I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen him around my gym on countless occasions though. He’s usually working out, swimming, or chatting people up. The only reason I know his name in the first place is because our CrossFit box is holding a benefit WOD for him on May 19th. According to the CrossFit page, he’s in need of a new wheelchair. I’m not really sure how much money they’re looking to raise but my wife works in rehabilitation and she assures me that the type of wheelchair he uses costs as much as a Death Star.

I have a bit of a handicap myself although it’s nowhere near as debilitating. I had agoraphobia for over a decade and have just gotten around to getting beyond it. In fact, until September of 2010, I only left my house three times. Until December of 2011, I hadn’t had a job since the 90’s. Although I’m employed now, I still maintain a strong social phobia, which is mostly why I don’t know James Gibson. I admire him though.

The medical practice I work for is called Vitality Medical Wellness Institute and it’s nestled into the corner of the upstairs cardio deck at the Sportscenter Fitness & Athletic Club in Concord, NC. I work for them part-time as a Health & Wellness Advocate and a Systems Administrator. Our reception area has a clear view of the facilities’ indoor pool area and I often see James swimming laps while his caretaker (or friend, or both) uses his wheelchair to kick back and read a book; my eyesight isn’t good enough to see which book – hopefully it’s not Mein Kampf or Twilight.

Agoraphobia tends to set in later in life and it was no different for me; it started getting bad when I was 19, although I was always a bit of an introvert. I’m 30 now and still an introvert but I’m usually very polite and a good conversationalist. It’s just that initiation part of a relationship that gives me fits. That’s why it was very much outside of the norm when on November 7th 2011, I sent a blind e-mail to the only two people I could find on the gym’s website. I had an interest in personal training and I was just getting around to restarting my life after my time wasted as a shut-in. The first person was the gym’s sales lady and the second was the head trainer. I explained my situation and pleaded for a foot in the door and not long after, I received an e-mail back from Jeff Switalski; he is the aforementioned head trainer.

Jeff was instrumental in my life being kicked into gear. Although he couldn’t offer me lasting employment, he did work with Sportscenter to hire me to do the CrossFit Cabarrus website and fix some issues the Sportscenter was having with their computers and network. He was also responsible for reaching out to Dr. Galvin, who co-owns Vitality Medical Wellness Institute with his wife Paula. If your memory sucks, that’s the same place I work now, so that went well.

I started seeing James Gibson almost every day when I got my job because Vitality has a business relationship with both the gym and the CrossFit box, so I would often go talk to trainers and coaches. The first time I saw James, he was stretched out on the floor of the weight room. I remember thinking, “What a badass.”

He made me feel pathetic. Even when I weighed 500+ pounds, I could still move. I could have gotten a job and I could have gone to the gym. I didn’t because I was scared of people staring at me and here was James Gibson splayed out on the floor facing my fears and doing it with a smile on his face.

You don’t realize how important social interaction is to the fabric of existence until you cut yourself off from it. As little as 3 years ago, I was completely inconsequential. I could have died and the WoW guild I was raiding with would have just assumed I quit the game. My family would have been stuck with a giant bill to cover my oversized casket, a couple of people might have showed up to my funeral, and I would have just ceased to exist without ever having done anything.

I wouldn’t have known that I had it in me to face my fears. I would have died a loser with no friends. I wouldn’t have inspired anyone and James Gibson would have never inspired me. I wouldn’t have ever found my dream job. I wouldn’t have met my awesome bosses, co-workers, or the amazing Sportscenter staff, including a new very good friend in the sales lady I originally e-mailed, Katie, or her fiancé and new friend, Brandon. I wouldn’t have met the owner Bruce, his wife Lisa, or the general manager Randy. I wouldn’t have met amazing trainers in Crowder, Jamie, Ashlyn, Bridgette, Melissa, or Tommy. I wouldn’t have met any of Dr. Galvin’s patients that I’ve grown to love. I wouldn’t have met anyone. I would just be another fat guy being cut out of his house that’s forgotten the next day when the laughter dies down.

A puzzle lined up to lead me to post this – an entire life of depression and suicidal thoughts; my brother building me a 286 with a dial-up modem in it, a BSDi shell account, and a text web browser called lynx in the early 90’s. Countless hours spent trying desperately to escape my body by burying myself in almost every size and generation of monitor – 11 inches of glorious monochrome to 24 inches of digital flat panel. The computer skills I picked up that gave me a foot in the door at Vitality. It all led up to this.

If I didn’t take control of my body enough to gain the confidence to face a big fear of initiating contact with strangers and send that e-mail in November, I might have never seen James Gibson struggling on the floor, swimming laps, or laughing with his friends. You might not have ever known James Gibson existed but if you didn’t, you do now. And he needs help.

http://crossfitcabarrus.com/james-gibson-benefit-wod/

Who is James Gibson? A guy I’ve never spoken to — who maybe you’ve never spoken to — who needs a new wheelchair. Whether this leads to him getting it or not, the way that one life can branch off towards and can connect with other life is pretty awesome and I’m glad I stayed alive long enough to realize what I would have missed.

Taken from this page on his blog:

“To summarize my story, I was an obese, sedentary, recently diagnosed diabetic when I began this journey. I was on diabetes, cholesterol, and hypertension drugs as well as taking 4 insulin shots per day.

But within days things began to change and within a few months, I WAS A NEW PERSON!”

• 235 LBS to 165 LBS
• Diabetes: GONE
• Hypertention: GONE
• High Cholesterol: GONE
• Acid Reflux: GONE
• Back Pain: GONE
• Lethargy: GONE

This link will take you to YouTube, where you can hear Steve being interviewed by Jimmy Moore

Every Paleo and Low Carb blogger on the planet is going to rain down their opinions on this matter and I’m no different but rather than fill a page with vitriolic rhetoric, I’ll instead take this opportunity to write an open letter to the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition and fill that with vitriolic rhetoric instead.

Imagine, if you will, that I’ve just cleared my throat for dramatic effect.

