174

That is how many pounds I've lost since I started keeping track of my weight. I'm not entirely sure what I weighed at my heaviest other than it was close to 600. I remember seeing 598 on the scale at one point, but I didn't step back on it for months after that. My first recorded weight was 589, my weight today is 415. 174 pounds gone. I have to remind myself of this often, it keeps me motivated. One of the true struggles for me, or probably for anyone that got to that size, is that it takes a big drop in weight to really notice a difference. Especially when your brain is constantly trying to convince you to give up. When an average sized person loses 10 pounds it's usually pretty obvious, when a fat person loses 20 pounds you barely notice. Just look at the average weight loss commercial. "I lost 15 pounds and look totally different!". Screw...I mean good for you. I lost 100 pounds and no one really noticed. Now I've lost 174 and I still have a hard time seeing the difference. I feel it, but I still don't really see it. I suppose there's probably some fancy physcology word for that. I just know it's true and it sucks. Makes staying motivated difficult at times. Until I really think about it.

I've lost an average size person. I realized that today. I spent years existing with an average sized person on my shoulders. And I'm still packing around one more. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that sometimes. I lost an entire person. I'm not saying this to boast or brag, I'm saying this because I find it rather shocking. At 415 pounds I still need to lose a lot more to be "healthy", and to be happy, but I've already stepped out from under an entire person. Do you know how hard it is to simply function when you're packing around an entire person? To just do the basic necessities of living?

One of the biggest struggles for me over the years was that getting fatter and fatter kind of snuck up on me. This had a lot to do with depression, stress and just being lazy, among many other things, but it was gradual. It's not like I woke up one day and there was suddenly 175 pounds hanging around my  neck. It was a slow but steady process. A pound at a time. So I had time to adjust. To adjust and to ignore. Or justify. Or whatever it was I did for so many years. I honestly don't remember when I became truly obese. I can't pinpoint one particular day or month or year it happened. I do remember sometime around 2006 when I watched video of myself and honestly didn't recognize the person. It was a bit shocking to see this morbidly obese person crammed in a shirt that was two sizes too small waddle around the deck of a boat. I knew it was me, but I couldn't admit it was me. I didn't really look like that. It was the camera angle, it was the television, it was anything other than the truth. I have no idea what I weighed at that point, I hadn't been on a scale in years. I'm not sure when I hit 400 pounds the first time. It was a long time ago. I'm sure I was over that in the video. I avoided cameras for years, so there's not a lot of evidence to look back on. And unfortunately I can't find a link to that particular video.

Getting fat was easy. Our culture makes it easy. When I was younger I had a lot of jobs and hobbies that required energy. I would ride my bike 5 miles to work, push a lawn mower all day and then ride 5 miles home. And I still had energy. I would toss bails of hay around all day for fun. I was offered several jobs over the years because they knew I could lift, carry and move objects that most others couldn't. And I could do it all day long. And then the depression snuck in and I stopped working so much, yet I kept eating the same. I got fat. I got tired. I got more depressed. I ate more to deal with the depression and exert some level of control over my chaotic life. Instant loop. But think about just how easy it is. Don't want to cook? Order pizza. Straight to your door in well under an hour. Drive through and have instant food. Never mind the fact that the burger you just inhaled had 3500 calories in it. It was fast, cheap and easy. I was in a sporting goods store recently. It's a two story store specializing in athletic equipment. I couldn't find the stairway to the second floor but the escalators are right there and so are the elevators. Ponder that for a moment. A store that specializes in athletic equipment has two escalators instead of a stairway.

And it goes far deeper than that. We don't teach people how to cook anymore. And buying real food, that gets expensive. The processed, boxed, instant just add water crap is cheap. Sugar, chemicals, preservatives and mystery ingredients in a box, 5 for a dollar. Fresh fruit? Pardon me while I take out a small loan. But seriously, how many people really know how to cook anymore? How many of the recent generations have grown up on microwave dinners and takeout?  I know how to cook and I still find it challenging at times. The menu prep, the shopping, the thinking about what to make. It's so much easier to sit down with a menu and let someone else make it. Until you start to really think about it. What could you buy for the same price as that pizza? And how much better for you would it be?

