Why is Everything So Heavy?

Three hundred twenty-five.  In terms of money, it's not a lot.  In terms of weight, it seemed insurmountable.  How had I gotten there? The question burned in my mind every time I saw a photograph of myself or took a look in the mirror.  

I never felt like I overindulged in food.  I knew, of course, that I didn't moderate my choices of food at all, but I felt like I had normal sized portions compared to other people, and only occasionally snacked.  In short, I couldn't square the amount I ate with how large I'd gotten.  Yet here I was.

I was constantly exhausted and just generally had let myself go.  At this point in my life, despite knowing full well the effects of smoking and overeating, I just didn't care.  I figured there was nothing I could do that would every have any kind of noticeable impact.  Diets were too strict and I was always hungry, and found them hard to stick to because it took an inordinate amount of time to see any appreciable benefit.  

At one point during my experiments with different diets, I took the step of eliminating soda.  That alone netted me about a 35 pound loss, but over the course of about six months, and for me the benefit compared to the sacrifice wasn't enough of a value to be worth it. All it took was just that 'I'm going to just have one sip' moment and I was back to drinking soda within days.

Every year I felt worse, looked worse, and had even less energy.  I can remember sitting on the couch watching people on TV and movies thinking 'My God I'm getting tired just watching these people exert themselves.'  It was a downward spiral, and the only thing that changed was my clothing sizes just kept slowly inching larger.

I can still remember one particular night at work when I had been issued a new uniform.  The shirt was an XXL and when buttoned up it was snug.  When I sat down, I began to fear that buttons would begin to launch across the office. When I stood up, the size 46 pants were uncomfortable and began to ride up.  If I pulled them down a bit, they squeezed my hips uncomfortably.  I knew I had to do something and fast.  I had zero enthusiasm for life because I simply wasn't able to enjoy it.

It was around this time that I became aware of the ketogenic diet, and I figured since I'd already tried counting calories and watching portion sizes to no avail, this was just different enough that it might work.  I was hopeful, but not convinced.  I did enough research to learn the basics of the ketogenic diet, and to learn the difference between 'dirty keto' and strict.  I knew that micromanaging my nutrient intake was something I wasn't prepared to do, but 'dirty keto' which entails simply limiting your net carbohydrate intake, was something I could manage.  Instead of tracking every last nutrient, I only had to watch one figure.  I was so unhealthy at that point that strict keto seemed pointless.  I knew I was on borrowed time.  Either my heart was going to give out or my sanity would.  I could worry about the nutrients later. 

I had just started a new job which involved a lot of walking.  Roughly ten miles a day to be honest, with only short rest breaks scattered throughout the day.  I began by eliminating soda entirely, and calculating the net carb content of everything I ate.  I set an arbitrary goal of 20 net carbs, and made it a hard limit for myself.  If I was still hungry, too bad. At first, I was.  I craved chips and candy bars and all the little treats that I knew were bad for me. Somehow I resisted.  The funny thing was, after the first week or so, I no longer craved those things.  I was full much faster with smaller portions, and I felt satisfied. My body was beginning to enter ketosis and adapt to burning fat for fuel instead of carbs.  

I began to experiment and find ways of substituting things for the foods I missed, and altering recipes to be compliant with the diet.  It was easy enough, and the foods were actually very tasty.  I found that I wasn't missing out on nearly as much as I thought I would be, making it much easier to stick to.

I had only been on the diet for about a month when I suddenly began to realize that my clothes were fitting better.  Not only that, but they were actually starting to feel...loose.  I was in disbelief.  This was more success than I'd ever experienced with any other attempt to lose weight.  And it was far faster than I'd expected.
  When I first stepped onto a scale to check my progress...I was down to 295.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing. 

For the first time in forever I had hope.  I actually felt like I could do this.  I could achieve the one thing I've always wanted and get myself back into shape.  I kept experimenting with new recipes, tried new things, and held fast to my 20 net carb a day allotment.  After the first month, things began to accelerate.  It seemed like every month or so I'd drop a clothing size. I remember calling my wife from the walmart fitting room, literally crying because I fit into size 40 jeans.  Not long after, I repeated the process with 38 inch jeans.  I was back down to my high school weight.  I was wearing a large hoodie at the time.  

A month or so after that I was in a medium hoodie and size 36 pants. This process repeated over and over.  And then it happened.  Approximately 11 months after I'd begun this journey, I stepped on the scale one morning and it read 139. It's about there that my body reached a plateau and stabilized. I've now kept that weight off and remained (with normal day to day variations) at the same weight.  I've relaxed my hard limit just a bit in the meantime.  I try to still remain at or near 20 carbs daily, but since I'm now much more physically active, that helps to offset any overages.

I've discovered not only a whole new world of food, but a whole new part of me.  I now spend my free time hiking or working out on the exercise bike when I can.  I've been able to spend so much more time outdoors and rediscover what it feels like to be alive.  

This of course is the short version.  There's so much that happened in my life in the interim, but I'll leave all that for future posts.  I want to dive more into my keto journey and my life journey. For now, this is a short introduction to why I refuse to accept that anything is truly impossible.  It's also proof that no matter what situation you find yourself in, things can get better!

Never give up on your dreams.

What Does It All Mean?