Dear North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition,

My name is Jesse Stilwell and I live in Kannapolis, North Carolina; a mere stone’s throw from the owner and operator of the Diabetes Warrior blog, Steve Cooksey. I’m sure you’ve received many nasty letters about attacking a man who’s just trying to help folks improve their health. I, however, write to you in support of your campaign. I know it’s shocking because I also run a blog focused on alternative nutrition and I’m also from North Carolina but hear me out.

I beg of you, please, send an army of well-paid attorneys to pick on Steve Cooksey. You see, hornets are fairly docile creatures and although they always seem to hum in concert, you don’t really get to hear them roar until you poke around in their nest and this particular nest that you’ve lent your credence to is snuggled firmly across the entire world in the form of the Internet. It’s filled to the brim with blogs just like Steve’s, all operated by similarly driven busy-bees fighting for a voice in the crowd with nothing but words and a chip on their shoulders. Diabetics, people with auto immune diseases, obese and formerly obese folks like me, fitness freaks, and even a few top-of-the-class nutjobs (also like me).

The thing about a low hum is that you can just place it aside in your mind as ambiance; you can imagine each participant in the crowd holding different conversations that all merge together into an intangible symphony of dissonance. A roar — on the other hand — a roar is quite a different story. You can’t mistake a roar because as Newton’s famous law decrees it must be, it is a reaction. Every human being on the planet understands a reaction and that it cannot occur without an action. And we humans, being the inquisitive species we are, when we see a reaction, we immediately seek out the proprietor of the offending action. We live on reaction. We breathe reaction and by extension, our fist forms as the news media and being members of our frateternity of humans, they also seem to love a good reaction and even more than a good reaction, they really love a a good sob story.

So once again, please take your comparatively whiffle ball bat sized stick and strike — with the full force of your being — at the base of the tree that holds a million hornets’ nests. When you’ve got them good and angry, then grab on to the trunk and shake. Shake free the victims of terrible diseases, depressions, and plain old bad luck; shake so vigorously that they fall right into a chair on the evening news. Tear away from them their word amplifier and instead give them a voice and a cheeks-wet-with-tears-from-a-lifetime-of-agony amplifier. If the latter is too dramatic we can just call it an empathy amplifier.

This is the right thing to do. Let’s re-educate the world, North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition. That’s what this is all about, right? I sincerely hope it’s not the small amount of NCBDN licensing fees that are in jeopardy if we continue to talk to people who are already fed up with your licensees anyway. That would just make you look incredibly stupid, short-sighted, and out of touch with reality.

Food is for Fuel. It occurs to me that I never really took the opportunity to go into detail about how this one phrase changed my life, my attitude towards food, and not only aided in my weight loss but also improved my overall outlook on life. So I think I’ll take this opportunity to explain it.

I have a food addiction coupled with not only an urge to binge but the physical ability to binge to an absolutely outrageous degree. I very rarely feel full until my stomach is painfully distended. It’s been a lifelong problem and among the primary culprits for my morbid obesity. When you’re lazy, sedentary, and when not only can you eat an entire week’s worth of groceries in one sitting, but you’re absolutely compelled to, you’re going to get fat. And I did.

Now, some folks don’t believe in food addiction. I understand the skepticism and lack evidence other than anecdotal facts but I believe that the results of the solution I applied to my problem are fairly compelling. That being said, I believe that food addiction is a complex compilation of variables. Rather than becoming addicted to certain foods, I believe that I created a reward loop with food that had devastating consequences.

My weight has always been high and I’ve narrowed that down to my family’s economic situation coupled with the nutritional ignorance of my parents or any figure of authoritative consequence in my early life. I grew up feeling different than everyone else and learned to live in seclusion at a fairly young age. This lead to depression and eventually suicidal thoughts, as well as agoraphobia in my late teens. My fondest and most comforting memories became holidays and family events. All of those events — in one way or another — heavily involved food.

It had been drilled into my head throughout my childhood that I was fat because I ate too much. Instead, I believed wholeheartedly that I was fat due to genetics, and I believe that everyone telling me that I ate too much only made me believe it was genetics that much more. I think that at a deep level, I knew they were right, but I was so angry and hopeless that self destruction and to some degree, self mutilation became a source of novelty for me.

I got angrier and angrier at the world around me and I inched further and further into myself. I felt weak, powerless, wholly dependent on others to survive, and stripped of any control over my situation. I was completely and utterly dehumanized. And then it happened; a moment of clarity in an otherwise endless fog of depression.

I had manifested a reward loop. My parents were both from impoverished backgrounds and constantly asked me if I wanted seconds and thirds, which trained my body to take in a massive amount of food. Even though I was active, I kept getting bigger, which only solidified my belief that my obesity was genetic when it was actually an enormous daily calorie surplus. That helplessness and self-imposed segregation led to crippling depression. I ate junk food to remind myself of the happiest moments of my life in an attempt to repair the damage done by years of suicidal levels of depression. My brain was attempting to self-correct the problem by making the problem worse. I was activating a dopamine response by recalling my fondest memories, I was activating a dopamine response with food specifically engineered to activate a dopamine response, while at the same time activating a dopamine response by causing myself harm, and round and round the toilet bowl my life did rapidly descend.

Food is for Fuel. It was dually an epiphany and a paradigm shift; this single phrase would lead me to triumph over my lifelong struggle with obesity. I stopped attaching food to holidays and events, but instead enjoyed the events for the people. I stopped eating junk food and instead ate simply what my body required to run the most efficiently. If I didn’t know what was in it, I didn’t eat it. I ate ingredients instead of complex recipes. If it was salty, sweet, and fatty at the same time, I didn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. If I ate a food that invoked a desire to binge, I threw it out of my diet completely. Eventually, I ended up with a diet of meat, veggies, and protein powder. Instead of food, I now crave social interaction. Instead of self destruction, I now crave self improvement.

One little phrase changed everything and through my blog, I want to help spark a revolution that helps change everything for as many people as possible, so that’s why I named it Food is for Fuel. Now you’re all caught up.

