Holy Caloric Intake Fatman!

Well I got a big dose of perspective today!

I posted a blog that discussed my usage of certain substances that I used to help me find the way I felt when I was a young man. In that blog I realized that there was a much deeper reason for the way I am but couldn't put my finger on it. In pondering my situation, I realized that I was over weight long before I started using drugs and alcohol to find my younger self again. Well...I think I figured it out!
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Although I love the past, it is mostly for pop cultural and historical trivia facts more than anything. I don't generally look back at mundane events in my my life, such as eating. Eating is just something you do. Right? Well based on what I discovered today, I never thought at all about the consequences of what I was putting in my body.

I got a text message from my wife saying that she entered all the food she would have normally eaten today and that the results were, shall we say, disturbing. She encouraged me to enter my intake as it used to be before the epiphany. So I did. Holy caloric intake Fatman!

My god! What the hell was I thinking? I now know why I have a waterfall of flesh cascading over my belt line. On an average day I consumed nearly 5,000 calories. This revelation lead me to look back at my eating habits over the last two decades and it is no wonder how I got into this Titanic mess.

In my reflecting, I saw every half of a Cheesecake I ate, every whole frozen pizza, every 12 pack of beer I drank, every bottle of wine I consumed, every delectable hostess product I could get my hands on. I can remember almost every horrible thing I have eaten in the last 20 years like it was yesterday. I can taste them too. This is another disturbing observation I have made in the quest to find out where my obsession with food comes from. Why are all these food memories seared into my brain? It all comes down to my childhood.

When I was three, my mom and I found ourselves on our own. It was the early part of the 70's and we lived where we could with whatever family had room for us. You know the story. Single mother, doing her best to make ends meet for her kid, barely scraping by from check to check.

The food situation in the house was always dire. I grew up on a steady diet of powered milk and government cheese, day old bread and whatever else she could find to keep my diet as balanced as possible. Every once in a while there was the occasional treat, but for the most part it was pretty much the same day in and out. Fast forward four years and a new step-father later.

We moved into a new house and settled into a new routine. This time however, the struggle was behind us. My new dad had a stable job and the house we lived in was modest and cozy. We were not rich but it was more than my mom and I were used to. Everything we needed was provided for and things were good. Especially in the food department.

My dad was a food lover and introduced me too many gastronomical goodies. Things most kids my age hadn't even experienced. Let's just say I got used to having great food around all the time. While the food was awesome, it was rich and high in calories. Add to that the fact that I spent the formative years of my life in nutritional purgatory. So when it was put in front of me, I ate it. A lot of it. Hell! I didn't know how long this was gonna last. I just knew that it was here now and I needed to eat all of it in case I never got the chance to have it again. So began a career of eating without thinking.

Looking back at my school pictures, I was a chubby kid. Not portly. Not fat. Just a typical baby fat kinda thing, but I was active. This is what I think kept me from BEING the fat kid. So it kinda balanced itself out. This lasted until I was a freshman in high school.

When puberty hit, I shot up like a weed and my metabolism kicked into overdrive. I began to grow taller and thinner. I was still very active. I walked or biked to school, had P.E., was on the football team, in the marching band, on the track team and even sported a speedo on the diving team. I wouldn't say I was a jock, just active. I also ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

This went on all through high school. My senior year, I met my wife and after a month of dating, found out that we were gonna have a kid. We decided to get married after I graduated and she had the baby. At the time I was 6' 1" and weighed 165 pounds. Wet!

Well as we all know, when adult life and responsibilities start to take hold and things change and priorities change. Especially when there is a new child to feed and you are still a kid yourself. You are just doing whatever you can to survive. I also tried to go to school and was trying to be come a rock star with the band I had started my junior year with a couple of friends. Needless to say, like in high school, I ate whatever and whenever I could. The kicker is, I got a great job after graduation working in a hospital kitchen. Yes that's right, I was working around food, and I was now driving a car and the time I used to have for sports was gone.

So you get the picture. Never really learning how to eat correctly as a kid, I had developed so many bad eating habits it was insane. My life became more sedentary and I continued to eat badly. The biggest difference was that now instead of eating things that were rich and decadent, I was eating whatever I could to just keep me and the family from starving. Most of our money went to diapers and formula. With the money we had left over we could really only afford things like ramen, pancakes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, dollar whoppers, 39 cent cheese burgers, cool aid, potatoes and the cheaper meat that was 30 percent fat. Have you ever noticed that people who don't have a lot of money, tend to be on the heavier side of things?

Things did get better financially and I was well on my way to building a solid career as a Graphic Designer. This was a blessing and a curse for me. On the one hand, I had a career that allowed me to use my creativity and provide for my family. On the other hand, it meant long nights sitting in front of a computer eating whatever was in the vending machines or on the roach coach. At this point, I just had no idea that I was on auto pilot when it came to feeding my face.

Around about the time I turned 27, I started to drink socially. Before then I had never drank. Not even at high school parties. My drinking remained social and sparing for a while. When I turned 30, my mother had lost her battle with MS. I started to drink more frequently and experiment with the darker side of myself. Not only with my drinking and now pot smoking ( and the subsequent munchies from hell), but also from a food stand point. I dove head first into out of control eating. Once again my bad eating habits took over.

So it has pretty much been like that ever since. I have managed to educate myself about eating right and am working on being consistent and adopting those lessons into my life. But as anybody knows, it is tough to reprogram your thinking. It's gonna take a lot of thought, patients and forgiving myself when I fall down as well as forcing myself to get right back up again. But now that I have identified some of the key things that make me tick, I'll be able to move forward with a lot more confidence in my ability to make smarter decisions.

It's funny how the past determines so much of a persons future. Especially when you never learn from the mistakes.