Fit2Fat2Fit (6 page)

Volunteering to go grocery shopping instead of cleaning the house

Making date night a movie-in night because I am too miserable to go out after a food challenge

I'd convinced myself that the first half of my journey was purely physical. Like dating, marriage, and parenting, however, becoming fat walloped me upside the head—and I wasn't prepared for any of it.

The physical side of becoming overweight goes well beyond, say, the sheer amount of trans fat you consume or the pounds you gain. The bodily effects are enormous: added weight gives equal favor to expanding waist, hips, and bottom, all growing proportionally (or in the case of my bottom, not so proportionally). For guys, you even need to deal with unexpected man boobs!

As the pounds did their job, I began to realize that my body was not only expanding, but moving more slowly. On top of that, I had been introduced to chafing. Honestly, though, I was more afraid of potential stretch marks than I was of chafed skin, so I would put Lynn through the horrible experience of “rubbing the Buddha” with her pregnancy stretch-mark cream.

As the months went by, the chafing appeared more frequently. My man boobs, once the subject of a self-deprecating anecdote on my weekly blog, gathered copious amounts of sweat when I did something as innocuous as taking out the garbage, and the sides of my pectoral region began to feel inflamed.

Worse was the act of walking. My wife probably thought I was getting too lazy to even hand her the drink sitting on the table before me, and she was right: I dreaded physical movement of any kind, but especially genuine exertion.

One thing was painfully clear. If I, as a budding fat person, was already dreading a walk up the stairs, how did my overweight clients feel when I ruthlessly subjected them to 25 push-ups and an equal number of sit-ups in front of unsupportive onlookers at the gym?

As the growing feeling of exhaustion exacerbated the chafing and physical pain, I lost my will to contribute at home. Prior to gaining weight, I was an overachiever in the household. I did most of the cooking (to make sure I was “eating healthy”—but it earned me brownie points with my wife despite that selfish motivation) and tried to be as helpful as I could with my family.

With every added pound, both the effort and the desire to be helpful slipped away. Scarier, the guilt I initially felt at putting the household upkeep on Lynn seeped away too. I'm ashamed to admit that I was comfortable lying on the couch while she balanced housework, children, and dinner preparation after her own long day at work.

Early on, when she asked me to help out, I would begrudgingly agree, although she'll tell you I complained about it with much more vigor than I put into the actual activity. But as time passed, and I gained more weight, Lynn moved from open frustration to quiet resignation. I knew which was worse.

I sat on the couch, too tired to play with my two-year-old girl, too hesitant to invite an extra bout of chafing in my oversized body. And once I'd moved from the living room to the bedroom each evening, fluffing my pillow was about the extent of what I could do in bed.

If my home life provided countless reminders of how physically unprepared I was for going from Fit2Fat, my work life supplemented the emotional and mental evidence of the same. And in a medical workplace, the reminders and evidence never leave you.

In my line of work as a neuromonitoring tech, scrubs are a daily requirement. On some days, the usual cloth scrubs aren't available. When I was fit, the occasional need for paper scrubs never caused problems. As I gained weight, however, paper scrubs became problematic, both for chafing and durability. I knew I had gained more weight than I had expected to when the XL scrubs were uncomfortably tight.

As I set up in the operating room one day, bending over to adjust some settings, I heard a gigantic rip: my large bottom had caused my pants to rip in half. I glanced down at the flimsy remains and was horrified—and grateful that I had not gone commando that day!

Worse still, my workday had only begun. I perfected the art of using one hand to hold my pants together while doing my assigned tasks to get through the rest of the surgery. I couldn't help but laugh at myself for my predicament. This was exactly the type of thing I had imagined would happen—almost comical experiences in which my body had clearly outgrown what I was used to. It was like being a teenager again: awkward.

I had approached gaining weight with the thought that any strain would be related to embarrassing situations like this. I had visions of dribbling food down my front, or trying to wear T-shirts so small that they resembled midriff tops and I looked like a drag queen.

And yet—despite my anticipation of such events—my embarrassment over them was palpable, extending far beyond the hospital doors.

I sensed societal judgment wherever I went. If I ordered a large meal at a restaurant, I could see the server looking me up and down (and not in a “How you doin'?” sort of way). There was a look of exasperation when a fellow airline passenger realized that I'd be sitting next to him or her. And when family and friends saw me huddled on the couch and out of breath, even my closest supporters shook their heads or rolled their eyes.

It helped a bit that I had expected the embarrassment part. As hurt as some of the judgments made me feel, I wasn't surprised that my physical changes would elicit reactions, whether teasing or serious, and I felt that I could let any hurt feelings roll off my stretch-marked back. What I
hadn't
expected was the fear.

Back at work that day, as I sheepishly made my way to the pile of XXL scrubs (“graduating” from XL), I heard a commotion down the hall. As I exited the room, I could see that one of the other people working in the hospital was in distress not far away. Someone like me, I thought, though I didn't know him well. This person, who was severely overweight, had collapsed just outside the front door. I found myself selfishly thinking that this could have been me.

