So where was I? Oh yeah...I was talking about the Fall of 1996 and the last time a scale I was standing on had a reading of under 200 pounds. As you might recall from my last post, I had ventured over 200 pounds for a brief spell but then lost about ten pounds over the course of a semester I spent walking around a campus overseas. Unfortunately, the dip below 200 didn't last long.
Over the course of the next fifteen very sedentary years, I watched the numbers on the scale go up consisently and drastically. After a couple of years teaching English, I was still hanging around 215, so I had yet to find myself in the "obese" category (around 220 for someone my height and build), but I was gaining on it (literally). In 1998, I walked into corporate America, sat down at my desk, and within two years I was up into the 230s. By the time my daughter Mary was born (three years later), I found myself at around 260.
Prior to Mary's birth, I did have an "I am going to be a dad and need to do something about my health...right now!" moment, and I quit smoking about six months before she arrived. Then, about six months after she was born, I came to realize that I also needed to lose weight (still hovering in the 260 range), and I actually got myself back down to about 210 pounds again...208 to be exact. This was the result of strict adherence to the South Beach Diet for about a year. That said, though, somewhere in the middle of the weight loss, I thought it would be wise (it wasn't!) to start smoking again (but "just for a little while"). I actually justified smoking over being obese, and I had the intent to quit smoking again "once I found myself back in the 100s" again. Pretty good logic, no?
At the end of the day, my trip away from obesity was short-lived, and to be honest I can't remember what triggered me back to my old eating habits...which, basically, was something like "I'll eat as much I what, when I want it" while hiding from everyone how much I actually ate and how often I was eating. Between fast food places, candy machines at work, bags of chips at home (these were a few of my favorite things), coupled with the days' "normal" meals (yes, fast food sandwiches became snacks), I once again journeyed back to the 260s and then actually surpassed them to find myself in the high 270s. In fact, in June 2009, after returning home from a cruise, the scale read 278, the highest number I've ever seen reflected on a scale on which I was standing.
From that moment, I panicked and then found myself on crash diets here and there, but nothing stuck...or, more appropriately, I stuck with nothing. I would lose fifteen or twenty pounds here and there, and then they would come back...and this was the cycle for the next few years. The reason why there aren't many pictures of me from this era is because I guess I was hiding from cameras when I saw them...and I would always seek cover (either consciously or subconsciously) behind people or objects in the photographs that managed to capture my now rather large (okay, obese) frame. Here are a couple of shots that somehow got by the goalie, though...
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June 2009 - At my top weight of 278 (Time to Start Crash Dieting) |
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December 2011 - Around 275 Pounds (Not much Progress with the Crash Diets) |
So at the end of this fifteen-year period (from 1996 to 2011), I didn't recognize the guy in the mirror as a former college and professional athlete. Instead, I saw an obese man who lacked power over food and cigarettes, who was too lazy to get out and exercise, and who was ultimately dying a slow, unhealthy death for which he would be deemed the primary cause.
But on November 1, 2011, an unfortunate event finally lit a spark under that obese guy, and he decided right then and there that it was time to change his life...but we'll get into that in the next post.
Until then, enjoy your journey...
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