“Wow – just read your about you stuff – incredible! I lost 70+ pounds 10 yrs ago and thought I was something specials – nothing compared to your accomplishment dude.”

Shenanigans. The insane level of nutritional depravity I was living in shouldn’t make me any more or less special than anyone else who’s done the same thing I’ve done (still doing); we followed through on the decision was to do something about our unhappiness. Even if you’ve lost 20 pounds, you’re just as cool as me.

I put it that way because there’s a billion decisions made daily that end up with results maybe 1% of the time. It’s easy to decide to do something. I’ve decided I’m going to own a country. I’ve decided I’m going to make my mark on history by inventing a flying car that shoots purple laser beams. Decisions are nothing — anyone can decide anything, any time they’d like to. Doing it is the hard part and if you’re doing it, we’re equally awesome.

If you’ve lost 50 pounds, look into the mirror and feel content with yourself, you’re much cooler than me. I’ve lost over 250 pounds but you know what it’s like to live in a temple you built yourself, while I’m still hauling the stone to build the archway for mine. I guess it’s just a matter of perspective.

Here is my latest 3 month follow-up DXA scan. It shows that my decision to slow down my weight loss on the way to 200 pounds to focus on rebuilding muscle and give my metabolism time to recover from a long calorie deficit was the right move.

To hear you complain about a small pouch of barely visible fat on the belly that resides just above a bustling factory of equally miraculous life is ridiculous but at the same time gives me hope. As long as you’re pursuing perfection, then so must I. If you do and I do not then I am automatically weaker than you and that is unacceptable. Not because you are a woman or a wimp but because I’ve been weak before and I no longer like how the words “But I can’t” taste when they escape my lips.

Our shared need to succumb to our vanity is not a terrible sin. It is an absolutely human imperative. It is what makes us great because ego isn’t a personality flaw but rather the exhaust of newly ignited confidence that’s blazing at both ends. You are a human, you are inherently breathtaking, and you have the self awareness necessary to recognize that you are not what you should be and the wherewithal and imagination required to forge your own path to greatness. Let the bar be your exclamation point and the plates pounding the earth be your words; let your body be the poetry.

Depending on where you know me from, my name is either Vainglory or Jesse Stilwell and in March of 2010, I weighed myself for the first time in a decade. With her tax return, my wife purchased a heavy-duty scale for me. We were both positive that I weighed well over 600 pounds so we bought a scale that went up to 750 pounds. I stepped on it and the number quickly climbed until it rested on 538 pounds. I felt relieved that it wasn’t higher and that’s the number that would mark the beginning of a 2 year transformation journey that’s lead me to where I am today.

When I was 19, I developed agoraphobia and became a shut-in. I didn’t work for over a decade and relied on my wife and parents to support me. I now work as a Health & Wellness Advocate doing nutrition consulting & weight loss management at Vitality Medical Wellness Institute in Concord, NC. I’m also the company’s Systems Administrator. I’ve reintegrated myself into society and the mental aspect of my transformation is as important as the physical transformation; I’m not done with either yet.

This is the story of Phase 1 of my life transformation. What caused my lifelong struggle with obesity, how I stopped it, beating my agoraphobia back, and how I’ve rebooted my life.

I was fat before I left my mother’s womb. I was born on November 1st, 1981 at a robust 10 pounds and my weight just kept climbing from that point on.

When I was in elementary school, Arnold Schwarzenegger was leading the President’s Fitness Council, which is when I was indoctrinated with the first bit of information that would lead me down the road to morbid obesity. If you were fat, it was because you were lazy. Otherwise, you had to be genetically predisposed to obesity.

I was always the moon-faced chubby kid in school but my baby fat never left me like most other kids. I was incredibly active and involved in sports, playing something for at least an hour every day; most of the time I played for 2 or more hours. Basketball, football, baseball, soccer, and anything else I could find a group of kids playing. I played in every kids league that was made available to me, I played after school at day care, and yet I kept gaining weight.

I looked around at the rest of my family and one of my brothers was morbidly obese. Many people on my father’s side of the family were morbidly obese as well. Coupled with my parents’ nutritional ignorance (they weren’t alone), the knowledge that a good portion of my extended family was obese or morbidly obese, and my blossoming addiction to sugar, there was an easy path forged for me to shift the blame for my own obesity from myself to a genetic predisposition. In my naivety and ignorance, I failed to look at obesity from a broad angle and instead focused on what was in front of me instead, which was often some form of brightly packaged junk food.

What I failed to see were that the eating habits of my immediate family and my extended family were incredibly similar because my mother learned how to cook the things my father liked and my father liked what his family liked. Biscuits, gravy, breaded and fried everything, cornbread, and all forms of dairy. One of the most insidious concoctions I learned to produce in my adolescence was a giant bowl of cornbread and milk; a titanic sugar bomb that likely guaranteed at a pound of weight gain with each serving I slurped down.

So I was exercising like crazy but still fat and getting fatter. Members of both my immediate and extended family were morbidly obese. I had developed an addiction to the high fructose corn syrup that was being packed into all of the cheap food my family was forced to buy due to budget constraints after a bankruptcy. This was the genesis of my morbid obesity and the formula for a hanging cloud of hopelessness that would haunt me for most of my life.

Growing up, I never really got picked on for my weight much, though I was definitely aware of how different I was. This was during the late 80s and early 90s when fat kids were in the minority. By puberty, I was already ashamed of my body and rarely even swam without a shirt on. I was also starting to shy away from social interaction. My brother built a computer for me and put a dial-up modem in it, which truthfully probably saved my life but also gave me the escape that would destroy my need for real life human interaction. I didn’t have access to the Internet immediately but I could connect to local dialup bulletin board systems, which is where I first learned how to be somebody else. I spent hours upon hours on them either chatting or playing DOOR games, which were little text-based role playing games mostly. I often skipped school to play them. About a year after that, the same brother let me use his dialup shell account that I used to access the Internet for the first time. I found and became addicted to Internet Relay Chat.

