Day one report

This morning I weighed 291. Yesterday I did not weigh myself but the day before I weighed 292. The day before yesterday I stuffed myself so I may have even weighed more than 292 but we will use that as my starting weight. Yesterday, with God's help, I did well. I ate about 1500 calories. I did not feel too well though. I had a headache that made me feel sick to my stomach. I took two sinus pills and two codeine tylenol an hour or so before bed and ate a huge salad and I felt better. I got up once during the night and had a piece of bread and some spaghetti. But I only had about 600 calories and only got out of bed once. God is helping me. Thank you God. I am doing this one day at a time.

Just so I remember, here are the problems that weight has caused me. I have to drag my leg up and struggle to put on my socks. I have to hold my leg by the socks in order to put my pants on and my shoes on. I have special shoe laces so I don't have to tie them. I can't keep my shoes up long enough to tie them. I have to lie back on the bed to get my pants buttoned. I have a hard time urinating; my penis is recessed into my fat. I get rashes around my belly because I have a large over hanging stomach which lies on top of my belly.I also get rashes around my groin. My back aches. My knees ache. I can't sleep well my sleep apnea is weight related. It is hard to get in and out of my car. It is hard to get in and out of bed or a chair or anything. I can hardly get up from the floor if I lie on the floor. It is hard to wipe my butt. It is hard to sit in the seats at some movie theatres. I dread going on an airplane. The arms of my desk chair push against my leg. I have hip bursitis from bumping the side of my leg on things like the chair arms. I'm over the weight limit for getting up on ladders, plu my balance is not very good; my legs have a hard time keeping my weight up. There are probably a lot more things but this is enough to remember so after I weigh less I can go back to this so I can remember.

The day the diet began

Today I am starting a "diet." I thought I was going to be able to enroll in a comprehensive weight control program with a clinic, but my insurance said there was a specific exclusion for weight control counseling. So maybe just as well, I am starting on my own. Well, not exactly on my own--I'm asking for God's help. I need to keep that in mind because I have tried to diet so many times that it is hard to get psyched up again. At 20 years old, I weighed 160. My friend diane said that I looked like Jackie Gleason, and I began to think about my weight. I went on a Dr. Stillman's all protein diet. I did it at my parent's house and lost 25 pounds eating hamburgers and some other meat. I kept it off for a while. I think my next diet came when I was about 26. I was probably about 160 again. I started fasting on January first 1976 for 15 or so days. All I ate was coffee and cigarettes. I think it was supposed to be a cleansing diet. :-) I also starting running, jogging. I was one of the first joggers. The first year I ran about 1000 miles, and my wieght got down to 119. I was able to wear the suit that I wore for eighth grade confirmation. I still felt a little fat and not feeling like I wanted to take my shirt off. But obviously I was thin. I just didn't have a six pack muscles on my stomach. i remember how much I restricted my eating. I would not even eat one pancake or a piece of pizza. I hardly ate anything. I ran for several years and lifted weights and did other training stuff while eating very little. When KC was born, I weighed about 140. I was feeling like I was losing my grip on being thin. I couldn't lose those extra 20 pounds to weigh less than Jean when she was pregnant. I went to weight watchers then and got back to about 130, my ideal weight. I became a lifetime member. Even though I was running from home to work every day, between 5 and 6 miles, my weight was creeping up. When KC was about three, she cold cold sores all over inside her mouth and so did I. I was pretty much unable to eat for 5 days or so. I lost 2o pounds and got down to about 140. I was drinking when KC was very young but I joined AA in April of 1983. Soon after I quit drinking I also quit eating sugar. I did not have any sugar until I quit working for South Central Library System in 1987 about two and a half years. Once I had started working at schools I could no longer take hour and a half for lunch while I lifted weights and jogged. The weight crept back up again. It was harder to lift weights because when I got done with work I was taking care of KC. This was the fall of 1987. I still kept running and remained reasonably thin. But I went to the UW Eating Disorder clinic. I had tried to talk to people about my eating before. I had seen at least 2 counselors and a couple of nutritionists. They all said that I had no problem because I was pretty thin. So in order to get the ED clinic to take me seriously I started late night binge eating . When KC was a baby she did not sleep very well. So when ever I got up with her at night I would eat. I got into the habit of waking up during the night and eating. Well, as I kept an eating diary for the clinic I really binged, eating lots of ice cream and plenty of other food at night. I'm not sure what happened while I was seeing a psychiatrist and going to a group there, but I wan't losing weight. I was trying really hard to diet and still eating during the night. Every morning when I woke up I felt terrible guilt. The guilt was so unbearable that I actually thought about suicide. They would always ask me if I had a plan. My plan was to get run over by a car while jogging that way no one would know that I actually killed myself. I didn't even think about how bad that would make the driver feel. I did think about how it would make KC feel though and that is what kept me from going through with it. I probably would not have killed myself anyway. I had thought about it before KC was born and I chickened out. So I probably would have chickened out again. Anyway the guilt was pretty hard to take. Eventually the Eating Disorder Clinic changed its name to the Healthy Eating and Lifestyles Place. HELP. But the name change did not help me. The cognitive approach to change was not working. Neither was phen-fen, or anyother drugs. The clinic finally closed and I was just seeing a psychiatrist. In the spring of oh about 1992 I broke my ankle. That did my running in for months; I was basically inactive but continued to eat a lot. I gained 30 or so pounds and weighed almost 200. Meanwhile KC began to have some mental problems and maybe was dling drugs. I lost the focus on me and began to focus on her. I just let my eating go. Well not exactly I kept trying to diet off and on. I went back to weight watchers. I ordered some pills and took them to control my hunger. I did a few other things. I went to Over Eaters anonymous. I went to meeting with them for about a year. I had stopped going to AA. Not sure where to go from this point in my description. I tried dieting. I lost some weight and regained. Eventually I was eating every night 2 or 3 times after going to sleep. I gained enough weight so that I got sleep apnea, but I could never use one of the air blowing machines although I still have one sitting by my bed and still go to the sleep disorder clinic.

