I thought at least that would prove I had made an attempt to change. I could never have imagined all the changes that were coming and how my life would be so drastically different as a result of the journey I was beginning. I quickly passed through that first twenty-five pounds so I made my goal fifty pounds. I passed that mark as well. I moved my goal to seventy-five pounds and I surpassed that mark as well. I moved my goal to one hundred pounds and surpassed that as well. I moved my goal out to one hundred and fifty pounds thinking there was no way I could get there and you guessed it, I’ve passed that mark as well. My current goal is a total of two hundred and twenty-five pounds. For those of you good at math, you guessed it, that makes me quite literally half the man I was when my journey first began. I’m currently just shy of one hundred and seventy pounds lost. My last A1C test showed a result of 5.9 and a fasting blood glucose test of one hundred and eleven. My last blood pressure reading was one hundred and eighteen over eighty-two. To date, after almost seven years on this journey I am averaging a half of a pound lost each week, every week over that seven year stretch. It hasn’t all be sunshine, rainbows and roses. I have gone on a roller coaster and things still throw me for loops at times but the journey continues.
I don’t brag about what I have accomplished. One, my journey isn’t over yet. As a matter of fact, I believe I’m still finding my stride. As many physical and routine changes I have made over the last seven years the more dramatic changes have been mentally and emotionally. It would be impossible for me to provide proper emphasis on how drastic those changes have been. None of that has happened in a vacuum or on my own. I have been blessed with several people along my journey to help provide the next lesson I needed at just the right time. I have been blessed with the right people to encourage me, believe in me, and help me surpass anything I thought was possible on my own. I am grateful for every one of them. They all, by God’s grace, have helped to give me my life back.