A Long Arse Introduction…

After a few months we made the decision to relocate and being a new life in a major city. I had a new position starting but also the possibility of transfer if required from my previous role.

We had finalised the move by February 2016 and I moved over in March as I needed to fulfil my notice to my previous employer. Once we were settled things started to line up nicely. I contacted the company I was about to start working for (they advised me to move to our new city) however the week we moved they advised that the position had been transferred to another state, almost 20 hours away, which wasn’t workable for us so they wished me good luck and farewell.

You can imagine after receiving this news what my mental state was like! Instead of processing this like an adult and breathing through it and working on solutions I, immediately chose my childhood trauma response and ate my feelings, anger, resentment, and depression for the next two months. I literally used Door Dash every day, wasted hundreds of dollars and the weight skyrocketed from 120kg to 137 in two months. I felt like a huge failure. I attempted to obtain a transfer of sorts with my previous employer but that never eventuated. I was out of work in an expensive city and we were living off my wife’s salary alone.

I sunk to a real low point when I threatened my wife after a major argument. I left the house and drive for a long time before pulling into a random carpark and having a meltdown, then sleeping for a while. I then drove to my parents for a while, and returned at night. My first reaction was to apologise but in the back of my mind all I wanted to do was eat. My trauma responses to food were worse than they’d ever been! I’d solidified the trauma response and now any situation where I was around food meant would just slam it down, whether I was hungry or not.

I found employment within a month of this in a mall in the sales department, I had a great crew whom I still friends with and I enjoyed great success, but I was around food all the time, hence without self-awareness and a proclivity to eat when stressed or verbally attacked I frequented one or two eateries a day as well as coffee in the morning. This continued for almost two years, and it didn’t just affect my waistline it hit my wallet hard as well, and phone payments made things much faster to buy food. That 137kg quickly became past tense and by the time I left that position, i was 152kg.

After I left this role I moved back into information technology and just because I was further away from take away stores, didn’t mean I avoided them. It was a rite of passage to go to the service station and buy a coffee and sausage roll, for the guys it was a choice, for me it was a compulsion. I had to discipline to make my own lunch every day, only on occasion. I would buy coffee and lunch every day, then buy dinner on occasion. Sure, I had to walk further to get it but I still did it, I had never dealt with why I continued to do this.

By the end of 2018 I moved into project team and delivered relocation assets across departments. I decided at this point that I would follow a 44 hour fast protocol and eat up to 1500 calories on the non-fasting days. I was setting myself up for eventual failure because even though I lost 20 kilograms by the end of it, I just put the weight back on because I was too restrictive, I wasn’t doing any exercise to complement the diet, finally I never dealt with the fuel for my traumatic food response (my brain) so all that was just dormant for the 3 months I was on this diet.

After logging diet and weight loss every day I started to waver because food was still a comfort and when I was stressed, or had a family argument, I would have an increasing desire to comfort eat. Within two months I was back to 154kg, which I maintained due to physical activity in my new role, but once I left that role in early 2020 I added a kilo, then in late 2021 I landed a coveted sedentary role any my weight jumped to 170kg in six months.

I always thought that I was not eating an excess of calories, (i’ll explain how wrong I was about this later) however I was unequivocally aware of how little I was moving. Most of my exercise came from walking to and from my car to the office every day, then maybe some gardening once per month. the reality of that is I used battery powered garden tools - no bending, no twisting, no reach, no lifting, the machines did everything. So, even with hard work I turned it into “no work!”

I like to build furniture and even that task which should be of reasonable difficulty was made easy by tweaking most of the required tasks. Seriously, if you want to be lazy I am the supreme master of instruction, call me ;-).

The end of 2021 was a little odd, my wife got pregnant (yeah, don’t know how I pulled that off, as I was 170kg at the time) and I had this overwhelming urge to help other obese people, well, those who would want help at least. I know that fat acceptance and BP are a highly protected group even though members of it are dying and people that want to leave it or want to lose weight get cancelled. I thought it would be a great idea, an obese person helping other obese people, sounds cool, right?

The issue was, who would listen to an obese person about losing weight? My thinking at the time was that I could run the modules I began writing with my first few clients (if I ever found any) but what if we hit roadblocks and I didn’t have the experience to guide them through it? Without me going through it all first and then tweaking things to make it a bit easier (not cheating, tweaking), getting help if I needed it (which I do), and having the experiential knowledge to provide guidance, or write my app/website in a way that would provide the information to give that guidance.

I couldn’t!

It was my responsibility to work on myself first otherwise why would anyone believe a word I said? Now, I know what you might be thinking “He only did it to make himself look the part!” This is partly true, why lie about it? “He’s only doing it to exploit the obese for money!” You’re allowed to think what you want, but consider two things:

1. Read this as it applies to you: Matthew 23:13-14
2. I wish I had a guide to help me with obesity, I wish I knew someone or found a website that specialized in the mind scape of obesity, not just the physical. I wish I knew someone that had gone through it, and had the advice, care, and accountability I craved! If someone subscribes or doesn’t subscribe, I am more than ok with that. Now back to the weight issues.

At 165 to 170kg I had several health problems, here’s a list:

Physical:
No sex drive
Pins and needles in my legs hands and feet
Edema in my lower legs
Cuts would appear on legs from the edema then take a long time to heal.
UTIs (yep, the thing ladies get)
Difficulty breathing
Chest pains (not heart related) when breathing
Compression on my lungs from excess fat (related to breathing problems above)
Pain in the knees and feet
Limited range of motion in my movements (this is because fat will go where there’s space to put it simply)
Kidney problems
Sweating excessively after a shower
Dry cracking skin on my feet and hands (due to reduced blood flow and low water intake)
Discolouration in my lower legs from reduced blood flow
Weakness
No Stamina
No sense of satiation
Never knew what hungry felt like
Excessive gas out of both ends
Regular headaches and on occasion migraines
Fatty neck which mean I couldn’t look up properly
Could not hold my baby daughter for long periods when she was born and for months after.

Social/Emotional
Severe depression cycles
Difficulty in finding clothes that fit
Couldn’t go to the beach (not strong enough to swim)
Couldn’t take off my shirt
Couldn’t sit down in a dress shirt (size 5XL or 6XL) without a button or two popping off
Was mocked for my size in elevators and by staff
Had to buy clothes online as many stores only have 2XL
Had a predilection to take no action
I would hide food or eat a huge meal before I came home from work, then ate dinner.
I felt I couldn’t stop the above habit (the reality is I wouldn’t, not couldn’t!)
I was my own enabler.
My daughter saw me eat and never exercise, as did my wife, but this wasn’t enough for me to take a look at myself and my impending early death.
My willpower was strong, but my won’t power was not!
TV, gaming, and sitting were my best friends.

Quite a list yeah! These are only a few of the things I experienced, so I hope from this you get an idea of what obesity is like. I don’t believe for a second that the activists and social media personalities who promote this are happy about it, in my opinion they’ve given into it! I know exactly what it’s really like, and I know the physical and mental pain it can cause, especially if it began as a trauma response to abuse!

I had a responsibility to not only my wife and daughter but also to myself, to stay alive for a long time and be here for them, so I decided to look at my brain first and figure out why I was choosing to live out of abuse that had ended years earlier, yes it had an effect on me but the moment it ended it became my responsibility to resolve and move forward. I was foolishly waiting for an apology, or even acknowledgement, but in my experience neither will ever come, if it does, it’s the exception. Honestly, I waited years for this, even asked my parents about it in 2008 (which lead to an argument) which worsened things for my trauma, so I accepted that I would never hear it from them, but key point is acceptance doesn’t mean proactive healing.