In summary, I have tried many times to lose weight, and I have succeeded to varying degrees. But now I weigh 292 and have a hard time putiing on my shoes and socks. I have a hard time even moving around in bed. I have a hard time going up and down the stairs. My knees often hurt and so does my back. It is time for a change. I may enumerate all my problems because of weight at another point but not right now.

Anyway, today I am beginning to diet; not really radically just enough so that I can shrink my stomach a bit so that when I really start dieting I won't be having terrible withdrawals.

The first step

How original! But I'm not trying to be original, just honest to myself and being stupid enough to share this honesty with people. I'm not sure I will really want to do this. I weighed 292 pounds on Tuesday when I went to the doctor. I'm a 5'7" 57 year-old male. I'm writing on this pink background because I know that pink is the color of health, and I am going to work myself toward health during the next year. In 2008 I am going to be enrolled in a "comprehensive weight control" program with a medical clinic in my town. So these weeks before I become involved in that I will write about some of my issues and what is bothering me at the specific time. You know I had always thought about writing and publishing. I have several short stories that I wrote in the last 2 or 3 years for a university class in writing and had thought of publishing them. So it feels weird to be writing something that may bring me ridicule or at least a certain amount of embarrassment. Recently as I was thinking about blogging, my journey and struggles with weight and becoming thinner were the most important thing on my mind, and so here I am--far from my dreams of becoming a short story writer. I'm hungry right now. In my closet is a bag of potato chips. In my car are two candy bars and another bag of potato chips. I have let myself eat as much as I have wanted recently because I knew I would get into this program for weight loss. But I have gained 30 pounds since September. One of my "problems" is doing nice things for people. My ex-foster son has no bank acccount because he has overdrawn too much. He gives me his paychecks then I dole out his money so he doesn't spend it too fast. He was going to come over to get money for cigarettes. He only has a couple of dollars in quarters. But as he was on the phone his "baby's mama" left their house, so now he has to stay home to be with the children. I told him I might drive over and bring him some cigarettes. I don't want to and yet I feel like it would be a GOOD thing to do. There he is trapped at home and being a good dad but he will get the cigarette jones at some point. So I guess I am going to phone him now and see about getting him some cigarettes. God knows I have done innumerable things for him. He owes me thousands of dollars. It has been pretty much of me taking care of him situation. Can I do it without feeling resentful? Boundary issues. I can feel other people's pain more than I feel my own. If it were me, I would just suffer through it and would try to ignore myself. But it will be hard not to help him. I just called to tell him that I was coming over with cigarettes for him, but Tionna had come back home and had brought him cigarettes. I was happy that I didn't have to go out in the cold. I did eat. I had some tuna casserole--maybe a cup and a half--about 8 ounces of soda pop about 4 ounces of cheese and several handfuls of potato chips. I have given up so much that I don't even feel bad about doing that kind of eating at 11:30 pm. About 20 years ago, I was obsessed with my weight. I weighed about 150ish. I was running every day, and felt horrible when I ate one bad thing. I was near suicidal. I had terrible remorse every morning if I would wake up during the night and eat. If it hadn't been for my daughter, I would have killed myself. I knew I could not have left her fatherless. So I had what they call cognitive dissonance. What I wanted to do and what I did were at opposite extremes and it created horrible guilt feelings. So in the last ten years I have relaxed my feelings of what I want to do and made it match more closely with what I did. In other words, I gave up on the idea of dieting or of controlling my eating. So now as I said here I am at 292 pounds and having a hard time putting on my clothes in the morning. More later.