Acceptance

Step one.

It's time I admit it to myself. I am fat. A few years ago, I bought one of those "take off your shoes" scales that measures your body fat percentage. Since then I have discovered that I am, on average, comprised of at least one quarter Crisco. At my leanest, I have been down to twenty percent. Currently I am at twenty eight percent. My five foot ten inch frame, carries most of it squarely in the middle. If I had to choose a celebrity who most resembles my body type, I would have to say Mike Wazowski.

Or if I'm being generous Sy Snootles.

This body type doesn't stand out in a crowd, unless your crowd happens to be a bunch of cyclists. There was a time when I was the "skinniest" cyclist that I hung around with. In those halcyon days, weighing less than one hundred ninety pounds was down right trim. Thing is though, the guys that used to think I was skinny one by one abandoned bikes and the sweating and grunting that accompanies them. My interest in bikes remained and soon I began riding with people who had more than just a passing interest in the sport. The thing about those people is, they tend to be skinny. Soon I was on the other end of the spectrum and instead of people saying "If I only weighed as much as you I could keep up." People were saying "I'm impressed you can keep up weighing as much as you do." And soon I wasn't keeping up.

Each spring that passes, the struggle to get back to my version of fighting weight takes longer, and is more difficult. A few years ago, I was approaching two hundred pounds. Or as I like to call it, The Deuce. I setup the trainer, bought a bottle of Hydroxycut and in about two months, I had dropped twenty pounds. Once summer came, and I was able to ride more outside, I slowly got out of the better eating habits and justified it by saying I was riding more. It took awhile but the weight came back. Not with a vengeance, just enough that I didn't feel sexy anymore.

Last spring, once again approaching the deuce, I went whole hog and did the HCG diet. The thing about starving yourself to death is you actually dump a lot of weight. Fourteen pounds in about six days to be exact. Then I tried to ride a bike. On a gentle mountain bike climb that my kids are able to make, I went into a full, tunnel vision, head spinning, bonk.

So I went home and plowed through some carbs. In the short term, I only bounced up a few pounds, and managed to maintain a weight in the high one-eighties for most of last year.

Now spring is on the horizon and I find myself looking square into the maw of The Deuce once again.

The strange thing is that this winter I have actually stayed relatively active. My workout buddy/Canadian man-crush Jeff Orr has gotten me into the less than masculine world of Spin Class on Tuesdays and Thursdays and to offset the homoerotic tone of that, we lift weights Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I raced cyclocross every weekend into December and have even been out snowshoeing a couple of times. Easily more active than most Americans don't you think? But in my circle of leg-shaving, heart rate monitoring friends, I'm still the fat kid. It doesn't help that I eat like a garbage truck. Fast food is my weakness. Breakfast Burritos in particular might as well be presented to me each day by a serpent in a tree. Garbage in, garbage out as they say.

So I am finally ready to take the next step. Not sure what that is for Alcoholics, but for fat dudes it means it's time to diet.

The plan so far is this.

• Fifteen hundred calories. HCG was five hundred, and as an uneducated blue collar worker, and half-assed athlete, I have found I can't survive on five hundred. Being dizzy is not conducive to cycling or climbing ladders. Fifteen hundred is substantially less than I eat now.
• Chemicals. I have had positive results with two chemicals that people told me not to use. So I intend to use one or both of them as directed to give me a boost. I am willing to risk long term organ damage for short term weight loss.
• Grace period. Cold Turkey is not only unappetizing, it's spirit breaking. I have determined that my diet will begin next week. I intend to descend into gluttony over the next four days to get it out of my system.
• Public Shame. The purpose of this blog is twofold. To chronicle my efforts, and shame my failures. It also serves to delude myself into thinking that anybody cares to know what I have to say. If all it does is give Ryan Cobourn a place to mock my chubbiness it will have served it's purpose.

So there you have it. I will post each day with my morning weight, what I ate that day, and what I did for exercise. If I have the stomach for it(and apparently I do) I will post semi-regular photos of my man boobs. I might have to rate this site as MA though.