Still Athletic, but...

As I began my last post, if you're wondering who that skinny guy is in the picture...it's me again! In fact, I think at this point (early 1990s) I was even lighter than I was back when playing college baseball. I'm not sure because I never thought about my weight in the past, but I would guess that I weighed somewhere between 150 and 160 in this shot.

 

So what had I been up to since the shortened college baseball "career" ended? Well, it turned out I was a pretty decent golfer,  and I actually left Rollins College after my sophomore year to pursue a career in professional golf. To transform a ten-year story into a couple of sentences, in short, I eventually came to find out that I wasn't quite decent enough to make it on the PGA Tour. Yes, I knocked around on the minitours (golf's minor leagues) for a number of years, and I held some decent golf club professional / instruction jobs; but at the end of it all, I wanted to compete. As we all know, though, a very elite few get to compete on the biggest stages, and it just wasn't in the cards (or in my driver) to make it with the big boys.

During this decade, however, I still kept in relatively good shape physically. Walking a golf course (roughly five miles) a few times a week and hitting literally thousands upon thousands of practice balls will certainly keep the belly relatively flat. That said, though, during this stretch, I drank a little too much - which can be counterproductive to one's flat belly (as well as one's putting stroke) - and in 1987 I started up the worst habit I ever started up...smoking. Yuck!

Needless to say, although it wasn't immediately apparent, my downward slide to terrible health progressed steadily. With smoking added to my repetoire, any chance of getting out and running again (although I had no desire) was gone. I tried playing in a basketball league for a while, but I couldn't even get up and down the court without wheezing with my smoker's lungs. So even though I weighed less than I had in 1985, I was actually in worse shape because my ability to undertake true cardiovascular exercise had disappeared.

And then things started getting even worse. Although I stayed in the golf business part-time until 1996, I went back to finish my last two years of college in 1993 (finished in '94) and then went back for my Master's Degree in 1995 (finished in '96). As an English major, my life became a bit more sedentary (with the reading...and reading...and reading some more), and little by little, my weight increased at a slow and steady pace. The picture below - taken in 1996 at the beginning of a semester overseas - is probably the first time I was photographed weighing over 200 pounds.

 

I weighed about 205 when I left for England (a couple of days earlier), and my recollection of this is solid because I was shocked about the scales tipping over 200 for the first time in what had been my previously fairly skinny life.  What's strange is that even though nobody even knew I had gotten this heavy, I was also embarrassed about being over 200...how can one be embarrassed about something that nobody knows about? Those of you who are or have been heavy know exactly what I'm talking about. Those of you who aren't or have never been heavy, just be thankful...trust me.

Interestingly enough, even though I ate like a horse when I was there, because of the incredible amount of walking around the university during the semester, as well as climbing up and down three flights of stairs to get to and from my room multiple times per day, I actually returned to the USA at 195 pounds; and that I remember because 1996 was the last time I stepped on a scale that told me I weighed less than 200 pounds...but we'll get more into my trip to obesity in my next post.

Until then, enjoy your journey...