Fat Today, Fit Tomorrow

This is, like, hard and stuff

2007-08-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

I fully expected that once I began this blog, and I knew people would be reading, I'd have all the motivation it took to really concentrate on my weight loss goals. However, I didn't do very well over the past week. As of this morning, it was a loss of merely 1.8 pounds. This would not be bad at all if this had've been any other week of my diet. In fact, it would have been perfect. However, in the first week of any weight loss plan, one tends to lose many more pounds than that due to water weight and so forth.

I guess my big problem in this first week was that my honey wasn't being too devoted to his weight loss either, and I just didn't have the motivation to eat the right things. I was also busy with deadlines at work and the pressure of putting online the new Web site I've been hired to create. But then again, I can't use that as an excuse, though. I'll always be on some sort of deadline, and I'll always have extra things to do on the side.

So here we go. Maybe week two will be more productive than week one. My boss just needs to stop bringing brownies to the office! :)

Day One

2007-08-01T10:57:00.001-07:00

Okay, today's the big day: August 1, the official state date of the weight loss journey.

I got on my electronic scale first thing this morning and weighed 285.6. That's dangerously close to 300, but happily I never hit 290 or above. At 285.6, my 100 pound weight loss goal is just about perfect. My destination weight is 185, which at 5'8" may still be considered chunky by some but would be a Godsend for me. The last time I weighed 185 or less was about ten years ago, so I've had a full decade of "up, up, and away!" It's now time for this blimp to land.

My scales also measure body fat percentage. Dare I even say the evil number it presented me? Ok, you pulled my leg. 59 percent. Is that even possible? I guess with my fat ass (and belly) it is, but that number is just disgusting considering we often hear of sexy guys having somewhere between 5 and 20 percent. I'll be there someday myself, and that percentage alone is enough motivator!

Some may be wondering what my plan of attack is, with my diet. Basically I will be reducing my caloric intake all around and avoiding desserts, unless I find some very low-cal, low-fat alternatives such as Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches. I already stick to water and diet sodas, so sugared drinks are not a problem for me. Most of my lunches at work will consist of Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice or Smart Ones frozen meals, unless we go out for lunch, at which time I'll eat a small salad. I've been looking into Weight Watchers, but I won't go to meetings. So I read several Web sites about WW online, and I've learned their basic points formula, which I'll loosely follow to help decide which foods are good and which are not. I'm not yet sure if I'll take any diet pills or fat burners to help, but probably not unless I can find one which has been proven to work.... but that's a rare find these days.

As for the gym, I'm going to work myself back into it. When I'm trying to lose weight, I will usually go walk the treadmill as long as I can stand it, but my lower right leg often has a major pain and burn when I am first getting started. When I can, I follow it up with a whole-body weight lifting routine a few days a week. Now, I just gotta get off my butt and get back into the routine since it's been several months since I've gone.

Ok, time to get started. I'll post again in a few days with a progress report. Until then.......

It's Just the Beginning

2007-07-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

I’m 32, happily involved, gainfully employed, homosexual and fat. Yep, I said it. I’m fat, and I don’t mind saying so. “No you’re not,” my friends would say, just to be nice. Of course I am, and I’m not one to tiptoe around the forbidden 3-letter F-word (the other one).

I’ve embraced that little word and am able to use it to describe myself instead of taking offense to it as I did years ago. As a young child back in Tennessee, classmates would tease me with such silly-but-rude sayings as “fatty, fatty, two by four, can’t fit through the bathroom door.” I would just seek revenge on them by sitting on them on the playground. That always shut them up, at least until they decided to start calling me a fag. It’s funny how such obvious observations are so insulting at such a young age.

As an adult, I maintained the extra pounds I carried as a child, and they seem to have multiplied exponentially as I’ve grown older. In college, I lost 50 pounds in about six months and was just above my perfect weight. I didn’t necessarily lose that weight in the safest manner, however. I was a poor college kid living off potato spuds (just moistened with water, no milk or butter) and went dancing five or six nights a week, a typical club kid’s diet plan I guess, sans the recreational drugs. But when I moved back home for a while, the pounds came back and then some.