Life has a peculiar way of ignoring your plans and making up the rules and the route as you go along.  It's kind of like being stuck in a rudderless boat on the rapids.  Sure, you can stick your hand in the water and try to affect a change, but ultimately the current is going to take you where it will.  

The tricky part isn't so much trying to alter your course as it is learning to accept that you're probably not going to take the route you planned and will likely end up where you didn't expect.  You can point in whatever direction you really want to but at the end of the day, you might as well just enjoy the trip and take from it what you can.

Life really doesn't give you anything other than opportunities.  Plenty of people these days seem to feel like they're entitled to something and the universe owes them some debt of gratitude, but in actuality it's up to us to find whatever it is we can to be grateful about.  For some that's harder than it is for others.  Life itself is something to be grateful for.  Everything between the beginning and end is just a chapter.  Not the whole story.  This is a difficult lesson to master and sadly a lot of people never do. 

It's not my intent to sound like a sage master of all things, just pointing out some observations I've made along the way.  For a long time, I was one of those people who didn't see the light through the trees, and felt like life was slighting me.  It was a lie.  A prison of the mind, entirely of my own construction.  Am I perfect? Hell no.  But I am observant, and I've learned in my 45 years on this planet to see things just a little differently than I used to.  This blog is probably going to be seen by nobody but myself, and I'm ok with that.  If someone does stumble upon it, maybe I'll leave their day a little better.  Maybe something I say will make them smile, or think, or even change their mind. Ultimately, it's just a place to talk about where I am, how I got here, where I'm going, and some of the more interesting things I've discovered on the way here. 

So now that I've talked about the why, it's time to talk about the 'who'. 

I was born in 1977. I'd say it was a good year but to be brutally honest I don't remember it, so there's that.  I grew up in a middle-class home in Maryland with two hard working parents.  As an only child, I had to develop a pretty active imagination in order to stay entertained most of the time. That's not to say I didn't have a lot of friends, it's just that in the pre-iphone, pre-internet era there were times when, and this hurts me emotionally to say, I had to create my own excitement.

One of my earliest memories is that of my mom reading golden books to me as she tucked me in for the night.  Our rule was she would read me as much as I wanted, provided I would try to follow along with her finger across the page.  As a direct result of that, I started reading very early.  Around two years old I would occasionally pick up the newspaper and start reading off headlines.  

I owe my love of reading to this head start. Truly a fantastic gift to be given at such a young age.  In fact, as I grew older there were very few times I didn't have a book in hand.  As I got older, I recall McDonalds trips on Friday evening followed by a trip to our local used bookstore to pick out a new stack to get me through.  That place was so large that in my mind's eye I might as well have been in the Library of Alexandria. If the Library of Alexandria had $1.50 paperbacks.

My dad imparted a different set of gifts to me.  I still remember the night he came home with my first Atari 2600, triggering a love for video games that lingers to this day.  He was an incredible artist, and I inherited his passion for photography and his passion for learning about history; two things that go together like ice cream and chocolate syrup. 

I chose this analogy because not only is it true, but my late childhood is where I began to struggle with my weight.  At age 9 I had a horrible fight with chicken pox and began to waste away. I had no appetite at all and as it progressed I became extremely emaciated.  I can remember the doctor telling my mom specifically that if I wanted to eat, I should be free to eat anything I wanted. He was actually seriously concerned that I was in danger from lack of nutrition.  My mom then began to offer me food constantly, and would stop whatever she was doing to make me anything I wanted.  The problem was, it never stopped.

As I got older I was always the kid in the husky sized jeans.  By the time I reached middle school and high school, I wasn't yet what I would consider fat but I was definitely on the larger side.  I remember wearing size 38 jeans and XL shirts at that age.  As I entered the working world and got married, my weight increased even more with each year.  I spent most of my first twenty years in the work force in the car sales business, which definitely lends itself to a largely sedentary lifestyle, fueled by energy drinks and candy bars.

After 19 years of marriage and work, I had managed to tip the scales at around 325 pounds.  I was close to size 48 pants, and XXL shirts were beginning to feel a little snug.  I was also smoking around two packs of cigarettes a day.  All in all I was in terrible shape.  I had zero energy, and taking a flight of stairs required a tremendous amount of energy.  I dreaded having to get up to go outside.  

I'd made a few cursory attempts to lose weight but I nothing really worked and I figured that nothing ever really would.  I was resigned that I would have a short, fat, tired life and that's just what it was going to be for me. 

The very day I realized my size 46 pants were becoming uncomfortable I committed to myself to try one more time.  I drew a line in the sand, and it was size 48 pants.  I can remember telling myself that I just refused to gain any more weight.  I wanted my life back.  I wanted to have the energy to do something other than sit on my couch. I wanted a reset on my life.  I had managed to quit smoking by switching to vaping, and that alone made me feel a little better.  My lung capacity began to improve and I had a little more energy.  I realized that if I could make that one change, that I could probably make more dramatic ones.

It was then that I read an article about the Ketogenic diet. The claims were pretty bold, and there were a lot of naysayers, but it looked like something I could work with.  That was the day that my life began to change.  

Interested yet? If not that's cool, thanks for reading this far.  If you are, stick around, it gets better. Much better!