This is relevant only because IRC introduced me to a couple of groups of people in Richmond, Hampton, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. They were the last friends I had before agoraphobia ripped me out of the real world.

Around that same time, I was incredibly depressed and it was only getting worse. The aforementioned cloud of hopelessness had been raining on me for a good long time and I had become suicidal by the time I was 15. I made two attempts on my life at that time. The first was was with a shotgun that I couldn’t figure out how to load because luckily, I am not my father’s son when it comes to firearms or things that require any degree of manual dexterity. The second was a full bottle of ibuprofen that resulted in the worst stomach pain I’ve ever felt and a ball of undissolved pills on a hospital floor. They thought it was a stomach flu and that’s the story I let my Mom believe, too. The first attempt was after my 8th grade English teacher called me stupid in class and said I would amount to nothing. If you read this at any point Mr. Johnson, don’t do that.

I was in middle school, getting bigger, and failing every single class I was taking. I had a couple of mostly in-school friends and I was too shy to talk to girls. I spent most of my time either lonely or online pretending to be someone else. My mental state was a wreck and I utterly hated myself. I had been held back twice already in second and third grade. In the eighth grade, Culpeper County Middle School instituted a pilot program that only lasted one year that required that students who didn’t finish homework throughout the year complete it in summer school. If it wasn’t completed, the student would be held back. I never did homework so at the end of the year, I knew I was going to be held back again. I talked my parents into letting me drop out and become home schooled. They offered up surprisingly little resistance partially because I think my mom recognized the desperation and despair in my voice. I was not going back to school, no matter how I got out of it.

I passed a placement test that put me at an 11th grade level and I spun my wheels. To her credit, my Mom tried to educate me, but failed badly through no fault of her own. I was lazy, didn’t care, and was too busy learning and caring only about computers, phones, networking, and how to circumvent their security. She did talk me into enrolling in a class at a local technical school where most of the region’s bad children went instead of high school to learn how to work on cars. Instead, I went to learn more about computers and took an A+ certification class that once again, I didn’t complete. However, I did meet my best friend to this day in that class. His name was Josh, we were both 16, and we would spend the years that would follow wasting an unmitigated crap-load of time playing massively multiplayer online games together.

Josh and I started our friendship with a mutual interest in hacking but we were also addicted to video games at that point as well. Early in our friendship, we played countless hours of Starcraft, Diablo II, and EverQuest. Even though we lived relatively close to one another, most of our communication was done over the phone or Internet.

When we were 17, Josh and I both moved out of our houses to stay with his father for the summer. Around that time, I introduced him to IRC and we started talking to a group of hackers from Richmond, Virginia that consisted of a married couple and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met to this day. Nearly every weekend during that summer, the couple would pick us up in their atrociously small car, and we’d drive to Richmond to spend the weekend dumpster diving and hacking various and sundry things. If you had an analog cellphone and you lived in Richmond in the late 90′s, there’s a chance a small group of dastardly teenagers and disenfranchised 20-somethings were rummaging about your conversations looking to create havoc.

Josh and I also had a group of friends from the Virginia Beach area that weren’t techies but just good and fun people. We often traveled down to their neck of the woods to go to parties. Sadly, all of my friends from the Internet I enjoyed hanging out with in real life would become casualties of my agoraphobia. I really loved some of them but when agoraphobia hit me, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The only person I felt comfortable around for the next decade was Josh, his family, and my wife.

Before Miriam was my wife, she was of course my girlfriend, and I met her right before that ton of agoraphobia bricks fell on me. We went to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and briefly after that, we went to Maryland to visit her friend where we saw Signs. That was one of the last three times I’d step foot in a public place for the next ten years.

When I was 19, I developed agoraphobia that lasted until I was 29. When I left my house, I started to have panic attacks that would cause me to sweat profusely and cause my heart to beat out of my chest. After experiencing that a few times, my brain became very adept at manifesting those panic attacks whenever I was faced with even the possibility of going into public — a sort of defensive mechanism I think — mini-panic attacks to avoid giant ones. It was so bad that when Josh got married to his wife Heather in the early 2000′s, I had to back out of being his best man because the night before his wedding, I panicked so badly that I got no sleep and made myself sick. His brother filled in for me. I attended the wedding but skipped the reception because the wedding its self wrecked what was left of my comfort zone, even though I wasn’t a member of it anymore. That day remains among my greatest regrets even though Josh never held it against me.

In 2004, one of my brothers decided to move with their two children to Davidson, North Carolina. My parents, wanting to be near their grandchildren, decided to follow. Because I was dependent on them at the time and unwilling to move in with my relatively new girlfriend in Hampton, Virginia, I decided to move with them to Kannapolis, North Carolina. The move would take me approximately 5 hours away from Josh, which would turn out to be enough distance to limit our visits to once or twice per year. One visit would be on New Years Eve and the other on July 4th. The trip would do terrible things to my knees every time because cars aren’t made for fat people and I would have panic attacks the whole way. Josh has anxiety about traveling on highways and had two small children to deal with, so he couldn’t come down to my neck of the woods very often, either.

I used my free time — which was all of my time — to play video games. Sometimes I played console games but mostly, I was addicted to massively multi-player online games. EverQuest claimed 5 years of my life, including some that I spent playing before I became agoraphobic. World of Warcraft claimed nearly 7 years. I became very good at them and met some amazing people that I still talk to. However, the games allowed me to completely ignore who I was in the real world and who I was in the games became more important to me. The end result was that I became very good at the games, became a guild and raid leader in my fantasy world, and plunged deeper into sadness and despair in the real world. My wife was an introvert herself and loved to read, so our relationship wasn’t harmed. If it was harmed at all, it was more my cynicism, depression, and inability to go places. She remained incredibly supportive however, amid what I assume was a veritable torrent of girlfriends and family members asking her why should would stay with me.

