FF-Formerly Fat, Part One

Back in 2009, I vividly remember a visit to my Primary Care Doctor over at Cedar Sinai wherein I was told that I was obese and pre-diabetic. I tipped the scales at 215LBS that day but it still did not dawn on me that I had a big problem and that my unhealthy lifestyle was killing me. In fact, when I went to Vegas later on that week and was laying out by the pool, I had no idea that I looked like a fucking manatee out there in the desert sun. I had reckoned that I was a Gourmand and a connoisseur of fine beers. I had been watching the Food Network and had convinced myself that a terribly destructive unhealthy diet was normal behavior. It took years of exercise therapy to realize that this unhealth thought process asserting that big is beautiful or "health at any size" is a form of mental illness. This is a photo of me lounging at the MGM pool in the Summer of 2009:

In addition to a high fat, high sodium, and high cholesterol diet that involved mammoth portions of food, I was also drinking myself into oblivion and taking a handful of dangerous pills on a daily basis. My drugs of choice were Vicodin, Xanax, and Dextroamphetamine. I washed ten vicodin pills, eight xanax bars, and 30mg of Dextrostat down the hatch with Bourbon every day for two years although the actual number of pills I took must have been far higher because when you are abusing prescription drugs with alcohol, you are in such a haze that the last thing you can do is count. I used to eat a lot of carne asada burritos at El Taurino Restaurant. They are pretty tasty, but what they do to your body is simply insidious. Vegetables, well, I did consume them regularly, if macaroni and cheese is considered a vegetable. Or scalloped potatoes. Or fucking potato chips and sour cream dip. You get the picture. I was a fucking pig. But in reality, most American men of middle age are at least as fat as I was. Around this time, I started to realize that all this abuse was causing some heavy damage to my cells. I found myself waking up several hundred times per evening because I was suffering from sleep apnea. The shock of being constantly woken up, and the deprivation of REM Sleep that it was causing created a dangerously high situation with my blood pressure. Instead of 120/80, it was regularly 153/115 and sometimes 153/120! Furthermore, I have a history of stroke in my mom's side of the family. I did not get much exercise, and had all but ceased using an elliptical machine that I purchased a couple of years back. My excuse was a ruptured cervical disc at c6-c7. My doctors had told me to take it easy and prescribed me a never ending bowl of vicodin to kill the pain. In addition, I had steroid injections in my cervical spine on several different occasions. These pills and injections did nothing to improve my condition, and in fact, set me back several years. I did not complain, because I was addicted to hydrocodone and did not want to kill the proverbial pharmaceutical golden goose. All of this caused me to be angry 24/7. I felt seething with hate and venom at every waking hour. My sex life did not have a life. I seriously don't think I would have made it another year at the pace I was going. One foot was in the coffin, and the other foot was halfway in there as well. TO BE CONTINUED...