On being fat...(part 1)

Day 498

I was naturally skinny from the ages of 14 to 24.  Ten years of easy skinniness.  The other 38 years have been a difficult pendulum swinging from losing weight, gaining weight, trying to keep weight off, trying to take weight off, but mostly just being fat.  And not Jolly-fat like Santa, or All-Star-wrestler fat like "The Big Show."  Just that big-gut-fat-face kind of fat.  The least attractive kind in my opinion.

I grew from 5'6" to 6'4" in less than a year between 7th and 8th grades.  I went from the slowest kid in my class to one of the fastest.  I remember in 6th grade getting lapped by Christy McClatchy in the 600 yard run for the President's Physical Fitness test (thanks Nixy).  In 8th grade I broke the school record.  I held that record for like 5 minutes until the person in the heat behind me ended up breaking the one I had just set.

I should really apologize to Amy for false advertising.  We met when I had my best look. Little did she know...( I like it when people who haven't seen us in a long time finally do see together.  They tend to say, "Amy! You haven't changed a bit!....Hey Chris, how's it going?")

I lost weight for my 30th birthday.  My goal was to weigh 200 lbs and dunk the basketball.  I ended up weighing 204 lbs and dunking a women's-sized basketball.  We had a foster daughter at the time who began to run away.  She eventually ran away and was gone for a couple of weeks.  I remember getting a call from the police to come see if this girl they had arrested was Becky.  So I drove to the apartment complex where they had found her.  There she was, handcuffed and sitting in the back of the squad car.  She looked, "unkept" and her mascara was running (she liked to wear a lot of eye makeup.)  Se looked up at me through the window, but there was no pleading for mercy in her eyes.  She had had a hard life and she was greatly skilled in shutting her heart off.  Me too.  I told the officer, "That's her." I got in my car and drove home, back to my wife and infant son, Eric. When we were on vacation in Iowa that summer, Becky and one of her friends broke into our house and attempted to steal one of our cars.  Luckily the battery was dead and they only rolled the car down the hill into some trees. No one was hurt. I think I weighed 240 lbs by the end of that year.

I lost weight again  in 1998.  I was fasting and praying every day.  I was seeking the lord, pursuing Him hard, and He was meeting me early in the morning at the church building.  I was praying for the start of our school year.  Then, on the morning of the day of the first teacher's meeting, Julie, a student I had a history with, died of renal failure in the dorm.  She had been at home for the entire two-weeks previous and had been to dialysis every day.  Yet the sack around her heart filled with fluid overnight and she died on the bathroom floor in the dorm....I broke my fast with a double whopper and an extra large fry that day.

I had knee surgery in the Fall 2005.  I was then up to 285 lbs.  I had to go to the gym to work out my knee.  So I went, and got on the treadmill.  I tried to go for one mile at 2.5 miles per hour.  I went for 15 minutes.  Eventually I increased to 3, then 4, then 5 then 6 miles per hour.  At the YMCA in Newton you could only sign-up for 30 minute sessions on the treadmill, so I tried to run over 3 miles per session.  I lifted weights every other day.  I rode my bike around town.  And I lost weight, down to 235 lbs. I felt good.  Then, the boom was lowered....

Part 2 on day 497