“The Gift – Giving Myself a Fighting Chance”

Life is hard as hell! All the crap that comes at you from all directions all the time is hard enough to deal with without the added disadvantage of being unfit and unhealthy.  I know; I know I’m sounding pretty damn pessimistic in this blog.  Really I’m not trying to be a downer; I’m just trying to relay how tough it was for me to fight the daily challenges of just plain life and work when I was not at my fighting weight, or health.  It is amazing how much your fitness level can impact your emotional and psychological state.  In the normal course of a day I would come home from work so mentally and physically exhausted that all I wanted to do was crash on the couch with a glass of wine and zone out.  Unfortunately in order to make it to the couch I had to climb up a short flight of stairs and out of breath wheezing hard. Damned this split level house! Psychologically I was so scared that I would end up like my Mom who died of complications due to diabetes.  All the while I was her caretaker for the last two years of her life I kept thinking about my own demise.  Would I also end up bedridden and in horrible pain from diabetic neuropathy?   The fear escalated when my doctor recommended that I start on insulin injections because my meds couldn’t contain my disease.   Oh I rationalized with myself and told myself that it wasn’t that bad.  I’m not going to end up like that; I had time to straighten this thing out. The truth was I was running out of time.  No matter that in my mind I wasn’t any different than when I was twenty, the fact is I was middle age.  I was looking at the precipice of being old and it was now or never to turn this thing around.   It’s really strange how things come into your life, not planned but just what you need. Crossfit and the Paleo diet came into my life; took hold and turned my life around.  It gave me a fighting chance to save myself from the inevitable end that I was headed to.  Now, I know that sounds really overly dramatic and that I sound like some fanatical zealot trying to evangelize you.  Well I am. I make no bones about it.  The reason I’m writing this blog is so that I can influence you.  To persuade you to look honestly at your state of being whatever that is and if you are not satisfied, do something.  Do something different than what you have been doing. 

Crossfit and the Paleo diet is something so radically different than what I was doing.  What I was doing was the recommended path: moderate exercise, mostly cardio and a low calorie, low fat and whole grain diet.  This plan led me down the path to weighing over 200 pounds, escalating diabetes and high cholesterol.  I had been following this plan for over 20 years.  Sounds familiar?

Now for the good news; the Crossfit/Paleo makeover.  Numbers don’t lie.  I’ll let them speak for themselves.  First let’s look at the outward results (body measurements) from one year of this makeover.  Oh and yeah, I went from a size 16 to a size 10. This is important to because basically I'm pretty vain, hahaha.

   

What’s way more important was the internal results.  Here are the numbers from my quarterly doctor’s checkup and lab blood work. Ta Da! Diabetes, take that! Crossfit and Paleo put a whoop ass on you!

 

I’m not finished with the makeover yet; I’m nowhere near where I want to get to but I won’t stop this journey. My goal is to completely get off all meds, get down to a size 6 all the while getting so strong that I can be labeled a badass.  I have given myself a Gift, a fighting chance; I have taken my bad health out of the equation of life.  Now I can deal with all the crap that will always come at me.  The difference is that I’ll be coming right back at my fighting weight, bounding up the stairs, hardly missing a breath.