After moving to the Pacific Northwest in my mid-20s, my weight went up and then down again, until it went up about 40 pounds after moving to Hawaii and getting a job at Starbucks. It’s amazing what drinking unlimited Frappuccinos can do to one’s waistline. It tastes great but is too filling, finding its way to my midsection almost overnight, it seemed. It was around this time that I realized I may as well just accept I’m always going to look and feel like Violet Bauregarde.

I found my way to Vegas a couple years later and realized that being a fat gay man isn’t always easy. In Seattle and Hawaii it was fairly easy to be overweight and still maintain a successful dating life. Here in Vegas, and especially with my job in gay publishing, it’s like being in WeHo where image is everything. I can almost understand the pressure teen girls feel when confronted with the abundance of thin and gorgeous models and actresses in the media. This town is full of sexy showboys and strippers, the guys in clubs often have ripped bodies no matter how fugly their faces, and a large portion of advertisers demand a sexy man be placed in their ads to target our community.

So what’s a fat gay man to do in this environment? Seek out a chubby chaser, of course. That hasn’t proven too easy in the past few years I’ve lived here because the available selection is limited, and I haven’t necessarily been that keen on finding a man who may only love me if I’m huge. If I were to desire one day to lose, say, 100 pounds, would that chaser still adore every remaining inch of me?

After searching and hunting both near and far, I got really lucky in January 2006. I met a tourist from California and developed an immediate chemistry, strong enough to keep us together across a 300-mile distance. He does not consider himself a chubby chaser, but there was something about me that attracted him enough to move to Vegas a few months later to start his new life with me. Now, a year and a half after meeting, we’re still going strong, proud parents to four loving dogs. We’ve both also gained about 30, what I like to call, “happy pounds.” Our bodies may be a few inches farther apart now when we hug, but we get such laughter and pleasure from it, I know it’s unconditional true love.

However, as I said before, I’m 32 now, and I’ve made up my mind that I don’t want to look like this forever. I want to take control of my body and my health. It’s a disgusting feeling when clothes I bought six months or a year ago simply do not fit anymore. Sure, they’ll slide over my fat ass or my distended belly, but I don’t want clothing to fit like a second skin. I can still fit in the restraints in rides at Disneyland, but walking around the park all day just wears me out. And every step I take up my stairs at home, nearly every joint in my lower body can be heard popping and cracking.

Happily in love, my desire to lose weight is not motivated by the search for companionship or acceptance or any of those things so many gay men are perpetually seeking. My journey toward weight loss is so I can look at myself in the mirror and smile with pride, walk into a designer store and find a shirt that fits and be able to hug my partner without standing two feet away.

I have watched with amazement such shows as The Biggest Loser and the multitude of weight loss infomercials on the airwaves, and I’ve found so much inspiration and encouragement to believe that I, too, can accomplish my weight loss goals. All it takes is a little self-motivation, which I truly feel I finally now have.

Over the next twelve months, it is my mission to lose 100 pounds. At the safe rate of up to two or three pounds per week, this is entirely possible. I have no problem eating low calorie, low fat and low carb foods. My biggest struggle is getting my butt into the gym I’ve been paying for—yet not using—for the past year, but I’m fully prepared now to suffer the sweaty consequences.

I want to invite all of you to join me on this journey. Read and comment on my weight loss blog online (fattoday.blogspot.com), and send me e-mails (weightloss@qvegas.com) with your words of encouragement or your own weight loss success stories. Every few months, check the pages of QVegas for progress reports. Your comments and stories may be published to serve as encouragement for others, too.

A year from now, I will be happy, healthy and fit, and I hope you are all right there beside me to celebrate my victory against the flab.

I’m fat today, but I’ll be fit tomorrow.