Stay-at-Home Nerd: The Weight Loss Issue OR This is Heavy
Sep16

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Stay-at-Home Nerd: The Weight Loss Issue OR This is Heavy

My favorite comedians are the fat ones.  Give me Belushi in Animal House, Farley in Tommy Boy, and John Candy in anything, over anybody.  They eat a lot, drink a lot, sweat a lot and boy oh boy do they make me laugh.  For the longest time I wanted to be them, but I couldn’t.  I wasn’t a fat kid growing up.  I played soccer, football and golf in High School.  I spent most of my weekends watching the latest movies, playing Palladium, participating in sports or partaking in soda drinking contests with my friends in Shorewood, Wisconsin without ever packing on a pound.  I was as far from being fat and funny as I could be.

Josh at age 20

Then things changed.  High School ended and my friends and I went in very different directions. I drifted.  A semester at the University of Minnesota educated me on Big Mike’s subs, hot wings, parking tickets, and Keystone Light.  A couple of semesters at UW Milwaukee introduced me to two-dollar pitchers, fifty-cent tappers, foosball, Oakland Gyros, and bad grades.  Community college and working for Wells Fargo taught me how to stretch my dollar over happy hour appetizers, drink specials, and the importance of quantity over quality.

Go big or go home was my motto.  Why stop drinking at midnight when the bar doesn’t close until two?  Why stop eating when I’m still hungry?  By the time I got to San Diego I was twenty-five pounds heavier than when I graduated High School.  By the time I got to Los Angeles I was fifty pounds heavier than that.  And now seven years later I break the scale at a whopping 303 pounds.  That’s three pounds heavier than the playing weight of Reggie White, the first ballot Hall of Fame defensive end for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-nineties.  That’s more than twice as heavy as my wife, which I’d like to point out should entitle me to two wives, but that’s a different blogumn.

You see I just made a joke about being overweight.  The fat and the funny went hand in hand.  The heavier I got the harder I wanted to make people laugh.  It works too.  Just ask Kevin Smith.  Now that I had incrementally achieved my goal of being fat and being funny, you’d think I’d be happy.  I was.  But, that’s when things changed again.

I had a son.  And, he has a doctor.  Every time we take him to the doctor the nurse weighs him, measures him, measures his head circumference and tells us where he is on the chart.  He’s top 10% for length, 50% for weight, and 40% for head circumference.  I guess that means he’s long, lean and will never fit into my hats.  In the land of childhood obesity (I’m talking to you America) my boy’s doctor assured me that my boy could eat as much as he wanted and he would be fine.  In fact, he said that if he ate too much he would barf, and that’s how we would know he had too much.  He might have said throw up.  Either way the point he made is that healthy kids on a good diet (breast milk, jarred baby food) eat as much as they need.  That is their nature.

So, what’s my nature? I mean, I don’t eat breast milk, except for that one time accidentally and I try not to eat baby food, but it does get flung everywhere even back in your face.  Other than that, though, I really do eat and drink as much as I want, when I want.  How did this start?  When did this start?  More importantly, how can I stop?  That’s when I got my own doctor.  She measured my blood pressure, she did some blood work and this is what she said, “You have high blood pressure.  You have high cholesterol.  You are obese.  You need to lose weight.”  She gave me some pills.  She gave me a low cholesterol diet plan.  She told me to exercise.  And she gave me a date to come back 3 months later.

Three months later I came back.  I was six pounds lighter.  This is what she said, “You have high blood pressure.  You have high cholesterol.  You are obese.  You need to lose weight or you’re going to die early”.  She gave me some more pills and told me to come back a month later.  It didn’t feel real ‘til I just wrote it down.  I look at my son and I can’t imagine missing him grow up.  I look at food and drinks and I can’t imagine life without them.  Go big or go home I always said…  Well, I’m going home.  Who’s coming with me?

I’m keeping a weight tracker at the bottom of future blogumns for my own motivation and your support.

Today’s Weight: 303 lbs.

Featured Image Credit: Johnny Vulkan