Until I was 29, The last time I would step into a public venue was when my wife and I got married in October of 2006. We had to go to the courthouse because I couldn’t handle a real wedding. Instead, Josh and his wife were our witnesses, and we had a small gathering at our house the next day. Even though I knew most of the people there, the number of them and the few people I hadn’t met were enough to cause me to have a series of panic attacks that essentially ruined what should have been one of the happiest days of my life.

I remained suicidal from middle school and on through my twenties, thinking about it at least once a day. I went to bed most nights hoping that I wouldn’t wake up the next day and when I did, I was disappointed that I had. My life was of no consequence, I hadn’t had a job in over 10 years, and I had spent approximately 3 years of my life inside of two video games; as in 3 total years of 24 hour days. I was atrociously fat, barely mobile, and I broke every piece of furniture my wife and I had, including a computer chair with a 500 pound weight limit. I didn’t have health insurance and I even though I was suicidal, I spent a lot of time worrying about how sick I was because I hadn’t been able to see a doctor in so long.

In my estimation, I was at the very least a waste of oxygen and at the very worst, a burden for my wife and family. I reached a point in my life where it was either do something about it or just finally kill myself.

I weighed myself for the first time in a decade. With her tax return, my wife purchased a heavy-duty scale for me. We were both positive that I weighed well over 600 pounds so we bought a scale that went up to 750 pounds. I stepped on it and the number quickly climbed until it rested on 538 pounds. I felt relieved that it wasn’t higher and that’s the number that would mark the beginning of a 2 year transformation journey that’s lead me to where I am today.

Armed with a scale that could weigh me for the first time in a decade, I tried to lose weight for a week using a program one of my wife’s co-workers gave her. I think it was a printout from the Southbeach Diet but I’m not sure. It was a low carb diet with a carbohydrate refeed every 18 meals. I lost 10 pounds the first week and it felt like a key turning over in my head. It was game on.

When I’m interested in something, I tend to become obsessive about it. I started searching online for low carb diet information and stumbled across a sub-forum on the SomethingAwful.com forums that I had been a member of since 2005, except I had frequented the forums for its comedy content and had no clue it had a forum dedicated to fitness, nutrition, and personal hygiene. It was there that I found the thread that would really change my life. I’d never been exposed to scientific information that was broken down into words I could understand that were in short enough spurts that it held my attention and in the Low Carb Megathread, a user named Sizzlechest did just that.

He didn’t just go over nutrition but he also went into a broader view of obesity that included videos, articles, and other things pertaining to anatomy and systems in the body I hadn’t the fuzziest clue about. I’d never heard of ketosis in my life, nor did I understand what was causing my obesity. That thread provided me the answers that would spark my interest in the subject and usually, that spark is all I need to send me on an information gathering rampage. Instead of video games, I wanted only to learn about how food interacted with my body. It wasn’t long before I started reading about fitness as well.

I decided to start a detailed weight loss log to track my progress throughout my transformation and around that time, also decided to take progress pictures and measurements once a month. That’s when I named myself Vainglory and started sharing my journey with the Internet. I started out fairly slow and stalled at 515 LBs for 3 weeks before I transitioned to a standard low carb diet, trying to stay under 100g a day. The idea is that I did damage to myself gradually so I should probably try to repair the damage gradually as well. That was the last time I would stall for a very long time.

In September of 2010, my parents invited my wife, my brother, and I to drive to the beach in Norfolk, Virginia. I weighed 450 pounds, so I was only down 88 pounds. I had gained an incredible amount of confidence in myself, though. When I asked my brother and wife if they wanted to go see Inception, my wife shot me a familiar look; it was the “Yeah, until you decide not to go again.” look that she’d justifiably shot me many times before then. In all honesty, I was very close to backing out and even though I was panicking, I had gained enough confidence from the weight loss to that point that I was able to push through the fear. The sandals I was wearing had holes in them to let water drain back through the bottom but coupled with my body weight, they caused me to make popping noises like bubble wrap every time I took a step on the mall’s polished floor. The theater was on the third floor and it was packed. We made our way past a little under 100 people standing line and bought our tickets. When I sat down in the theater, I still didn’t quite fit between the arm rests but they were adjustable and when the lights fell, my head cleared up and I enjoyed the movie.

Leaving the theater, I was completely calm. I told my mind that I was in control again and it listened for the first time in almost a decade. The agoraphobia wasn’t completely gone but that night took away a large chunk of the absolute control it had over me. Inception remains my favorite movie.

I steadily lost weight and logged it in my forum posts but I think the real magic started happening after Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2010. I cheated heavily on purpose for those holidays and gained a bunch of weight but I finally looked at my relationship with food and saw the addiction for what it was. I felt so good and changed my state of mind so drastically that I was actually upset that I’d hurt myself and my progress. It was a gigantic breakthrough that lead to a thought that I share with all of my patients now. Holidays are about people, not food. Nothing is about food. We make things about food because it’s easy — it’s easy because it’s tradition and you’re expected to do it. The greatest triumphs come when you do the hard thing instead. The funny thing is that if you’re 100% committed to doing the hard thing, it eventually becomes the easy thing. But if you’re only 99% committed, it will remain just as hard as it is now, forever.

Optimism began to sneak into my head and the cynicism that had dominated me for so long began to dissipate. I began to transform into the person I am today when I became the most disgusted at the person I used to be. Dieter’s nirvana. I fully bought into my own rhetoric that food is for fuel. Enjoying it is biologically imperative to the survival of our species but being utterly enthralled by it is completely optional and ultimately destructive; multiply its destructive capability by 100 if you’re impulsive and your metabolism is inefficient.

By the holiday season in 2011, I was wholly committed to my health and I lost weight on both Christmas and Thanksgiving. I didn’t cheat even a little bit and I didn’t even think twice about it. The most interesting thing that happened wasn’t that I successfully avoided cheating. It was that some of the people I spent the holidays with treated me as if though I was torturing myself. They knew I had a food addiction, were inspired by my progress, and congratulated me on my progress. However, they expected me to cheat. I’m glad I can look from the outside in at the absurd pedestals we place on our food on. To me, it’s tantamount to presenting your car’s gasoline in a crystal vase before putting it in the tank. That’s partially why I’m successful.

