Laugh until you cry

Yesterday, I was hanging out with a buddy of mine, and he had me watch a video on youtube that I had not previously seen:

I’m going to admit that I sat through the whole thing, and I watched quite amused.  In particular my friend and I were entertained/stunned by his profuse sweating and heavy breathing…just from eating.   The entertainment value I gained from watching this video was so high, that I had to make my wife watch it when I got home 

Halfway through my 2^nd viewing, a strange thing happened though…I pretty much stopped laughing, and started having one of my sensitive ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’ moments. 

I have always been overweight.  As a child in the late 70’s and 80’s, I qualified as at least chubby(although by modern standards I might have just been fitting in.)  Through my teenage years, I was lucky enough that playing football, and much more important, wresting, helped to keep my weight down.  Actually, it wasn’t that I kept my weight down…it’s just that I lost enough weight in wrestling season that it took me 9 months to put it back on…then wrestling season started again, and the process would repeat.

Boot camp was good for me…I’m not sure I lost any weight, but I did move it from my waist to other areas.  Physically, it wasn’t any tougher than football or wrestling season had been(remember…Navy, not the Army or Marines).  After boot camp, standards are allowed to slack a little bit…and with no wrestling season to rein me in, the weight just kind of crept on…5-10 pounds a year.  When I got out of the Navy, it kept going.

At the end of wrestling season my senior year, I weighed 167 pounds…and not many people would call me chubby…my size 34 jeans were loose on me.  In November, when I reported to New York for some off-station work, I decided I would use the time being away from my family to get aggressive about weight loss.  The first day I went to the gym, I weighed in at just over 280 pounds…almost 120 pounds more than I had weighed in 1993.  And really, that is just 7.5 pounds a year.  I lost 35 pounds while I was in 35 pounds during the 7 months I was in New York…and in the 8 months I have been back with my family, I have put 5 of it back on(just about a 7.5 pounds for the year rate).

What I’m getting at, if imagine if I hadn’t lost 30 pounds for wrestling my Junior year of high school…I went into wrestling weighing 205.  I got down to 175.  My senior year I started at 200, got down to 167(we won’t talk about the healthiness of these weight-loss attempts…let’s just say runway models could learn from wrestlers.)    

If I had not taken an interest in wrestling…this kid could be me!  And that terrifies me.  It terrifies me because I still like to eat.  I am overweight.  My wife weighs a few pounds more than might be considered ideal for her height.  We have two little girls that have an opportunity to be so beautiful it hurts…how do we keep them from going down the path I went down?

The obvious answer is setting a good example.  Stop after one serving at the table…help get them active….lose some weight ourselves….all things we are working on.  I will NEVER see 167 again…but I could get down to a pretty fit 210-220.  I’m bigger in the chest and shoulders than I was back then, but medically, getting rid of the weight around my waist is the best thing  I can do for myself…and my girls.

Another thing I need to do, is tell my girls how impressive they are, and how their worth will never be tied to how many pizza rolls they can eat in two minutes, like this kid thinks his is.

Now…if we want to talk how many rounds they can put in the 10-ring in 10 seconds, that is something worth can be tied too.