When you’re making a massive life change, I think it’s incredibly important to understand your origin story. You need to know your reason for doing it, and you need to keep it in frame in your head all the time. So before I talk about everything I’m doing to get healthy, I want to tell you how I got here.
I Effed Around and Found Out
I have an expression I’ve used for a long time: f around and find out. When it came to being overweight and generally unhealthy, that’s exactly what happened. I effed around, and I found out.
The Dinner That Sent Me to the Hospital
I was out to dinner with a very, very dear friend. We had plans to go to something that weekend. He looked at me and said, “I don’t think you look okay, bud. We need to skip our plans.” Then he said, “Nope, we’re going to go to the hospital instead.”
So I went. They admitted me immediately, and I spent the next 12 days there.
What the Numbers Looked Like
Thank goodness, I didn’t have a heart attack, and I didn’t have a stroke. But my blood pressure was ridiculously high, about 200 over 120, give or take. I knew I was overweight. There’s no way you don’t know that. But I was almost 400 lb, just shy of it.
My blood pressure, my heart rate, my oxygen levels: everything was off. My oxygen was almost 80, which apparently is very hard to imagine people surviving, since a lot of people are in trouble once they drop into the low 90s. Honestly, I didn’t feel that abnormal. The only explanation the doctors had was that I’d gone so long with low oxygen that I had acclimated to it, kind of like people who live at high altitude. (Shout out to Denver.)
12 Days, a BiPAP, and Sleep Apnea
I spent those 12 days basically bedridden. At first they didn’t want me moving around much, because they didn’t know what was going on. I was on oxygen by day and they put me on a breathing machine called a BiPAP by night, and that took a lot of getting used to. That’s a big topic, and I’ll talk about it in a later post.
My sleep apnea, because of my size, plus the blood pressure and everything else, all compounded. Most of the doctors agreed that if I hadn’t come in within that week, maybe two weeks at most, I would probably have been dead.
The Promise I Made Myself
I sat there for 12 days, and it was painful. It was humiliating. Nothing about it had any redeeming positives, other than the fact that I didn’t die (I admit that was a plus).
During that time I decided that if it was a black-and-white choice between living and dying, I was going to live. And if the choice was between ending up in the hospital again, without some kind of catastrophic event, or taking good care of myself, I was going to change my ways and take care of myself.
Almost Six Months Later
I’m about five and a half, almost six months into this journey now, and I’ve seen massive changes. I feel incredibly different. I’m really trying to make good on that promise, and I’ll be sharing all the different things I’m doing here on the blog and on YouTube.
Why I Didn’t Take Care of Myself
I was in a very bad way, and I want to be honest about why. Some of it was that I genuinely didn’t know what I should be doing, and I certainly didn’t have the medications I needed. But the bad eating and not exercising enough? Those were things I knew I should do, and I chose not to. Figuring out why I made that choice has been a journey of discovery all its own, and I’ll get into that too.
So that’s my origin story. Not just where I came from, but where this whole effort came from.
Let’s Keep Talking
Thank you for reading and for being here. If you have comments, leave them below. If you have questions, reach out here on the site, on my YouTube channel, or by email at jason@iusedtobebigger.com. And if you want to follow along, subscribe on YouTube and find me on Instagram and Facebook.
What’s your “why”? I’d love to hear it in the comments.
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