As I begin this paragraph, it is April 14th, 2012, at least for another few hours. Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of the day I shared my struggles with anyone but my wife. My forum-based weight loss log guided me through my transformation and provided me incredible support along the way. It gave me an outlet to dump my thoughts and ideas into. It taught me that I’m still an idiot at times, no matter how much weight I lose or how much insight I gain. Most of all, it gave me a reason to track my progress and through that, I’ve managed to turn my life around.

The weight log I kept, the pictures and measurements I took, and the log its self are at least partially responsible for me getting my first job in a decade. My wardrobe is no longer full of super baggy clothes that wouldn’t look right on a hobo. I’m very much alive and my future prospects are as bright as the sun. Even if I end up working retail for the rest of my life, I’m a success story. I beat an enemy that had a death grip on me and not many people can say that.

I have the Internet to thank for that and specifically users who have gone through or are going through the same thing I did. They didn’t have to say kind things to me but almost all of them did. The online weight loss community is the greatest support group in the history of the world and I’m eternally grateful to all of them for helping me find some worth in myself for the first time… ever.

Thank you all for your interest in my story and I really hope it inspires someone to change their lives too. I’m probably going to miss a few people but I want to make the final words on this page a tribute to the strange goons (some with stranger names than others) who helped me to find joy in breathing. Most have been supporting me the entire time.

Uziel
Astonishing Wang
Wamsutta
Nucka
Groke
Beliskner
SouthShoreSamurai
gruvmeister
Ass Waffle
mewse
Pooter
IllegallySober
fanpantstic
DevNull
Junaos
mobiusrage
Apidae
danhenge
Jordan7hm
Alfajor
TheOmegaWhatsThatCollapsingSound
Humanoid Female
Schlinky
neonnoodle
KBD
Delta-Wye
Zugswang
SeaGoatSupreme
J Miracle
Korby Pockett
DocUzuki
OmNom
Schroedingers Cat
Marshmallow Mayhem
Vomax
Democratic Pirate

All images shameless ripped from /r/reactiongifs! Captions are my own.

When someone offers you fast food:

When your spouse playfully tries to throw a piece of popcorn in your mouth:

When your friends eat ice cream near you:

When your family reminisces about Thanksgiving dinner:

When someone tells you they can eat whatever they want:

When your Mom offers you biscuits for the 4th time:

When she offers them for the 40th time:

When an ex sees you for the first time in years:

When you first start your diet and you’re trying to throw away all of the junk food in your house:

When you tell your friends how many eggs you consume:

When you get into a diet argument with someone doing a juice fast:

When you open the fridge near the end of the week and see there’s still bacon left:

When someone sees you’ve lost a lot of weight and asks you what your secret is:

When your friends and relatives try to get you to cheat:

When the waiter drops bread off at your table and leaves immediately after:

When someone comments on how much better you look now compared to how you used to look:

When you pretend to write down the name of the Amazing Miracle Diet of the Day book that someone’s mother in-law saw on the Dr. Oz:

When you go to Cracker Barrel with your spouse and unexpectedly discover an entire page of low carb options on the menu:

When you step on the scale after a perfect week of eating and gain a pound:

When your parents get murdered and you have to learn martial arts and invent shark repellent so that you can spend the rest of your life fighting crime as a coping mechanism that ultimately proves to be futile no matter how many thugs you put behind bars and also, you ate a candy bar:

When your Mom tells you you’re getting too skinny while you still weigh 300 pounds:

When someone puts a tray of cookies in your vicinity:

When you witness someone alternating between dipping a corndog and pizza rolls in ranch dressing:

When you’re trying to decide whether or not eating something that you really want to eat is a terrible decision:

When you’re looking at a table full of things you used to love that you can’t have anymore:

How your friends and family should react if you contract and die from a horrible disease:

How your friends and family will react if you contract and die from a horrible disease while you also happen to be on a low carb diet:

When a relative loudly announces how much weight you’ve lost in a crowded room and then requests that everyone marvel at your willpower:

IF this is how you have to imagine junk food when you pick it up to keep yourself from eating it:

When a hater claims there’s no science supporting the health benefits of your diet:

When you’re walking through the candy aisle in the supermarket:

When your co-worker tells you the low carb brownies you devoured that she made specially for your birthday had Nutella in them:

When you lose weight even though you cheated multiple times:

When you gain 15 pounds of water weight in a week because you thought you could still lose weight while cheating multiple times:

When you’re listening to friends having a serious discussion about which non-diet soda is healthier:

When you see girlscouts coming from your neighbors house:

When your BMI is downgraded from obese to overweight:

When your co-workers go out for lunch:

When you have but one remaining use for a spaghetti strainer:

When you hear there’s something called a Cabbage Soup Diet and people think it’s a good idea:

When a regular clothing store has something in your size:

When you walk through the supermarket and get accosted by workers at multiple bakery sampling stations:

When someone in your house is cooking pizza or brownies:

When a vegan calls you a part of the problem:

When you’ve got a weight loss buddy and you hit a plateau:

When you forget to put your glasses on before stepping on the scale:

When you look in the mirror after you’ve lost 15 pounds:

When you go shopping for groceries while you’re starving:

When you have sugar for the first time in months:

When your friends see you take the bun off a hamburger for the first time:

When the restaurant slips a free piece of candy in at the bottom of the bag:

When you fall off the wagon and the only thing you had around to binge on were your fiber-rich protein bars:

90% of the people on the elliptical at my gym are women and while some are on them because they love to run and hate it outside, I’m assuming most of them are trying to improve their appearance, maintain it, or they’re running away from the deteriorating effects of aging.

