Thursday, February 5, 2015

What's Happening Now?

I don't blog nearly often enough.  If you're really interested in my immediate, largely unfiltered thinking, I'm on Twitter as @anothershoe.
My last post was all about my fantastic trip to BlizzCon 2014.  Let's catch people up a little, shall we?

I've moved.

No longer in glorious Wine Country, I'm living in Pacfica, CA now.  Pacifica is a suburb of San Francisco, nestled between mountains and the ocean, where it's a destination for surfers and people seeking a reason for their exorbitant real estate prices.  I'm renting the spare room of good friends who live a couple of miles from the glorious Linda Mar State Beach. Every morning I get to drive past the ocean and bays on my way to work. I highly recommend the experience.

I'm gainfully employed. Again.

I have a new job as a Technical Writer for Nominum, Inc. The people here are all phenomenal, the work is interesting, and I feel like my talents are appreciated. Pretty much what anyone could ask for in a day job.

I'm working out.

That's right. Me. Lardass Supreme, Master of the Seated Profession and Hobbies. In a gym. Five nights a week. And now I'm going to talk about it in excruciating detail. My motives. The inspiration. The challenges. Most importantly, the results.

Motivation and Inspiration


I want to "look good naked."

Seriously though, I'm fat. Not 'chunky' or 'big boned' or even 'more to love.' I'm straight up fat. Obese even. Any "Body Mass Index" score over 25 is overweight, while scores of 30 or more are obese. My BMI is 40.1 - Severely obese, in fact "Obese Class III (Very severely obese)."

That's terrible, horrible, depressing and a host of other descriptors.

I have health issues already which are contributory to my obesity, such as hypoglycemia and congenital spondylolisthesis.

In 2000, I injured my left hip in a car accident. A gnarly one in which I was lucky to have survived with so little damage to my body.

ASIDE: I was on a cross-country trip from Texas to North Dakota by car. 45 miles outside of Dallas, I lost control of my Nissan Pathfinder on a sheet of ice, spun out, hit a guardrail which tore out the bottom of my vehicle, threw the entire mess into the air and then came to rest on its right side after rolling twice. Had this been a ride in an amusement park, it might have been fun. At the time, I thought I had only some bumps and bruises. I was wrong. I'd pulled my groin and dislocated the joint in my hip.

 In 2003, just barely finished healing from that accident, I tripped over my cat Gremlin and re-injured the same hip. I limped for 18 months, after being told there was nothing to be done for this new groin-pull except wait.

 In 2004, just barely recovered from the last groin pull, I tripped over that same cat, and fell onto that hip, again dislocating the joint.  Since 2004 I've walked with a limp at least part of every day. Walking any distance meant horrific pain. Climbing stairs, riding a bike, even carrying groceries from my car to my apartment meant agony of a sort I wouldn't wish on anyone. Hell, it hurts to put on my shoes, and lifting my leg to put my pants on is agony.

I got fat. Then I went from fat to obese. And then to severely obese.

It would be easy to lay the blame on just my health problems and injuries. I had been larger than I liked since I was in my twenties. Lots of video games, programming, and other swivel-chair work had meant I was always a little overweight, but now, now I'm just fat.

I've tried diets in the past. Adkins, South Beach, caloric reduction, even the Hacker Diet. But I didn't have motivation, and physical pain meant I was never doing much to exercise. I'd tell myself "Next year, for BlizzCon I'll be in shape!" I never made it.

I've dated off an on over the years. And let me tell you - dating while fat is an exercise is humiliation. There is nothing that hurts like the flash of disappointment when you show up for a first meeting date and the other person realizes you're fat. People who love your charm, humor, wit, and intelligence cannot wait for a first date to be over when they discover you're fat. (Please note, I never hid my weight, and I don't look like an amorphous blob, but I'm clearly fat in person.)  It was hard in Texas where most people seem to carry a little bit extra, but it was downright cruel in Northern California. No one was ever gauche enough to say anything. But the shocking number of first dates have made it easy to recognize that look.

I'm not calling anyone out for that. I know I do it too. Our culture tells us that thin is the same as attractive. That defined musculature is sexy. People want to be in relationships with people who have bodies that excite them sexually. I don't have a problem with people having desire for trim, sexy bodies, or any other kind of body.  I don't condone shaming anyone's body. I just got sick to death of seeing that micro-expression that said "I'm not into this guy, he's fat."

I also wanted to walk to places without it hurting. I wanted to buy groceries without thinking carefully about how many trips from the car it would take to unload them. I wanted to be able to go to the beach and enjoy it, not just sit and wait for my leg or back to stop hurting. To go to Disneyland and not be the one holding everyone back.

