Revelation

So there I was; spiraling to an early death.  I had been working for a rather large bank for about 6 years.  I wasn't exercising.  I was eating poorly.  I would order a large pizza and a 2 liter of soda. The pizza would last two days, but the soda was gone in one evening. It was not unusual for me to drink about 8 cans of Coke in a single day.

I was approaching 290.  I was waking myself up snoring.  I was having horrible night sweats.  I would have a couple of sever URI's per month.  I actually broke a chair at a restaurant.  They were mortified; but it wasn't their fault.  When I traveled, I was that guy that no one wanted sitting next to them on the plane.  I was in 46 jeans.  I was wearing 2XL polo's.  Suits were better described as tents.  I had finally moved over to the big and tall section at stores.

Any thought of introducing a woman into my life was quickly dismissed.  Even if they wanted to be with me, I wasn't going to widow them.

However things were about to change.  Two very important things were happening around the same time.

The first; I had met someone online that shared my passion for Blue Jackets hockey.  She was Canadian and for some reason she really enjoyed my postings online.  We chatted online a lot and decided to meet once before a Blue Jackets game.  This was friendship brought upon by a common interest.  She never commented on my appearance and she never looked down on me. However, my health started to come up from time to time.

The second; I was researching liver disease online because of my friends health issues.  We had talked about her options and one of them was a partial liver donation.  I promised her that I would reverse my health issues and, if I could, donate part of my liver if we were compatible if that time ever came.

The latter will become apparent next.  The former will become clear in a later blog entry.

During my research I came upon a site; http://www.liverdoctor.com/ and a Doctor Sandra Cabot.   I started doing some research online and came upon this image to the right.  That is advanced fatty infiltration of the liver.  I also discovered the dangers to having a fatty liver and they are not pretty.  Is that not one of the most disgusting things you have ever seen?  You know what should concern you?  If you have excess abdomen fat, you have fatty infiltration of the liver.  I discovered that the first place fat is stored is directly in the liver. When you discover what the liver does you quickly realize how key that organ is in your overall health and longevity.  When you do reading online you will quickly realize how foolish some of these experts sound.  The key to improving my health was taking care of the largest organ in my body.  It's a domino effect.

On her site, she referenced a few books she had wrote.  I decided to purchase the book that changed my life.  It was called "Fatty Liver; You Can Reverse It".  When this book came from Amazon in a couple of days, I absorbed the book in a couple of days.  This book described what was happening in my body and what the function of the liver is.  It also described the progression of the disease.  I have purchased about 10 copies of this book and have given them out to friends and family.  To this point I can say that not one of them has followed through with her recommendations for any length of time.  Why?  I'll cover that in later entries.

As I said in the previous entry; I didn't immediately start.  It was a good six to eight months before I actually started.  During my next blog entry, I describe what actually prompted me to make the change.  In later entries, I will start to cover some of the things in this book as well as another site that has helped tremendously.  I will also eventually cover exercise.

Until tomorrow!  Thanks for stopping by.

In the beginning...

This story starts out like a great many stories for the obese.

As a child I was very active and was really skinny.  I played baseball and basketball.  I was outside more than I was inside; although that started to change with the discovery of video games.  By all appearances I was a healthy kid.  However, I was building bad habits that would start to plague me as I entered adulthood.

I was starting to become a carb addict, the worst of it being soda.  My mother, while she did make us eat our fair share of healthy foods, she didn't realize that the foods she was giving me and her 2 daughters was pretty unhealthy.  After all what is wrong with some Kraft Mac and Cheese to go with that meatloaf?  We had green beans with it after all!

Sisters graduation; slowly adding on the weight

The turning point is when I got my first job, at McDonald's.  At that point I had the money to feed my carb addiction.  On top of that I was getting more it for free!  I actually hid it well.  I did, after all, get a lot of exercise there.  I was actually fairly strong, at least compared to what I was before.  At the time I graduated high school, I was a grand total of 109 pounds. At this point, I entered college.  That lasted all of a trimester.  I decided that I was going to look for a job.  At that time, college really wasn't for me.

I found my first real job.  I had went to a vocational school for electronics.  I used those contacts to land a computer job.  This is where the slow road to obesity really started to accelerate.  I was in field service, so I was still pretty active.  However, I was also starting to program and gaming heavily at home.  While I could still run a few miles, I was starting to form a gut.  At this time other issues where starting to surface.  The biggest of them were migraines.

Around 23 or 24 I decided that I needed to make sure there was nothing seriously wrong with me.  So I ended up with a MRI.  With the discovery of nothing wrong with my brain, which was a big surprise to everyone involved, another thing was discovered.  I had fatty infiltration of the liver!  That was a surprise to me and this was certainly before the discovery of Google.  Doctor Kahn, being one of the most useless doctors to ever walk the planet, told me that it was quite common and nothing to worry about.  I will, in later posts, discuss this tool in greater detail.

1999 or 2000, Buckeyes game

I continued on doing the same things I had and the weight just continued to add on.  With me second job in the computer industry, I continued to be active in that job.  We were building retail stores, so I was traveling and doing a lot of lifting and walking.  At this point I had to be around 175.  Then in 1997, I moved on to my consulting job.  That is when things started to spiral out of control.  Notice I said started.  As you can see to the picture to the right, I had a nice sized stomach.  I was now around 210.

Around this time I discovered a dear friend of mine had cirrhosis of the liver.  This was through no fault of her own.  What that did, however, was get me to research my own health issues.  I discovered things existed like portal hypertension and that fatty infiltration of the liver can, and eventually will, lead to cirrhosis of the liver..

I would like to claim that it immediately led to my changing my habits.  It didn't. It was always in the back of my mind.  A couple of times I had quit soda with remarkable weight loss.  However, I was always massively irritable and still suffered from what I thought was caffeine withdrawal.  I will cover what was going on in a later post.

That was until I discovered the book that explained what was happening with me.  For the first time, everything made sense.

Until the next post....