Listen. Your appearance is the sum of your various lifestyle choices and not the result of burning calories. Your folly is largely in your nutritional choices and they will account for most of your appearance. Resistance training (weight lifting/body weight+gravity) will account for the other portion. No, you will not get bulky when you get muscular. Shut up. Before you get the urge to burn a bra, that’s not meant to be read as a get back in the kitchen shut up. It’s an I hate seeing women wasting their time because they’re misinformed shut up.

Most women do not have the appropriate testosterone levels to get “bulky”. The ones that do and find out that they’re better at lifting heavy things than other women end up doing it competitively. A lot of them also do hormone replacement to get those figures that look more manly than me. Those are the ones you’re thinking of. There’s almost a zero percent chance of you getting bulkier than you intend to if you’re a lady. Also, I don’t know if you think lifting a bar once is going to make your blouse split open with rippling muscles but putting on muscle is kind of a pretty long process. If you look in the mirror one morning and a shadow hits a crevice and you think to yourself, “Oh, I do not like that!” then you can just stop lifting.

A lot of the problem is marketing. Women constantly walk into our clinic doing the exact same things and having the exact same problems. So many women starve themselves and do nothing but cardio that it can’t be a coincidence. This is just a small sample size in Concord, North Carolina. Literally every woman under 150 pounds who comes in trying to get leaner is doing exactly the opposite of what she should be doing. Most of the ones over 150 pounds are doing it, too. It’s because people will make more impulsive purchases that require smaller monetary investments over larger ones. Selling a $15 5lb kettlebell is easier than selling a $60 45 lb kettlebell and fitness companies know it. Along those same lines, selling a $10 2lb dumbbell or exercise ball is way easier than selling you a barbell, bench, and some plates.

Diet companies know that by starving you, you will lose a ton of weight in the first two weeks, and then blame yourself when it slows down and eventually reverses; then you’ll move on to another diet that’s either owned by the same conglomerate or has its food produced by the same conglomerate. Another reason this is both an incredibly insidious and an incredibly lucrative practice is that by starving yourself, you’re screwing up your metabolic rate. So when you gain that weight back, you’re going to gain over what you were originally. Desperation sells and unless corrected, you’ll likely still buy into starvation as a viable means of weight loss because supermodels have been stereotyped into the ground as all being anorexic. Yes, by not eating, you can look impressively terrible.

Let’s talk about what your appearance consists of. Body fat is the appearance killer, which is why I think most of you are chugging along on a treadmill or elliptical. Burning calories isn’t necessarily burning body fat. However, you can completely regulate your body fat through nutrition if you choose. Your body fat only represents the bubble wrap covering the canvas, while a few specific muscle groups play the role of the canvas its self; your skin is the paint. Let’s make art.

Skin is the largest organ on the human body. There are not pieces of skin that aren’t attached to other pieces of skin. It’s all connected. That and the fact that most women cannot bulk up make up the reason why — for women — “spot toning” is a bunch of crap. Men can do curls to increase their bicep sizes because we have the testosterone required to build giant stacks of lean muscle mass that can push the skin up enough to forge definition.

The only way for a woman to look toned up is to either be hit by the genetics stick or get their diet under control and do resistance training. The reason for that is that women naturally have a higher body fat percentage and because they can’t build big muscles, the easiest way to get around genetics is to increase your body’s overall lean muscle mass while attacking body fat through nutrition. Here’s how.

Carbohydrates -> Glycogen -> Higher Blood Sugar -> Insulin -> Fat Storage
No Carbs -> Ketosis -> Lower Blood Sugar -> Less Insulin -> Less Fat Storage

Ketosis is a state your body enters when its deprived of carbohydrate wherein it begins to utilize fats for energy instead. It is one the most efficient ways to demolish body fat. What’s the most inefficient method of attacking body fat, you ask? Well, sitting on your ass in front of a T.V. but also not eating enough and then doing a bunch of cardio. Not eating enough food translates into you not taking in enough protein, which can result in muscle loss, lighter skin pigmentation, swelling in the stomach, and hair loss. When you add cardio, you are burning calories you don’t have to spare because you’re already eating at a substantial deficit.

You probably guarantee that you’ll induce a starvation response if you eat too little and then do half an hour or more of aerobic exercise. That will get you the OPPOSITE results you’re looking for. You’re essentially torturing yourself so you can go in reverse. Let’s assume you’re a 35 year old female who’s 5’5″, 140 pounds, and do intense exercise 5 times a week. You require 2,000 calories a day to maintain your fat mass and the top end of your starvation response is something around 1300 calories probably, which is still dangerous, and most of you eat under 1,000. Caloric needs needs go up with weight, height, and activity level. The older you get, the less calories you need because your metabolism slows down. The difference between 20 years is somewhere around 100 calories.

2 eggs, 2 pieces of bacon, a grilled chicken salad from Arby’s with light ranch, 4 oz of skinless chicken breast, and I’ll throw a CLIF bar in there to be generous. This is probably more than a lot of women eat and it’s like 950 calories. Calories aren’t the holy grail or anything but you can use them to kind of guess on food intake and when it’s low, it’s low. The problem with starving is that yes, you will burn fat, but you will also shed muscle due to the protein deficiency, and you’ll probably cause the one area you’re trying the hardest to tone up to puff out like a blowfish.

So let’s get into why you should stop trying to run away from lean muscle mass and instead covet it like a shoe sale, or something equally girlie that you like. Ok, you can burn that bra now. Anyway, you should want to put on muscle. That means you should want to get the hell off of the ellipticals and pick up heavy things instead. The reason is simple. Muscle is hard, so skin will look better when it stretches against it versus how it looks when stretched against fat. Imagine a balloon stretched around your fist and then imagine a balloon stretched around an equal volume of liquid. In your mind’s eye, you’ll either see the definition in your fist because it is rigid or you’ll see a generic and plumpy water balloon because it is not.

