Category: About me

I originally wanted to call this entry my weight loss journey, but as I began to think about it, my journey is more than about weight loss… it’s about my health.  I used to be very healthy and active when I was young.  In high school, I played football and ran track.  After high school, I was involved in intramural sports in college.  As I got older, got married, and had kids, I became less active, and like a lot of people, I kept eating like I was far more active than I actually was. In high school, I played inside linebacker on our football team, and I had a playing weight of 182 pounds.  By the time I was in my late twenties I was about 235 pounds, by my mid 30’s it was 280 pounds and my mid 40’s it was about 330 pounds.  Looking back, I was putting on about 50 pounds per decade, or about 5 pounds per year.  When it’s only 5 pounds per year, it creeps upon you, and you don’t realize how big you are getting. 

About four years ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and I figured no big deal.  I will just take a pill once a day, and it will be ok.  It wasn’t ok.  One pill a day became two pills a day, and eventually three pills.  By January 2020, I was neglecting my diabetes and sometimes taking my medicine and sometimes not.  I was never watching what I ate.  Daily blood sugar testing, that was never happening.  I went for about five months without a test.  Probably because I knew I was going to have high numbers and didn’t want to deal with it.  Then in January 2020, I switched physicians and went in for a physical so that my new doctor would prescribe me the other medications I needed.  I was on different medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol.  I was a mess.  They say that for many people, they don’t make a change until they are faced with a crisis.  This was the day that was a shocker for me.  I was in a crisis.  My blood sugar that day was over 450, and my A1C was over 14.  My doctor said I needed to make immediate changes that day, or I was in danger of becoming insulin-dependent, possible blindness, neuropathy, and possible future amputations caused by diabetic complications.  Why didn’t I do something before this visit?  I was trying to convince myself that my diabetes wasn’t that bad even though I wasn’t checking it.  After all, I had lost just over 30 pounds in the last six months and wasn’t doing much at all to lose it.  I should have known better.  The extremely high blood sugar level was causing rapid weight loss.  It was my body’s way of screaming for help.

Thud.  That was the sound of a brick just hitting me.  I immediately changed my diet that day.  Gone were all the sugar and complex carbs.  I was focused on a low glycemic index diet from now on.

Along with the changes to diet, I had to get more active.  At my size, running was out of the question, so I had to start a walking regime.  I had heard over the years that you should get in 10,000 steps a day, so that was my goal.  I started off slow at first just going on 1 – 1 1/2 mile walks in the morning, then adding a walk in the evening so that I could get my 10,000 steps in.   There is a famous quote that says, “A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step.”  These are my first steps.  Follow along with me on my health journey by following along in my blog to see what happens next.