A Weight Loss Story

Hayden House of Healing

I had been hiding behind my computer, playing "World of Warcraft", stuffing my face with fast food wondering "what difference will it make to anyone if my character makes level 80?"

Anyone who knows me at all knows that this is just not me. Prior to my incredibly fat life, I worked full time, enjoyed time with my family and friends, auditioned for local theater and performed on stage. While I was hiding I just worked and ate and played..7 days a week. It was getting to the point where I was having difficulties taking care of myself. Getting dressed was a challenge let alone personal care and activities of daily living. I was very scared, I was afraid that I would have to go to a nursing home.

I had tried dealing with my weight before. When I went to the doctor the best he could offer was, "you need a bigger wheelchair". A sense of false bravado came over me as I replied "no, I need a smaller ass and you need to help me." As cheeky and confident as that may sound, this response left me despondent. I had tried the health clubs (I will post the pictures and articles as soon as I get them scanned in). Yep, that was supposed to be me, "FULLY ALIVE IN 2005" the headline read. I had been working out at a local gym, nothing was really very wheelchair friendly so it took a bit of doing to get in and out of the pool and hot tub and transfer onto the work stations. So much so that I blew my shoulder out. This put me in a lot of pain so I had to stop working out for a bit.

Pain seems to be a big trigger for me to eat. Probably because I wasn't sleeping well, I would use food to wake me up and food to put me to sleep. The newspaper was supposed to follow me good, bad and ugly. The idea was to create "reality news entries" so therefore the outcome was not a given and if it didn't go as planned the original idea was to follow the journey, detours and all to a final successful outcome. After the first week when I didn't loose weight, the story was dropped. The editors wanted a success story and mine did not appear to be working out that way.