Watch the image above and as the balloon’s form is changed by the force of the impact, imagine the balloon is skin instead. Imagine the rolls in the material are filled with body fat, and instead of forming due to inertia, imagine them being formed by the constant pull of gravity. The image in your head should look a lot like love handles. That’s because as far as volume goes, water and body fat are fairly similar, while lean mass (muscle) is a completely different beast. You can sculpt your form out of lean mass like modeling clay, while trying to sculpt it out of body fat will be as effective as capturing a waterfall between your cupped hands.

That’s 5 pounds of muscle and 5 pounds of fat. Those two objects weigh exactly the same so you’ll understand my frustration when folks come to weigh in and do not care at all about their body composition as long as that number on the scale goes down, which is the product of marketing yet again. That number gives you a false sense of accomplishment and an easy-to-tabulate high score you can share with your girlfriends. It is the biological equivalent of, “Look at this engagement ring I got!” It reminds you of something tangible but the objects’ worth is completely and utterly fabricated by our culture.

If you look at your weight for for what it is, you’ll feel as silly as you would declaring a Ford Pinto superior to a Aston Martin DBS because it weighs less. You can weigh exactly the same but look completely different and it’s a matter of burning as much fat while building as much lean mass as possible. That will naturally occur if you focus more on your body composition instead of your weight. Body fat is what is making you look bad and if you’ve spent 90 minutes a day on an elliptical for 2 years and your midsection still jiggles like that balloon up there, you’re probably doing it wrong.

We want to get rid of as much body fat as possible because it gets in the way of the relationship between the muscle and the skin. It will be much easier to look how you want to look if you lift heavy weights and eat a lot (of protein). CrossFit is a good solution for this, especially if you have problems getting your heart rate up. Aerobic activity (135ish BPM) essentially does nothing for you except for burn calories and improve your endurance while anaerobic activity (150ish BPM) will improve your ability to recover as well as your resting metabolic rate, which will aid in fat loss. And to get to an anaerobic heart rate, you still have to climb the aerobic ladder, so your endurance will also improve.

When women discuss the sections of their bodies they want to improve, it’s usually the butt, stomach, thighs, and hips. Remembering that muscle gives the skin a better surface to stretch against, exercise that induces an anaerobic heartrate promotes healthy fat loss, and being stronger allows you to beat your husband up, let’s play a game.

How many of those muscles do we use on an elliptical? Trick question! A lot of them are actually kind of used. Not really to any great effect though. Your hamstrings and quads will take the brunt of the impact. Your core will be only slightly utilized if you don’t use the handles. However, if you spend an hour or more on the machine and your legs never burn like they’re on fire, it means that you’re not exercising hard enough to induce an anaerobic heart rate. There is a process called anaerobic glycolysis, which is when your body is using glucose and glycogen for energy. The absence of oxygen (huffing and puffing) and the breakdown of glucose is what results in lactic acid and legs that feel like they’re being repeatedly stung by wasps. This is a necessary step towards improving your resting metabolic rate and turning you into an efficient fat-burning machine.

Now, how many muscles will a deadlift hit? Everything, but it will also get your calves, hamstrings, and shoulders. When you lift against a resisting force (such as gravity), microtrauma (microscopic tears) occurs in your muscle fibers. The body then repairs the damage by replacing the injured tissue with additional tissue to future-proof it against further injury. This is what makes you stronger. Muscle hypertrophy is a byproduct of the microtrauma and where the “bulk” comes from but women just naturally suck at muscle hypertrophy, which is why I can find you about a hundred videos of beautifully toned (non-incredible-Hulkish) women deadlifting their own body weight or more. Lifting heavy things will also increase your bone density, which is a fairly nice investment to make in your future health. Enough of that general health crap, though! Let’s get back to the appearance.

Kim Kardashian is a target physique for a lot of women. Genetics, photoshop, surgeries, and make-up probably play a part in her appearance but a lot of it is a ridiculous degree of resistance training.

Thighs = Squat, Deadlift, Lunge
Hips = Squat, Deadlift, Lunge
Butt = Squat, Deadlift, Lunge
Stomach = Squat, Deadlift, Lunge

I’m just making a point. Spot toning is still a myth. You need to work all of your muscle groups so that your skin stretches more toutly, which will allow it to push through the extra body fat you’re carrying around because of of your gender. Unfair, I know. Don’t believe me? There’s plenty of proof.

Here’s a couple of blogs with CrossFit girls:

http://wildgorillaman.blogspot.com/
http://crossfitbabes.tumblr.com/

Here’s the always-popular AllisonNYC:

Here’s a couple of normal girls from the Internet:

http://www.reddit.com/r/xxfitness/comments/pl5kr/little_girl_big_weights/
http://nerdfitness.com/blog/2011/07/21/meet-staci-your-new-powerlifting-super-hero/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/nue8c/6_month_progress_weightlifting_female
http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/pt81b/proof_that_lifting_heavy_does_not_make_ladies_big/

The conclusion we come to is that women are woefully and intentionally mislead when it comes to their body composition, nutrition, and fitness. The result is that when you compare yourself to genetically gifted women who just happen to also be misinformed, you wonder why the hell the elliptical isn’t giving you a “V” shaped torso too? Well, if lemmings march off a cliff and some of them have genetic variations that make them more aerodynamic, the lemmings who don’t understand wind resistance might be left wondering why they’re not hitting the ground as fast as their friends. If they spend enough time contemplating and lamenting their peers’ speed advantage, they might run out of the time they could have spent opening their parachutes.

If you keep inching along the line, you’ll learn the patterns of the wind and sway with them. You’ll eventually go from inching along to a full sprint. But if you jump off the second you get a little queasy, you’ll just be a fat dude floating in a river to who knows where.

I know where. If you don’t fix it, you’ll always feel mediocre and you’ll always hate it. Your weight will always be a little wound on the top of your mouth that you can’t help but play with. It’s going to be the sibling bully holding you by the forehead while you swing wildly and desperately with your cheeto-dusted fists.

So every time you jump into that river, it’s like an Escher drawing that will flow right back to the same piece of fishing line you dove off of before. You might as well just learn how to walk the line and see what’s on the other side instead of guessing what’s over there.