While all this internal pressure was mounting, my friend Heather (@MortuaryReport on Twitter) was busting her ass to recover from a foot surgery and get back into shape. I watched her, this tiny waif of a woman put out a crushing number of miles on a bike despite chronic pain, and said to myself, "Hey, if she can do it with all that working against her, don't you think you could at least try?"

So when I started my new job and discovered it had a gym membership as a perk, I took it as a sign to finally make the god damned change.

The Challenge


  1. Lose 100 pounds.
  2. Get back flexibility and mobility. I want my hip to work as well as it can so that I can walk 3 miles and not have the thought of that be unbearable. Weight loss will help with this goal.
  3. Seriously, I want to look good naked. I want to be hot.  And if not "hot" traditionally, I want people to look at my body and imagine that sex with that body would be fun and exciting.

My Plan

I have to account for the fact that I haven't done a workout (until recently) since 2000 (ironically, I was working out to lose weight then). I have no stamina, no physical strength, I'm starting from scratch, and standing for long periods of time is painful. So I have to start small.

First, I started measuring what I eat; not religiously, but I try to keep my calorie intake to 2,190 per day. I use an app on my phone called MyFitnessPal to journal all my food and exercise.

For ten days in January I spent ten minutes a day just stretching. You'd be amazed at how much sweat I produced just reaching down to touch my toes.

Then, on January 20th I started going to the gym. The important part here was to build the habit. I go every week night. I go, I put my gym shorts on in the locker room, fire up some music or an audio book on my phone and headphones, and I ride a stationary bike for thirty minutes.

I picked a time rather than a distance because I could make myself hit a time consistently.

The Results

For twelve days now I have gone to ride the bike. I started at level 0, and I've pushed myself a little each day. For all but three days I've managed the full thirty minutes.  My last two work outs have been twenty-five and twenty minutes each; both got cut short due to pain.  Really though, the last two have been triumphs in retrospect; I realized that I was pushing hard, at level 3 resistance on the bike and on both days hitting a four minute mile.

My leg moves better. I can walk from the parking lot to my desk without much pain. This was not true before I started working out.

I sleep better at night.

I get to sleep more easily.

That's not all.  Working out has been emotionally brutal. The first few days I knew I wasn't doing anything special. I was just showing up and trying.  After a week, I was convinced I was making almost no progress so I started pushing harder.  And then I hit the wall last night (Wednesday, 4 Feb, 2015).

I was riding the bike when at ten minutes in, I hurt so bad I had to stop. I was out of breath, dripping sweat, my hip felt like it was full of broken glass. My heart was hammering so hard I could hear my pulse through the music playing in my headphones.

I drank some water, caught my breath and started up again, making it for five minutes and a little over another mile.  I was shaking. Literally. My skin was flushed red, my shirt was soaked, and sweat was literally dripping off of me.

Again, I drank some water, killing the bottle I'd brought with me, and started pedaling again. I got through five minutes and again just over a mile. By now I'm shaking, sweating, and panting. I can't seem to catch my breath.  I'm staring at the god damned timer on the bike and I know I've got ten more minutes to go. I knew I was fucked.  Ten more minutes? It might as well be an hour. It might as well be the Heat Death of the Universe.  My leg and hip were screaming like murder victims. I stumbled off the bike and it was all I could do to stand.

I shook in-place for five minutes and then hobbled to the dressing room. My head was hanging. I was ashamed.

Really. Ashamed of my failure to ride a god damned bicycle for thirty minutes. Ashamed that I was limping. Ashamed to be fat. My inner monologue even said to me, "You're a fat, stupid, failure." It repeated like a loop in my head as I packed my gear and put on my jacket.

I limped back to my car in the parking lot, breathing heavily, sweating and trying to maintain composure. My face hurt from grinding my teeth to keep my face from betraying me.  I couldn't meet anyone's eyes as I passed them.

I got into the car, and I had to use my fucking arms to life my lifeless left leg into position. I couldn't do it normally because the pain was too intense.  I dry-swallowed 800mg of ibuprofen, closed the door of my car and lost control.

I sobbed. Like I was a five year old child lost in a park. I sobbed tears of anger, frustration, shame, and humiliation. Every bit of self-loathing acquired over the last two decades poured out of me for ten solid minutes. For me, such displays of emotion are rare. I'm almost as tightly wound as Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

"If anybody needs a day off it's Cameron. He's got a lotta things to sort out before he graduates. He can't be wound up this tight and go to college. His roommate'll kill him. Pardon my French, but Cameron is so uptight, if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in 2 weeks, you'd have a diamond."

I tweeted about things without revealing how hard it hit.






I got encouragement/straight talk from @MortuaryReport.


These and many more messages and tweets came flooding in.


And you know what? They're right. I'm doing better than I give myself credit for. Fourteen days of riding and I'm doing amazing. I'm going to keep at it.

I have goals.

I am going to make them happen.

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