Staff members rushed around, trying to aid the man, who had apparently suffered a major heart attack. It was so bad that the crew helping out had to revive him. I wasn't a part of the efforts to save him, but the impact of this event was greater than I'd ever expected.

The medical implications of my weight gain had been Mom's greatest worry when I first opened up to her about my plan. And on a weekly basis, I would be inundated with questions, not only from her but from friends, the doctors and nurses I worked with, and even strangers, about the danger to my heart, liver, and kidneys, and potential risk for diabetes. Most people asked me about the extra stress on my body and voiced their concerns loud and clear.

I always thought I would be fine, especially at the outset. It was only for six months, after all. When my wife would mention health concerns, I'd tell her that by the time my body was truly at risk, I'd already be losing the weight as quickly as I'd gained it.

But that was before the incident at the hospital. I had no doubt that my coworker's heart attack was directly tied to the excess weight he was carrying. Indeed, with my concern about ripped scrubs, I had been living in the shallow end of the pool. And I was in denial.

From that point on, with every weigh-in, the vision of small shirts and ripped scrubs was replaced by the thought of the very real danger I was putting my body through. This wasn't just a cute blog story for strangers to follow.

I'd spent most of my adult life trying to convince family, friends, and clients that they were playing Russian roulette with their health. And now it was my turn to play. Experiencing the game was a much more difficult task than I'd realized.

And with every cheeseburger or lazy day on the couch, I was getting farther and farther removed from myself emotionally. I was tense. I lost my patience easily. I wasn't happy anymore.

Megan's e-mail opened my eyes, allowing me to see past my own fears, and helped me remember the reason I'd started this project in the first place. Besides, I was already accomplishing one of my chief goals—to inspire as many people as possible to improve their health, and to help them by being honest with and about myself.

I hadn't realized that anyone was paying attention to my experiment beyond the small number of followers I had developed. My hope for the website was to attract people through personal relationships as the journey progressed—family would tell friends, friends would tell friends, and at the end of the ordeal, I could get through to a far greater audience than I would by reaching two or three individual clients in the gym.

There had been some interest close to home. My local newspaper had written an article, one of the more popular local radio stations had conducted an interview on air, and a local TV news station had run a five-minute story early in one of their evening broadcasts. As more publicity hit, I noticed that my in-box was filling with more than spam.

I enjoyed reading and carefully responding to each of my messages. In every Facebook response I sent, I tried to answer a question or thank a follower for taking the time to send a message. The e-mails I received carried me through my depressed days, giving me extra patience with my family and myself.

And then one day I got a wholly different e-mail. Having participated in an interview that I thought would appear on a lightly traveled fitness website, I was informed that the interview and article would actually appear … on the front page of Yahoo.com, the very next day!

The next morning I checked Yahoo.com every 30 minutes or so, eager to see the piece. Every time I looked I was greeted by gossip about Demi Moore and Jennifer Aniston. When the article finally did hit, my telephone began ringing—radio stations, television shows, and family and friends called in rapid succession. Once again I wasn't prepared, though in this case I'll give myself a break. I'm not sure that anyone could have prepared for the avalanche of interest that followed. In fact, the volume of hits crashed my website, and I frantically tried to figure out how to get my story back online.

With no pun intended, this attention was difficult to digest. Before I knew it, I was spending my time on three major activities—being interviewed, reading/responding to e-mails, and eating (hey, I still had a routine to maintain!). I suddenly had a platform from which to make an impact far greater than I had ever dared to imagine.

At the peak of my weight gain, I sat in one of the prep rooms of
The Dr. Oz Show,
trying to comprehend this whirlwind. We had walked through what the interview would entail—I'd have the opportunity to tell the world what was so great about my own spinach shake recipe from the fit days, and Dr. Oz would educate his audience on the medical impact that an unrestricted diet and lack of exercise could truly have.

I was just over a week away from the end of Fit2Fat and the beginning of Fat2Fit. Almost ready to start back on the journey to fitness, I was already making preparations to get as many followers as possible on board to lose the weight with me.

But
The Dr. Oz Show
provided more than another avenue to reach potential followers. It was a collision of the two realities of my journey so far:

As America's favorite doc explained the differences between a healthy and unhealthy kidney and liver, I got chills of unease. My wife had the same reaction. Perhaps her worry was even greater since it had begun earlier in the journey. We had started to track my blood pressure, and she knew just how high it had gotten.

On the flip side, the amount of support I received after the Yahoo.com interview was incredible. I was always behind on e-mails, had countless interviews lined up before me, and hadn't seen my children in a week. All in the name of trying to reach a greater audience—to wake them up to what typical Americans were doing to themselves. For every fearful moment, every shred of doubt, there was an encouraging e-mail. Some followers poured their own fears and frustrations into e-mails, hoping that someone would give
them
support.