On Losing Weight: June, 2014

It's been a long, difficult process, and I still have quite a ways to go, unfortunately.

For the last three or four years, I've been trying, if not very successfully, to lose some weight. The first year or year and a half or so went great, and I managed to take off somewhere in the area of 40 pounds. Good news, to be sure, but this is of 150 pounds total I need to take off, and since the middle of 2012, making that happen has been exceedingly difficult for me.

Something I've been meaning to do in my writing or video stuff since then is try to explain at least part of why it's been so hard since those first 40 pounds came off. I'll admit, my tendency to procrastinate has certainly played a part in why I haven't yet. The fact that I'm something of a lazy bastard is another part of what got me into my current situation, and I'm hoping that at least trying to change my ways will help me get out of it.

For me, being at my peak weight of just more than 300 pounds was kind of like being a semi-conscious zombie. I always felt like I was only just barely aware of what was going on around me, and while I was almost capable of acting on things, anything I tried to do for myself or others was just shy of having even a negligible effect and almost always noticeably off from what I'd intended to do.

To be honest, that's really what putting on all that weight was like, too. I knew what was going on, and whatever efforts I may have made to prevent it or slow it down some had the wrong effect. These were choices I was making, and for whatever reason, I was making all the wrong ones. I don't know why that was, and I'm not entirely sure I want to.

Eventually, though, I did get tired of being so big and always being caught in the haze of the constant waking-dreamlike state I'd been in for so long. After all, this may have started when I was in high school, but it didn't really start to get bad until college. Starting my second or third year there, it became fifteen years of increasingly going through the motions and becoming less and less aware of it as time went on.

But then, in 2010 or 2011, I finally did get to the point where it was just too uncomfortable, physically, to keep ignoring it. By then, my back had been sore just from sleeping for a good two years, minimum, and I'd been getting callouses on my feet that would crack and bleed in the winter for at least ten. I couldn't bend very far in any direction. Moving in general was difficult at best, and I just couldn't do the things I liked doing any more. Something needed to change, and change it did.

A year later, I'd taken off about 35 of that 40 pounds I mentioned before, and it was kind of like the ending of the Wizard of Oz. It was like waking up after being unconscious, or very nearly so, and seeing that quite a lot of my friends and family were still there, waiting for me to come around, and trying to help the recovery process come along as smoothly as possible. Sadly, both of my grandfathers had died several years prior to my even getting started on this. The good news, however, is that most of the rest of the people who might have been interested were still there.

The tough thing about coming around was those last five pounds or so. See, after getting through the part where I told Zeke and Hickory and Professor Marvel and the others that they were all in Oz, I got well enough to get up and try to go outside again, which was those last five pounds.

See, the thing is, when I got up and opened the door to try going outside again, it was like suddenly realizing that I wasn't back in Kansas yet, but was somehow still in Oz with all these friends and family instead of the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the others that had been there before.

Much as I like being more able to think and act and be part of the world again, I can't quite cope with still being in Oz, and that's at least part of why my weight has leveled off, and even started to creep back up lately. Oz is a weird place and I have trouble getting my head around things there. I like it, but I'm sure I'd like it better if I could make a little more sense of what was going on around me.

Making things all the more stranger, I seem to have found that part of Oz that's as much the Oz we know from the movie as it is the Mega Man universe as presented in a fan-made cartoon I saw some years ago called Dr. Wily Fails At Life. It's not so much that I mind being Doctor Wily. I did go trick-or-treating as him when I was in middle school, or at least I tried to. I mean no offense by this, but it's more that Auntie Em and Uncle Hank seem to have taken over the roles of Bass and Zero in the cartoon.

The worst part yet is that I know everybody's trying to help by offering advice, words of encouragement, and support in general. A lot of the time, I feel like I don't appreciate that fact as much as I should, and I'm not sure how to change that.

Just as often, though, I find myself thinking that I might be getting too much of a good thing, and have been for a long time. And there's where the problem lies. Getting too much of a good thing has done me no good in the long run, and continuing to get too much of a good thing will not solve the problem. As much as I appreciate the lengths everyone is willing to go to in order to help me, what may help the most is just giving me a little more room to breath and more than half a chance to think and figure out what I need to do and how to make it happen.

If there was a wizard I could go to for help with this, I'd go to them and have done with it that way. But as it is, there's no quick way to solve this, no miracle cure for my problem. It's going to take some time, and there will be failures along the way.

Can I get this eventually? Well, yeah, I think so. I hope so. It's going to take a while, but it'll happen eventually.

And I suppose that in at least some sense, looking for the Wizard might actually do some good, so I may as well get with it. So here's a little music to play us out: