Where to start?
My name is Christopher. I am an aspiring writer. I come from a family of athletes and I am no exception. I am a close-combat/self-defense and martial arts enthusiast and teacher. I’m way into movies, comic books and novels in the horror, sci-fi and fantasy genres. I get together for gaming with friends on weekends. I am a non-religious, spiritual Christian. I am thirty-six years old and six-feet tall with dark blond hair and blue eyes.
Also, I weigh 650 lbs, and I am dying of a terminal blood disorder.(click on image to enlarge)
For the curious, those are size 13 Quadruple Extra Wide Shoes. The Pants and Shirt are both Size 8X (that's not a typo,...
Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra Large.) I wanted to get a picture with the refrigerator in frame to give you a sense of scale. My chest, below the arms, is 68 inches around
(over five-and-a-half feet,.) My waist is 81 inches around,
(nearly seven feet.) And my hips... 86 inches around,
(OVER seven feet.)
How did I get here?
As I said, I come from a family of athletes. Both of my parents have always been athletically built, my younger brother, Eric was a soccer-player, a track-star, a basketball player,… really there wasn’t much, physically that he couldn’t do as a kid. He was doing 50 to 100 sit-ups at like three-years-old, an age where that’s supposed to be physically impossible. My sister Raquel was very athletic too. She played soccer, she was a cheerleader and she competed in track-and-field events in high school.
(click on image to enlarge)
That's me with Eric and Raquel at Thanksgiving, 2009. So, that was almost exactly three years ago. In that picture I'm 33, Eric is 28 and Raquel is 27 (with my little nephew Mason on the way.:)) So,... three people who've been athletically active all their lives.
What's wrong with this picture?
As for me,… I played basketball and baseball as a younger kid, but I never much liked it, really. For me it was always the martial arts. I’ve trained in a multitude of different styles, ever since I was a kid, and it’s been a passion of mine my entire life. I would practice outside, in the rain, in the snow, covered in mud,… I didn’t care. I just Loved it. I still do. I’ve met so many great people, learned so much and had my life so enriched by my experiences in the martial arts, I wouldn’t trade that part of my life for anything in the world.
Right about the time I was twelve years old, though? I started gaining weight. A lot of it.
Now, I’m not copping out here. I’ve always been a very big eater.
I Love to eat. But, truth be told, at least early on in my life I didn’t eat anything different from what my brother and sister were eating. I may have eaten more, here and there, but not as a matter of habit. In spite of this, I got fat. But, neither of my younger siblings ever cut anything less than the perfect figure. Pictures of me, prior to that time, show a very different kid. If you’d only known me as an adult, you’d never recognize me in those childhood photos.
At seven or eight? I wasn’t just healthy-looking, I was muscular. I looked like I was on track to grow into a linebacker. Then adolescence hit and I started growing a little pot belly. By junior-high that pot belly had sprouted Love-handles. By high-school I was obese. By college I was
morbidly obese and now? Now, I can’t walk from my bedroom to the front door of my apartment without getting winded. I have sleep apnea, high blood-pressure, arthritis in my legs and back, asthma,… a whole slew of health issues.
It wasn’t until about eight years ago that I was offered any kind of explanation for this, when I was diagnosed with Syndrome X.
Syndrome X is actually a cluster of conditions that generally stem from abnormally high levels of insulin in the bloodstream. When I was tested, my levels were over ten times higher than those of a normal person. Today, they’re off the charts. My diagnosis was revised a couple of years ago to include words like; “Advancing,” “Progressive,” “Severe,” and yes, even… “Terminal.”
The ‘under-the-hood’ story is this; I have a genetic predisposition toward insulin-resistant blood. Insulin is a trigger hormone that is released into the bloodstream when a starch or complex carbohydrate is consumed. Insulin tells your body to store a bit of what you’re eating in your fat cells, and it gives you cravings. This is why eating carb-heavy food leads to a recurring hunger a short while later. (As in the old saying about Chinese food.) It also tells your body to stop producing insulin. This last is what’s malfunctioning in blood that is “insulin resistant.” The blood just doesn’t get that message to stop the release of insulin when it should. So, your body produces more insulin. You store more of what you’ve eaten in your fat cells and you get more hungry. This vicious spiral continues until your blood responds. Depending on how resistant your blood is, that can mean a gradual weight gain, or a rapid weight gain. My blood is very resistant. In spite of how easy it is for an I.R. patient to gain weight, it is next to impossible for us to lose it. Basically, if you suffer from this syndrome, your system is hard-wired to keep your fat cells packed full. They don’t release energy very easily.
I continued to train as I got heavier and heavier. At first, I thought that it was just adolescent baby-fat that I would eventually burn off. This didn’t happen and though it became harder and harder to train, I did so anyway. As I said, it’s always been something that's very important to me, so I refused to stop doing it just because it was starting to hurt. The upshot of all that training with hundreds of pounds of extra weight on my body is twofold; 1 - I’ve built a great deal of very dense, very massive muscle. It’s just buried underneath a mountain of fat, and 2 - I’ve just about destroyed my knees and my back.
Because of that, just a couple years ago, training became impossible for me. Not just painful. Impossible. The strain was too much. I now have sharp, severe pain whenever I stand up. Walking, even a short distance is an ordeal. I always have to plan every little walking-trip. I have to know there’s going to be somewhere I can immediately sit down when I reach my destination, and that destination absolutely cannot be more than a few dozen feet away.
Difficult as it may be, I admit that the increasing insulin and, more than that, the increasing levels of hopelessness, have lead me, over the years to make some really bad choices and to develop worse and worse eating habits. In short, I became a binge eater. I'm the kind of person who generally doesn't eat breakfast or lunch and then pigs out on a huge dinner. It was like a perfect storm of bad habits, bad biochemistry and just the right illnesses to send me spiraling further and further into severe obesity.
Several years ago, the doctors dropped the bombshell that if I didn’t somehow find a way to move this mountain and get my weight down, that I was going to die. This news came three months before my wedding. My fiance and I suddenly found ourselves as very young, about-to-be-newly-weds, dealing with a situation we never thought we’d have to face until we were well into old age. I can’t really explain in words what that felt like. I was overwhelmed with shame at the idea that my obesity and gluttony were about to widow my wife-to-be just as we were starting our lives together. I felt the kind of guilt that is usually reserved for murderers. Also, I was more scared than I've ever been in my life. I didn't want to die. I didn't want my time with Amy to end. I just didn't want any of it. But, it was all my fault. I'd done it to myself. More than that, I'd done it to the both of us.
I started feeling that the only purpose I'd ever fulfilled in my life was to serve as some kind of horrible, cruel trap for her. Something to fall in Love with her, marry her and then die, ...leaving her alone.
I came to hate myself.
I was also told that bariatric surgery would be my best avenue for getting my weight down. So, I pursued that option. The bariatric clinics I consulted, however, told me that I would need to lose approximately one-hundred fifty pounds the old fashioned way, before they would consider operating on me. My weight is literally so high, that weight-loss surgery is too dangerous an option for any bariatric clinic in the country to sign-off on.
Here's what I heard in my head, during those consultations;
"Christopher, you are so fat that not even surgery can save you now."
Ever try swallowing a rock? That’s about what it was like for me, trying to come to terms with that revelation.
I got to the point two years ago, that I really couldn’t work. My doctor was practically screaming at me to leave my job, because, as an Insurance Agent, I was on my feet all day. So, I did. My wife and I moved in with her father to save money on rent and utilities and to save up for some kind of medical help for me. It was a very stressful time for us both. Dealing with a terminal diagnosis is never easy for anyone. In fact, I still don’t really know how anyone does it. I certainly failed at it, myself. We were (and still are) both very young. For whatever reason, coming on the heels of all that stress and worry and struggle, she came to me one evening, and told me that she couldn’t be with me anymore. She’d been seeing someone else for a while. She left me.
I don't judge her, nor do I hold anything against her. As I said, it was hell for us both.
When it happened, I was devastated. I was truly in Love with her. She was all I wanted from my life. I can’t express in words how badly I wished we could return to that golden time we had together before I’d brought all this darkness into our lives. I began to fall even deeper into depression and self-loathing and I’m neither afraid nor ashamed to admit that I lost it. For a brief time, I lost my mind. Period. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t hold a rational train of thought. I was alone. I was broke. The Love of my life had left me and I was dying.
With her gone, obviously I needed to find a new place to live. Jeff, my father-in-law wasn’t really my father-in-law anymore. He was wonderful about the whole thing and he let me stay there for a couple months while I figured things out. I applied for social security, medicaid, foodstamps and was denied everywhere. I was homeless for a while.
With no money coming in and nowhere to live while I fought through the appeals process with SSI and Medicaid, I found work as a customer service rep for the Special Olympics and Sirius Satellite Radio. That went on for about a year and a half, and it was
murder. Every day, lugging myself to work and back, climbing stairs, being out in public and walking everywhere. It was nearly unbearable.
I fell into the deepest depression of my life.
I saw no way out. I was working double-shifts just to keep food on the table, in spite of doctor’s orders to stay home. I was struggling to keep doctor’s appointments with no insurance and very little money. I was suffering from panic attacks and generalized anxiety disorder. I became suicidal.
One day, in late June of 2011, I was at work. I was in the fourth-hour of a fifteen-hour double-shift, the first of three I had scheduled for that week. Four-hours-in, and my back was still throbbing from that morning’s trip across the parking lot and up to the office. The call center was packed. At least seventy people had apparently all scheduled that same shift.
I was, for some reason, having a lot of trouble entering a customer’s information into my system. At first, I thought it was server-lag. I realized after a moment that it was my hands. I couldn’t feel them. Also, they were shaking and I couldn’t get them to stop. I’d been thinking a lot, that morning about my situation. Just running everything over in my mind, again and again. I’d recently received my fifth and final appeal-denial from social security and had applied for a court-date, which they told me would take another 13 to 18 months.
13 to 18 more months,… of a situation I couldn’t bear for even one more minute.
Suddenly, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight, so sad I couldn’t breathe and I began to feel incredibly detached from my body. I decided right then and there that I was going to go up to the roof and jump off.
I logged out of the company server, grabbed my cane and started for the hallway, when something stopped me. I don’t know what it was. It was like this icy cold gust of clarity blew right through my mind. It only lasted for a second, but in that second I realized the gravity of what I was thinking and what I was about to do. It took my breath away.
I was ashamed and angry at myself, but more than anything else, I was terrified. I don't know what scared me more,... the idea of dying, or the idea of continuing to live out this nightmare.
I stopped and dug out my phone to call my psychologist. Thankfully, I got through and told him what was going on. He said that he thought it was a good idea for me to check myself into the hospital. So, I did. I was there for a couple weeks.
During that time, I got a lot of perspective on things. I talked to a lot of doctors, psychologists, nurses, therapists and fellow patients. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t some feel-good movie experience. I didn’t have any great revelations or transformation. But, I did get some perspective. After I was discharged, I reduced my workload, and decided to ride this thing out as best I could and if I didn’t have enough money at the end of the month,… oh well. I gave myself permission not to suffer emotionally, any more than I had to.
I have been blessed with some wonderful friends and a very Loving family. They’ve helped me a great deal, and I have only the vaguest and most horrifying ideas on where I would be today without them.
Now, here I am,… a year-and-a-half later. I’m on Social Security and Medicaid, so I’m able to go a little easier on myself physically. A Charity Organization called The Kevin Coleman Center has really come through and helped me out a lot with housing and medications.
(Prior to their help I was homeless and my medications were over $280 a month.) So, Coleman's been a godsend. But, I still have no money at the end of the month, and really no way to change that. And the plain truth is that if I were still going to pursue bariatric surgery, I would need to come up with several hundred dollars out-of-pocket (
that’s several hundred dollars I don’t have and can’t get) just to get started and again…
I would still need to lose over 150 lbs., the hard way before they would even talk to me.
Doctors had given me “a few years” to turn things around,…
three years ago, when I had initially begun seeking help.
Like I said; Grim.
Fast forward to last month (Late October - 2012). My Cousin Scott is in town for a funeral and he stops by to see me. We catch up for a while and he tells me about Visalus. He says that he and his wife Sarah have been using it with great success and he wanted me to give it a shot. I was hopeful but skeptical. He gave me a bag of the stuff to try and I did. I began following the program to the letter.
Scott and Sarah are in town again this weekend for Thanksgiving. They came by earlier this evening and gave me a ride up to a hospital that I know has a scale I can use. Being so heavy, I can’t just hop on a standard-scale at most doctor’s offices and I certainly can’t use a run-of-the-mill home bathroom scale. But, the scale at the emergency room at Cuyahoga Falls General goes up to a thousand pounds, so I knew it would work.
As we entered that building I was terrified I was going to get bad news…
The news I did get? …In less than a month, I’ve lost over 35 pounds.
That’s more than a pound a day!
In addition to the weight-loss, I’ve felt clearer. It’s hard to explain. It feels like the world is being broadcast to me in brighter, more vivid colors and high-def sound. There’s also, now a tiny window of painlessness when I walk. Ordinarily, when I would get up to walk somewhere, it was just agonizing the whole trip. Now, it only hurts for the first few steps, then there’s no pain for about ten steps, then it hurts again and I need to sit down. That may not sound like much, but to me, it’s an enormous improvement and most importantly, it’s something to build on.
What I’ve taken away from this evening, more than anything else is the complete certainty and wholehearted conviction that this works and I can do it.
I want to be able to train again. I want to be able to walk,... to just get up and walk without thinking about it, or agonizing over it or having to plan it out like an expedition.
My goal for myself in my first ninety day challenge is to lose another 100 lbs.
More than that, I want to help as many people as I can who need similar help. Even if you only need to lose a few pounds, I am looking for people to do this with me.
Trust me, with the stuff I’m dealing with, if I can see success at this level in just thirty days, ANYONE can. If you are interested in making some positive changes to your own health and you want to hook up with me for support, I’m here. If you’re even a little bit tempted to try, please get in touch with me and let’s do this together! I don't care who you are, I promise we'll figure it out. Just get in touch.
I feel so free and hopeful and invigorated. Seeing tangible confirmation that… Y
es, as a matter of fact, I AM still IN this fight, damn it!… has filled my whole being with this thrumming, positive energy and Love for the whole world around me. I feel newly-minted. Like when I was a kid, before the black cloud of this illness settled over me, when all kinds of possibilities stretched out ahead of me. I want everyone who needs this kind of change to feel that with me.
If you’re not where you’d like to be and you’re hurting, then you need to know that you and I are in this together.
My email: Cosmic.ZenStorm@gmail.com
My phone: 330-548-5285
I’m alive and I’m here.
Come be here with me.
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Follow my Daily-Updated status-log where I keep track of EXACTLY what I'm doing, every single day, as far as Exercises, Diet and my general State-of-Being, HERE
If you want to make a change in your own life, I am here for you! I need all the help I can get and I will give all the help I can in return! CLICK HERE!
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