No Fat 40: The Quest to Wear My Cool T-Shirts Again

Alright, here’s the deal. I am 39 years old and I am, well, fat. I don’t want to be 40 and fat. So, that means I have six-odd months to reverse a trend that has had a grip on me for the last few years.

As with most great quests in my life I turned to the internet. In all my research I failed to find a magic potion or spell that will make me not fat. So I guess that means I’ll have to go the eating better and moving my body more route.

Let’s start with where I am, 39, 300 pounds, 5’ 11’’, shoe size 12, waist 42’’. I want to not be that. Well, except for the shoe size and height, I don’t think that will change.

I got to this point because of three reasons.

1) I lucked into a line of work that has allowed me to move out of food and retail work into computer and studio work. It’s great creatively, but not so great on the moving around part.

2) I have continued to eat like I am still a 20 year old college dropout, not sure where my next meal is coming from. Meaning, if I’m near a pizza a part of my brain shouts, “Better eat until you feel sick you may never see pizza again!!!!!!!!” Which I know is far from the truth. And on top of that, my mind may not admit it is 39, but my body knows it and can’t burn off all those calories anymore. As far as my body is concerned, it thinks it needs to save all those calories to make it through an ice age winter.

3) My medium-level anxiety disorder. If your brain is built like mine you know the fun-loving grip of anxiety. The crippling knot of worry and baseless fear in your mind. With a dash of OCD tendencies and depression thrown in for good measure. You know what loosens that knot a little? A tennis ball can of potato chips. Or six burritos. Yay, two minuets of bliss followed by two hours of self hatred! For a while the knot was also loosened by my old arch-nemesis cigarettes. Then when I got clean six years ago I traded nicotine for more cheese stuffed pizzas.

Oh, and I relapsed with cigarettes a couple months back. And if being fat has fueled my anxiety, being a fat guy who is smoking again has tightened so that knot much more and sent me down an epic spiral.

So, that’s how I got here. I don’t need to be talked into getting healthy. I know I'll feel better, work better, be all around better when I exercise. I know that sleeves of chips are a bad lunch, and I don’t really enjoy them at all anyway. And the smoking? I’m ashamed to even admit it here, but I’m sure I haven’t been as sneaky as I think I’ve been about it. I hate it, and really, smoking is dumb. Its only purpose is to addict and feed the withdrawal. At least a good beer buzz makes me super hilarious (to me at least). So, I am done. When this post posts, I will have had my last one. Please fell free to call me out of you see me (or smell me, oh I hate the smell).

So, to stay nicotine clean, better control the anxiety and not be a burden on my children sometime in the next 40 years of life (and to have a next 40 years of life) I will not be fat at 40.

February 3, 2016 is when I turn 40. I have a plan. A Starlord level plan at this point, but a plan.

My family is on board and encouraging. In fact, my wife has had a lot success with her workout routine over that last few months. So, I will be stealing her exercise stuff to start. Eating better is also at the core of this. Less in, more out.

It would be great if I could eventually be in a position to run something like a half-marathon. And, of course, be prepared to run from zombies.

There are four reasons I’m doing all this here on my blog.

1) The internet needs content. The internet is insatiable, it wants words and pictures and videos. So I might as well feed the beast.

2) I work best with deadlines. If I have to write an update every week, do what I say I’m going to do and pretend that someone is reading this, I’ll feel compelled to do the work. It worked when I went back to college.

3) I need attention. Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t work in radio or goof around online if I didn’t want attention. So I’ll combine my need to dance in front of people and my desire to live to be 150.

4) This may be the most compelling reason; I have a bunch of cool t-shirts that don’t fit anymore. I want to wear them. Especially my Mystery Science Theater 3000 shirt. I also have a cool Ice Cube shirt, a Suicidal Tendencies tour shirt, an X-Files shirt and a shirt that says ‘Wizard is About to Die, Needs Food Badly.’ It’s from Gauntlet, the video game. Look I said I was old; I used to play it at Safeway.

Here’s how this will work. I am going to post an update each week on my progress and my thoughts on this journey. I’ll show you the t-shirts, share some music and hopefully see some change.

So, let’s do this thing! For cool t-shirts! And for healthily living of course, but also COOL T-SHIRTS!

-Ben @BenSFSD