On Changes

So I've been trying to eat healthier and exercise a little over the past three weeks. It's not making much of a difference, but I'm really just hitting my stride. Some of the changes have been drastic, other's not so much. So I decided to take a minute here to lay out what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong.

My first mistake was that I sort of set out without a plan. I don't honestly know exactly what I weigh. I know it's over 350 lbs. but under 400 lbs. Best guess was that I was somewhere around 365 or 370. I don't know what I want my final weight to be. I remember weighing 302 lbs. on my 21st birthday and being fat. I remember weighing 219 lbs. my freshman year of high school and being fat. I remember weighing 110 lbs. in 4th grade and being fat. So I guess what I'm saying is I've always remembered being fat. And I'm pretty sure I'm always going to be fat. So what I'm working with is degrees of fatness. So I guess if could get back down to about 250 lbs. I'd probably consider myself to be in a happy fat sort of zone even though most people would still just consider it to be just fat.

So now that's a lot of weight to lose. But since it's not my primary goal anyway it's not like I'm focusing on that. I'm not even weighing myself. Somewhere down the road I'm going to say, "Hey I think I'm there" and I'm going to get on a scale. If I'm 300 lbs., fine I'll still be happy. If I'm 250 lbs. great I'll be even happier. If I'm still up around 350 lbs. Well, who the fuck cares, at least I tried. My primary goal is just to get healthier. To eat better. To exercise more. And to avoid surgery, or put myself in as good of a position as possible to survive surgery.

So I've cut down on the food. Sometimes I ate a lot, but mostly I just ate wrong. Stuff that wasn't healthy, stuff that should have killed me a long time ago. Sometimes I ate too much and ate wrong. Let me share with you a brief story from about two months ago.

So I'm coming back from picking up some paperwork and running some errands. It's 2:30 in the afternoon and I haven't had a thing to eat all day. This is sort of normal. I happened to be on the road so I stopped at McDonald's. This isn't something I did a lot, but something I did far too much. For lunch that day I had a double quarter pounder with cheese (710 calories) a large order of fries (500 calories) a ten piece chicken nuggets (460 calories) two apple pies (540 calories) and a large vanilla shake (1,100 calories). If you're broken out the calculators to add that all up I'll save you the trouble, that's 3,350 calories. Of shit. Now it's not like I didn't know I was doing this. It's just that even now I don't grasp the full concept of calories. Last Wednesday, by my closest guess, I consumed 1,100 calories primarily made up of apple juice and grapes and burned just over 200 calories on the treadmill. If I consumed the same amount of calories of healthy food instead of shit I assume it would mean I was healthier, but would it affect my weight at all? Yesterday for instance I had two servings of pasta with just a splash of olive oil. If I measured right that puts me at about 500 calories. For dinner I had a grilled piece of chicken with a little adobo seasoning. If I measured right that's another 200 calories, I also had some grilled asparagus with that would add somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 calories so let's round up and call it a hundred which puts me at 800 calories for the day. Here's the catch. I also drank close to a liter of apple juice. Tag another 500 calories on right there. So now I'm at 1,300 calories. But not all that hungry.

Today on the other hand I've had six triscuits with reduced fat cheese which puts me at 180 calories, call it 200 to be safe. And some peanuts which add 170 calories. Call it 200 to be safe again. Add to that two 10 fl. oz. apple juices and I'm up around 700 calories for the day. And friggin starving to death. Things is I'm not counting calories before hand, which I'm sure will bite me in the ass later. So yesterday I ate enough that I wasn't hungry. And I think it worked out pretty well calorie wise. Today something tells me it won't. But either way, if what I'm eating now is half of what I ate in that one meal at McDonald's...well I'd imagine I'm doing pretty well.

Last week I was eating a lot of fresh mozzarella and roasted red peppers on garlic crackers. Each piece came out to be about 120 calories and I would eat 4 or maybe 5 pieces along with some olives. To me that didn't seem like too much. But I guess when you look at it, it really is. Which means I've got some decisions to make. Some really tough decisions.

I was standing on line at Best Buy with my kid brother yesterday when he said, quite out of nowhere, "Mom says you haven't eaten bread in ten days." I had to ask him to repeat it twice to make sense of it, and then I told him quite honestly that I had eaten crackers which were pretty much the same thing and that I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich just the other day. He still looked confused so I explained that there was a week or two stretch in there where I hadn't eaten bread because I wasn't making cold cut sandwiches and I wasn't eating in restaurants and I wasn't eating fast food. So no, I wasn't sitting around munching on bread randomly but it also wasn't like I just stopped eating bread. He still looked confused so I explained what I was doing. Told him I wasn't drinking soda, or eating fast food or take-out, no fried foods, and nothing with heavy sauces. Certainly no deserts or junk food. He asked if I could eat ice cream, and I told him quite honestly that I could eat whatever the hell I wanted, but that I probably shouldn't eat ice cream. His response? "If I couldn't eat ice cream I'd probably want to die."

Well said boy-o. Well said indeed.