When you finally realize how fat you've become and choose to do something about it, it's interesting to not only pay attention to how much you eat, but what you eat. While a calorie is a calorie on the surface, there's a bit more to it than that. The burgers and fries on the top of this photo, for about $20, has more calories and sodium in two burgers than pretty much everything in the bottom half. According to Burger King's website one whopper has 650 calories, 37 grams of fat, 11 grams of saturated fat, 1.5 grams of transfat, 910 mg of sodium and 60 mg of cholesterol. A medium order of fries has 410 calories and 570 mg of sodium. The American Heart Association recommends that Americans consume less than 1,500 mg/day sodium, which is the level with the greatest effect on blood pressure. There's 1,480 mg of sodium in one burger and a medium order of fries. I wonder what the sodium content is of every item in the lower photo? True, you have to cook, but you can do a lot with those ingredients. And it will go much further than a quick stop at Burger King. And fill your belly longer too.

Looking back I can somewhat pinpoint when my weight started to increase. I was living alone, didn't have a lot of room to cook or store food, was going to school full time and it was just easier to stop at the deli and buy food. Or hit McDonald's on the way home. Then go home and sit on my ass and watch television while doing homework. That was when the depression started to get really bad. I was (and still am) a "loner". I had no social life, no family around at the time, no hobbies and no active job. I slept and went to school and drank and ate. That was my day. Wake up, hit the convenience store for a pack of smokes, coffee and whatever passed for food in their hot box, off to school, hit the store at the bottom of the hill for lunch, the same for dinner. Then I'd go back to my little travel trailer I called home, do whatever homework I had to do and then go someplace and drink. Over the next few years that was my routine. The location changed but the habits didn't. And then I started working on boats. Pretty much all the food you can eat, limited exercise and no place to go. You can't cook your own food, or have anyplace to keep it, you eat what's in front of you or you don't eat. And you eat fast because you have other things to do. You don't think about the caloric content of what you're shoveling in, you just eat it. And you do that for several years. Until suddenly you're not. But the habits don't go away. And then you step on the scale and see 600 pounds. It sometimes seems like it just suddenly happened, but it really took the better part of 20 years. 20 years of bad habits, bad food and poor exercise.  But it was so easy. Easy not to think about it, easy not to cook, easy not to care.

Back when I travelled a lot I was always taken aback by the moving sidewalks in airports and the fact that people simply stepped on them and didn't move until they got to the other end. That really wasn't their intended function, they're supposed to speed you up while walking, but it's easy to just stand there and let the floor carry you along. I was often surprised by the type of people I would see getting rides on the electric carts from gate to gate. Not because they had to hurry, they simply didn't want to walk. I've seen people drive two blocks to the store to get beer and chips. Two blocks! How easy we've made life for ourselves. You don't even need to leave your house anymore if you have internet access. You can pay your bills, shop, talk to friends, all without stepping foot out your door. We put a fast food joint on every corner and encourage you to drive instead of walk. And then we wonder why our society is so fat. We wonder why and how we gained that 5, 25, 200 pounds. It's easy.

It's been a three year battle to drop that average person. It took close to twenty to put it on. So all things considered I suppose I can't complain. I put pants on the other day that barely fit when I bought them almost 10 years ago, not they're loose. So there's that. I found an old belt that I haven't had on in about the same amount of time, it fits now. I've had to change the way I think about food. It's no longer a reward or something I use to satisfy other aspects of my life. I think about what I eat now. Not only what I'm eating, but how much of it. Sure, I still have junk on occasion, but it's one donut instead of a dozen. I haven't eaten an entire pizza by myself in a couple years. I try to take the stairs instead of the elevator and I get up more. Basically I do the opposite of what I did for years. I'm still trying to like vegetables, the struggle is real with that one.

I wish it was as easy for us to stay healthy as it is for us to get fat. What if, instead of a McDonald's on every corner there was a produce stand? What if we put stores closer together so we could walk instead of being forced to drive? Or if we made bicycling more viable (and safer)? How about community gardens instead of corner convenience stores? Or if we rearranged grocery stores so the fresh produce was more prominent than the bags of chips and candy bars. Or what if instead of making sure kids memorize the Pythagorean Theorem we made sure every graduating student knew at least 5 healthy recipes and how to make them? What if, instead of stigmatizing the obese, instead of ridiculing them and making them the punchline in a joke, we actually worked as a society to help them? Does an airport really need a moving sidewalk? Does a sporting goods store actually need escalators? Can we get salad delivery instead of "freaky fast" sandwiches filled with processed meat? Maybe a gym membership should be cheaper than Netflix.