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....