On July 21, 2023, I finally went to the doctor after 4 years. After asking me a few questions and me telling him my story he looked at me very seriously and said, “You are on your way to either a Stroke or Heart attack”.

I’m 61 years old. I have not had a lot of health problems in my life. I have struggled with being obese for most of my adult life. Like a lot of people, I let myself go in my mid-twenties with respect to diet and exercise. In high school, I had run track and cross country. During and after high school I had run a few marathons so I knew what it felt like to work out at a high level as well as feel healthy in general.

I also had times in my past when I made the decision to lose weight and was very successful at it ….for some time. Eventually, I would gain the weight back. My mindset had been to LOSE WEIGHT and not get healthy and fit. I will share some of those weight loss stories to hopefully put my past mindset vs. my current mindset into context.

Come to Jesus!

When the doctor said I was a good candidate for a stroke or heart attack that was what I like to call that a “Come to Jesus” moment. I knew I needed to make lifestyle changes but this was a bit more serious than I thought. He immediately put me on three different prescriptions. One for high blood pressure, another for high cholesterol, and yet another for diabetes. This was before I went to get some blood tests. To be fair, he did say we could wait for the tests before writing the prescriptions but I was pretty confident I was going to need the medication. He also prescribed a glucose kit and asked if I had a heart rate monitor. The doctor wanted me to start taking readings and charting my data.

My weight at the weigh-in was 280 pounds with a height of 6’2″. I have not typically had back problems but I kept getting these lower back pains periodically where it was hard getting up out of a chair. I was totally winded walking up one flight of stairs. I had just started playing foursome pickleball with my friends and could see they were in MUCH better condition than myself.

The doctor urged me to get a blood workup and return to the office soon. Preferably in the next couple of weeks. I was able to get a blood draw scheduled and got that completed a couple of days after this office visit. I also had scheduled my appointment back with the doctor on the 31st which was 10 days after this visit.

Before I went to the doctor, I knew I was going to have to make some changes. My goal immediately became all about getting healthy. Living a healthy lifestyle. Weight loss was going to be a very important factor but that was really going to be the by-product of my healthier lifestyle efforts.

At a high level of thinking, getting healthy is easy. Eat better and do physical activity. Obviously, the rubber meets the road when implementing those two things. I did have a plan for each of those healthy lifestyle factors.

Eat Better

I have done diets before but my mindset this time was slightly different. In the past, it had all been about calorie counting and it worked. This time the doctor suggested I limit what I ate if it came out of a bag, box, or restaurant. This didn’t mean I had to stop those activities but to me, it meant to eat less carbohydrates and eat more things that grow in the ground.

Our family had been having some kind of pasta dish a couple of times a week. I knew that I had to cut back to just a couple of times a month. I also need to stop eating entire bags of chips or half a pie at a time. Some of these things would be easy and others not so much.

Physical Activity

I had just started playing pickleball a couple times a week. That was a couple of easy hours of activity I knew I could continue. In the past, I had gotten up an hour earlier than normal each morning and walked a couple of miles before work about 3 days a week. This was also on my planned list of changes to get back into the morning walks.

Additionally, the doctor recommended that I do some kind of weight-bearing/anaerobic activity 3 times a week. I had done some body weight exercises in the past so I immediately had a general plan on how I would do that as well.

General to Specific

With the doctor’s recommendation and my past experience, I had some general ideas of how things were going to change. Over the next several days I knew I had to get specific. I needed to take those general action items and create a plan. I will share that plan in a successive blog post. My thought was that I would not try to “Eat the Elephant” I did not want to make too many changes at once. That may work for some people but for me, it could easily lead to failure if I felt too overwhelmed. I needed a plan to take small bites of the elephant.