Prologue (Part 2 of 3) - Diary of a FAT Man

Let's understand something here - I wasn't always heavy. In fact, up until I hit my mid-20's I was in great shape, even athletic by many standards. I played soccer from the time I was nine years old until I was in high school. I also played baseball, tennis and golf, although I wasn't very good at any of them. I entered freshman year at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, NJ weighing a scrawny 135 pounds and with a 32-inch waist. In high school I was a two- or three-season athlete, playing soccer and running/throwing in winter/spring track until I gave it up completely in my senior year, partly because I wasn't terribly competitive at the time but also because I wanted to go work after school with my friends at the movie theater. Even so, I was a very healthy kid. I've still never broken any bones, which is suprising given the amount of dumb stuff I've done (skiing, skateboarding, biking, soccer, track, baseball, pick-up football games, jumping around onstage like a raving madman, etc). I've only had one cavity that got filled improperly and turned into a root canal, other than a scare with gum disease and an accident with a homemade bola at 9 years old my teeth are perfect. I did have both my tonsils and wisdom teeth yanked out in college, and spent a year in braces on my lower jaw to straighten out the mess the wisdom teeth left. I have sprained everything at least once, including both ankles very severely (in fact, I still have trouble ice skating for long periods of time or doing one-legged yoga poses). But I was still overall very healthy. I took vitamins every morning with orange juice, I ran 2-5 miles a few times a week in the offseason, and basically ate whatever the hell I wanted, though usually that was whatever mom made for lunch or dinner. I remember being able to polish off an entire small pizza on my own, with zero effect on my weight or ability to perform any physical task I wanted. I went to cookouts and ate multiple hot dogs and hamburgers till I was ready to burst. Still I had a 32-33" waist (back when they still made jeans in odd sizes).

By the time I left high school I was 5'11 and 180 pounds of solid muscle (R.I.P. MacCottter and thanks). I wasn't good enough to play soccer at Rutgers (sorry Mr. Lalas), but I still ran and lifted weights during my college years (though I offset it with plenty of booze and late-night pizzas). Leaving New Brunswick I was 6'1, 200 - a bit paunchy perhaps but still relatively healthy. After college, I had a job as a mailman where I walked endless miles 6 days a week, sang and played guitar for a band, and even found time to play amateur-league soccer for a season. It was here that I started to become less disciplined as the stress of work and lack of definitive life goals bore down on me, and I packed on a few more pounds to peak around 215-220 or so, but I was by all intents a very normal, healthy guy who perhaps ate too much food and drank too much beer, but hey who the hell doesn't do that in their early 20's.

I drove across country to CA in late 1994 and even then initially kept in decent shape by not driving to work and walking up and down that massive hill I lived on in San Francisco. I did try vegetarianism for about 4-5 years (starting a couple years before I left for CA) in an initial attempt to regulate my weight and stop getting sick all the time...but all that taught me was that chocolate and cheese were even more wonderful than I could even imagine. Side note to the FAT people thinking about becoming vegetarians because it seems like all the vegetarians are rail-thin : forget it. If it is not a truly heartfelt decision to change because you value animals in some basic fashion OR because it's some sort of religious obligation, then all you are is a fake picky eater. And as a faker you're gonna look for ways to substitute the bulk that meat provides by eating tons of crap that's no good for you. Hey - I could be wrong, it may work for you but I tried it, and in my opinion it's a bad idea unless it's politically motivated. Chances are if you're a real vegetarian you're a real picky eater anyway (nudge nudge wink wink knowutimean?) I eventually gave up the veggie lifestyle when I visited NJ one year and really could not resist having a large cheesesteak from Stella's, for which I paid...dearly. But man are those cheesesteaks good.

Then in the middle of 1995 something happened that changed the course of my life drastically - I remember at the time I was a vegetarian and had a slight lactose intolerance, which everyone found funny since I subsisted mainly on a diet of potatoes, Ramen noodles and whatever cheese thing I could get my hands on. For lunch I ate microwaved bean burritos and breakfast (if I had it) was jelly on white toast. Dietary genius I was not...plus all that stuff was cheap and I was constantly broke living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

At any rate one Sunday night I remember having some extra scratch so I blew it on a whole pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs and did the time-honored FAT guy thing by downing the whole thing in one sitting. Later that night I felt a stiffness in my right side, kind of like a cramp when you run too much. The cramp lasted all night and didn't let me sleep, but it wasn't excruciating, just uncomfortable. I called out sick to work, the pain went away around 9-10 AM and I slept all day. I woke up, ate some dinner, and was sitting on the couch when I got the distinct feeling that I was cold - not uncommon for SF, it's 65 degrees there pretty much year round. But this was different, no matter how many blankets I piled on I was still shivering. So I got in a hot bath, but that did little good. I decided it was probably some lactose-intolerance-related payback so I just went to bed early and shrugged it off.

