Things don’t always go as planned.
Like immigrants of old, I moved back to America looking for a better life. But this was only meant to be a comparative better, and more specifically better compared to how I was living in China. One aspect in which I wanted my life to get better was in terms of my diet and
When I landed back in America I had decided to have a relatively normal American life. Unfortunately this mean a lot of fast food. Not by choice, but its just how America does things. The friends I had here wanted to meet up, and this often led to fast food. I took a job in the middle of nowhere, and this led to my needing a car to get there, and once there I found myself in a food dessert where the only place to eat was a 7-11 or a McDonalds. It’s about a bleak a place as you can get.
But the point was that after getting back and getting stuck in a routine, I put on about ten pounds from what I already weighed in China, which was already far, far too much. I became an even fatter fuck than I already was, and I didn’t really care. I mean, I was half-heartedly going to gym, and wasn’t that enough? Sure it was!
That is, until the pain.
I’m sure there were earlier account, but I really felt it on the way to a job interview. I started to get a pain in my foot which gradually got worse and worse as I got closed to the location. By the time I arrived at the interview, I was in full on agony and walking with a limp. I have no idea if they noticed, but I didn’t get the job either way. It was also the only interview I have had so far.
When I got home my foot had swollen ridiculously, and I spent the next few days barely able to walk. At which point the random pain treadmill began in full swing. The pain in the foot turned into gout or some other such nonsense. I ended up blowing out the other knee, although I am not sure how. Then I developed a pain in the arch of the other foot. To compensate for that, I put too much stress on the other leg and fucked that up. Then my back gave out, and I spent a week pretty much going from chair to bed with as many grunts of pain as possible. This moved south and to the left and gave me a week of rib pain, which pretty much had the same effect as the back pain. These then rotated around more or less at random.
It got so bad one day that I just had to leave work to go home and lay down. And lay down I did, but while I was there I decided to do something about it. I didn’t know what was causing all this pain, and like most poor Americans, I am full time employed and full time uninsured. I would have to figure this out of my own, and so why don’t I begin by assuming that I am a too fat to fucking be mobile and I need to lose some god damned weight. If I lost some weight and the pain didn’t go away, then I could try another solution.
But how to lose weight? A diet? Diets don’t work, everyone knows that. Unless you are desperate enough. And that I was.
My colleague had for some time been going on and on about doing the keto diet, which as far I can tell is insane. But low carb had worked for me for a while, and I decided to give keto a try. But that simply wasn’t going to be enough. I figured that one reason that I was such a fat fuck was that I had an unhealthy conception of food. Clearly, I was eating too much and clearly, I didn’t know how much to eat. Plus, I would think back to when I would eat and realize that I could put back an absurd amount of food. So I decided to try moving to one meal a day. Every day I don’t eat a single calorie till 6pm at night. If one thing wasn’t working, hopefully the other was.
As of this writing I have been on my diet for 86 days. I have lost about 20lbs and feel a lot better. My back still hurts occasionally and once a week I have a foot or knee related limp, but hey, progress is always piecemeal, right?