Archive for the ‘My Diet History’ Category
Are You A “New Year’s Resolution” Type Of Person?
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Most retailers have Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season, but the health and fitness industry has New Year’s week and pretty much the rest of January as they celebrate a sharp increase in sales and memberships. Gotta love those impulse shoppers!!!
I’ve left a few gyms in my wake which had had the opportunity to laugh all the way to the bank, wad of cash in hand, knowing they just signed up another sucker who would lose interest in a month’s time.
Are you like me? You give yourself that big pep talk, and you take that long hard narcissistic self-pitying look at yourself as you wallow over your past failures, and you promise… and I mean you PROMISE that this time you’re gonna go through with it, you’re gonna stick with it, and you do all that visualization of what you picture yourself looking like in 6 months, 9 months, a year’s time. You even calculate the number of pounds you’re going to lose… “let’s see - if I lose even just 5 pounds a month - hmmm… wow, in 6 months I’ll be 30 pounds lighter!”
The problem is, you’ve gone through this before. How many times have you made and then failed to keep your New Year’s resolution to lose weight, get into shape, or improve your health? How many times have you squandered hundreds of dollars on gym memberships or fitness equipment just to let it go to waste? How many infomercial products have you sent away for? Sh*t! Do you know how many fitness gadgets, videos, and dvd’s I have laying around my house? I have a decent treadmill in my room which makes a great cat perch and clothes rack. I’m into the thousands of dollars now in wasted gym memberships and fad diet programs.
WHEN WILL IT END?!!!
Most yoyo diet folks seem to do their pilgrimage to diet/exercise hell around New Year’s. Personally, my calendar revolves around hockey season.
Right around February/March I do my empty promise pep talk and visualization crap, then in a desperate effort to get into shape (because I didn’t do sh*t all summer!) I get all Jane Fonda around Septemberish. Ok, I know… Jane Fonda is sooooo 1980. Am I really that old? Well, whatever! I get all gung ho “gotta get in shape for hockey” a month before the season gets into full swing, as though a few weeks on an exercise bike is really going to reverse the effects of years of sloth and fast food!
I just got the official email a couple days ago. Hockey season officially starts in 3 weeks. Yeah, THREE WEEKS! And though I did manage to lose 25 pounds since last season ended, I’ve gone into full anxiety mode once again.
Can anybody relate to this?
Setting Goals: A Reverse of Milestones
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
This is a picture of my big fat ass taken at a tournament in February ‘08. I weighed +/- 252 pounds at the time, though when I bought these hockey pants new in 1996, I weighed somewhere around 185. So the answer to your question is, “no, they’re not supposed to look that tight.”
I hit many milestones on my way to 254 pounds. Probably the most memorable was the 200 pound mark. I recall telling my best friend, “Please just shoot me and put me out of my misery if I ever get to 200 pounds.” Well, I lived, as you can plainly see by the fact that you’re reading this post.
At the time I made that statement, I was still captive to whatever it was that drove me to go on my first diet at 161 pounds. I hated everything about myself at the time, so it was easy to blame my misery on my weight. You know the story, “if I only weighed X number of pounds, I will finally be happy.” Isn’t that what every eating disorder self-abuser says? So after my Richard Simmons diet fiasco which left me at 198 pounds, I was two pounds away from what I perceived as the end of any self worth.
From that point, I did manage to exercise off a few pounds to get myself down to 177, but as life played out, it was all “up” hill from there.
So here’s a list of weight goal milestones I’d like to see as I descend back down the fat chick ladder:
Eating For Comfort and Choosing A Plan
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Oddly, it wasn’t until AFTER becoming obese on Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal program that I truly began to eat for comfort. This survival mechanism more or less solidified my place on the obesity wall of fame. WTF? Heck, if I’m gonna be fat, I might as well derive what little pleasure there is in it, right?
I am convinced that every person’s dietary needs are different, as well as their metabolisms. This is why the diet industry is so dangerous. There’s this assumption that a person who is x-number of pounds overweight needs to go on y-diet plan. As I’d learned from some of my other diet failures, this cookie cutter mentality can have disastrous results (more…)
How Richard Simmons F*cked Up My Life
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Now before I start ragging on Richard, I want to make it clear that I take full responsibility for being a gullible stupid fool to buy into his BS. Richard is living out the American dream of marketing a product and making a killing off end-of-their-rope morbidly obese people. Good for him. I hope he enjoys his fortune. But I, for one, will forever kick myself in the ass for buying his product. Shame on me for buying the snake oil. Shame on me for being sucked in by all those teary eyed testimonials. Shame on me for thinking I was FAT to begin with. Oh what I wouldn’t give to weigh 161# today.
Up until that fateful day in January 1992, I had NEVER been on a diet. I had seen the failures of dieting all around me. I had friends in high school who practically starved themselves to death, I’d seen relatives try every plan and pill out there, I saw my best friend’s mom constantly running back to Weight Watchers or whatever program she happened to find… just to get skinny, get fat, get skinny, get fat over and over again. I was thoroughly convinced that diets were faddish scams designed to keep people in “the system” much in the way our social welfare system works. I often said to myself, “I’ll never go on a diet!” So what changed? What sick message penetrated my brain to cause my reason and logic to lapse? What the hell was I thinking?!!!
I suppose it doesn’t matter much anymore. Whatever it was that made me so uncomfortable and miserable at 161# is gone. This is going to sound strange, but I’m more comfortable in my skin and with my body image at age 41 and 244# than I was at age 25 and 161#! Why is that? For crying out loud, back then I was terrified to wear shorts in public! Now I could care less what other people are thinking. If only I weighed 161# today, I might actually look good in those shorts! WTF!
How Did I Get So F*cking Fat?!!!
Saturday, March 29th, 2008MY HISTORY
I was skinny for all of 7.3 seconds of my life. No, not really, but close enough. I was a normal size child up through 1st grade. And as much as I hate the victim mentality of finding someone to blame, as children, we really are at the mercy of our caretakers. My grandparents were not skinny people. Actually, they were quite chunky and robust. But being from their generation, they seemed to view their overweightness as a sign of good living so-to-speak. As young people, they lived at a time where poor people were skinny and sickly looking, but those who had food to eat were regarded as being “healthy.” So they looked at their only grandchild, me, and saw a sickly kid (even though I wasn’t), and they made it a point to fatten me up. Of course, I didn’t mind all the attention and wonderful food I was fed. I seem to remember Kentucky Fried Chicken, Red Barn, Arthur Treacher’s, and Howard Johnson’s being the main staples of my diet. Then back home at Grandma’s house was grilled cheese, mac and cheese, cube steaks, and lots of potatoes.Add to all that the praise I received for fattening up. I remember how big of a deal my Grandma made about the fact that they were buying my clothes in the “husky boys” section at Sears. Instead of embarrassment and shame, I was treated with praise for being a fat kid. This only confounded the problem as I faced ridicule in school. I was taught to believe that being fat was a good thing, so when kids made fun of me, I was blindsided and confused.
But just to get things straight here… I was not the same size of fat kid you see today. I mean, what in God’s name are people doing to their kids today?!!! Kids today are obese… grossly obese. I am floored that there are 200# 4th graders. So even though my grandparents succeeded at “fattening” me up, they didn’t try to kill me in the process like so many parents are doing today. (more…)