The next day I woke up and initially felt fine so I went to work in Redwood Shores. However once I got there the "cold" feeling came back and I couldn't get warm, even with emergency blankets on me. I got someone to pick me up and I went home to bed again. Another day later and I wasn't better, but I was a contract worker without health insurance so I went to the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic to get checked out. They took my temperature which was running around 101 at this point, told me I had the flu, and sent me on my way.

A couple days later and I was getting worse and worse. My temperature was now hovering around 102-103 consistently, broken only by the Tylenol I was allowing myself here and there. I couldn't keep any food down, the most I could do was container after container of water and/or Gatorade. I kept waking up at night completely soaked in sweat and would shake so violently from chills that my roommates could hear it in the next room. I decided to go to the emergency room the next day.

SF General is a big busy hospital so it took me a while to get seen, though I don't really remember much because I was fairly delirious at this point. They too assumed I had the flu (after asking 100+ times if I had HIV or was a heroin user), hooked me up to IV fluids, and sent me on my way home. 2-3 days later I was back and begging them to find something wrong. This time they did a CT scan (which is murderous when you have a fever by the way), and finally found out what was wrong...

Now I'm sure you've heard of some people who have an unreal tolerance for pain, my grandfather was one of them. Toward the end he was so sick that he died because he didn't realize he was that sick. I have unfortunately inherited this condition, because that "cramp" I was talking about was my appendix bursting, and it had now been leaking stuff into my system for nearly 10 days - and I was none the wiser. I had three different blood-born pathogens in my system, a blockage in my liver, and I was going to die without emergency surgery. The last thing I really remember for the next week is calling my mom on the phone to tell her what was going on, and then helping them hoist me onto the table.

So I was bedridden for 10 days before the hospital, in SF General for 2 weeks, and then unable to move around very much for about a month after that. In that period of time I went from a big, strong, healthy guy of 225-230 pounds to a wasted mess at 165. I lost a huge percentage of my muscle mass. I remember taking the sheets off for the first time to walk out of the hospital bed down the hall and nearly crying because I couldn't believe that was what was left of my legs. Not to mention I had a gaping infected wound in my stomach that had to heal from the inside out. This time, right here, is the main reason why I got into the mess I'm in today.

After the recovery period I did manage to put weight on, but because I wasn't able to exercise, the initial weight gain was all fat. And to top it off, having had an incision go all the way through my abdominal wall like that destabilized my core so badly that sometimes even walking long distances put my back in excruciating pain (which you may now understand, is saying quite a bit). So exercising was out, and in my mind I still hadn't grown out of my 20-something eating habits. Put those together and it was a recipe for obesity - my weight shot up to 260. I did lose a bunch of weight when I joined Phrenik, but after I stopped working out 5-6 days a week my weight shot right back up to where it was and worse, peaking out at 275 at one point in 2008. At 6'1, that gave me a BMI of nearly 37 (40 is morbidly obese). One of the last things I remember my dad saying to me was "you ARE going to lose the weight, aren't you?". Little did either of us know that his untimely death a couple months later would trigger me to do just that. I know I'd said I'd get to the doctor thing in part 2, but it's been a long day and writing that was pretty exhausting, so forgive me for moving on...

Diet for Tuesday 9/1 :
Breakfast

• Fiber One Original cereal, 1 serving with 1/2 cup fat free milk
• 4 oz. orange juice w/vitamins
• one poppyseed bagel w/butter (my indulgence when I go to Oakland)
• two cups of coffee

Lunch

• Turkey sub from Ratto's (sweet roll, smoked turkey, cheddar cheese, mustard, lettuce, tomato, vinaigrette, cucumber, avocado)
• one 1.5 oz bag of Sun Chips Harvest Cheddar
• 20 oz. Coke zero

Dinner

• Turkey sandwich at home (yeah I like turkey) - two slices Trader Joe's Harvest Wheat bread (toasted), 4 slices deli turkey, 1 slice fat-free cheese (no mayo, no salt, nothing else)
• 3 large carrots, uncooked but peeled
• tons of water

Dessert

• 1 cup of 100 calorie Jell-o chocolate pudding

Exercise for Tuesday 9/1 :

• I take Amtrak from Sacramento to Oakland/Jack London Square and walk the 1 mile distance from the train station to my building downtown. I also walk the 1 mile back after work, and about 1/2 mile to get to Ratto's. All in all about 30 minutes of walking at around 3-3.5 mph. We'll get into this later in a discusssion on "making time", but sometimes the exercise is just out there waiting for you...