So how did I get here?

This morning, I received an email from a friend asking how I got the point that I needed to lose this much weight.  She was very polite in her prying and openly admitted she was prying.  Obviously I didn't mind the question since I'm responding here publicly rather than privately just to her.  I think in the long run doing it here could help someone else in a similar situation, if for no other reason than to give an idea of how someone could get to where I was.

At my heaviest, I was somewhere between 420 and 430 pounds.  The majority of the standard scales you can find won't read that high and it took adding a counterweight onto the scale in the doctor's office to get an adequate reading, hence the approximation.  How I got to that point was a combination of factors.  To get the big one a lot of overweight people will hide behind out of the way, it definitely wasn't just genetics that got me to that point.  Yes, I come from Northern European stock that tends to bulkier sizes.  I cannot, however, blame my weight simply on genetics.  Over the years, I had myself checked for thyroid issues, hormonal issues, and the like in some vain hope of finding a silver bullet to deal with it in a meaningful fashion, none of which came back with anything.

At the end of the day, it was a combination of lifestyle, laziness, and poor choices.  I was raised in a Southern Family where 'clean your plate' was the order of the day.  Given there was very little portion control, this lead to massive overeating on my part.  It's taken years for me to break this habit.  I still have problems at times not cleaning my plate due to that ingrained conditioning.  It's taken me putting much smaller portions on my plate or, if I'm at a restaurant, asking for a box from the get go to make any dent in this part of this problem.

Laziness was another big issue.  The first twelve years of my life, I lived outside of Winston-Salem, NC.  I was a reasonably active kid, though I was always tending toward being "husky."  I actively played baseball, rode my bike, and did various things to keep me moving that helped somewhat.  When I was 12, my family relocated to Atlanta due to my Dad's job.  Once I was down here, I lost touch with a lot of the things I'd done to stay active.  Instead, I turned into your standard gaming geek who would rather site around a table all weekend playing RPGs rather than being outside doing anything.  Add this to a natural proclivity to being lazy and the 'clean your plate' mentality mentioned above and you have someone who is going to start packing on the pounds. 

The only time in my life other than the last few months where I made any concerted effort to do something about my weight was the second half of my college years (I phrase it that way only because I graduated from college in 3 years rather than 2).  I lived on campus at UGA, walked pretty much everywhere, and played racquetball three to four days a week.  I didn't get into good physical condition by any stretch of the imagination, but I was certainly in better physical condition than I'd been at any other point in my life.  Once I graduated from college, however, that went by the wayside as I moved back to Atlanta and rediscovered the world 'you can't walk everywhere.'

At various times since then, I've made some sort of effort to lose weight.  The issue, at the end of the day, was accountability.  I really had nothing that kept me accountable for what I was doing and how I was doing it, so eventually I'd drop it and fall back into old habits.  I had good success on phase one of the South Beach Diet a couple of times, but I would also stumble when I transitioned to phase two.  There was no real daily accountability to it and as I pursued it, it was more along the lines of 'feel free to each however much you want as long as it's within these categories.'  Therefore it simply compounded the issue and led to much more rebound weight gain and the like.

At the end of the day, it was my own laziness and willingness to put up with being overweight that got me to this point.  It's going to be finally having enough and getting off my ass that will get me out of it.  I still struggle with parts of it.  There are some days when I really crave a specific thing (for instance, General Tso's Chicken is a major comfort food for me) or when I just don't want to worry with this.  This happens, I accept it, and I move on without letting it derail me.  If I give into a craving, I make a note of it, and stay on the horse past that point.  Keeping myself accountable, even if it's only to myself through the Weight Watchers app on my iPhone, is a large part of this.  The structured way I'm approaching this helps me out much more than the loose 'eat less, exercise more' mantra of past years.  It's just a matter of keeping to this until I reach my goal.