During this time, I’ve discovered some things that you just shouldn’t do and have compiled a list for your convenience.

1. Ask cute girl to dance.
2. Tell said cute girl that you want to have her babies.
3. Tell a knock-knock joke.
4. Speak Klingon.
5. Ask the bank teller for money.
6. Do voiceover work for daycare center.
7. Ask the kids at said daycare center to “keep it down”.

1. A sustainable exercise routine
2. Conscious control over what I eat
3. A written log of the journey

#1 is in the bag… I’ve committed myself to 30 minutes a day on the Wii Fit, and while it’s not the most rigorous workout ever, it’s better than nothing.  It’s challenging enough that I feel like I’m accomplishing something and not too challenging that I want to give up.  It’s sustainable and I don’t feel like a slug.  I’m sore and tired, but it’s a good tired.

As a side-note, commonly exercise it clears your head… not me.  I’m less focused than I was before.  Aside from the soreness, this has been the only downside.  On the plus-side, I do feel like I have more energy.

#2 involves a few things:

• Walking to Sunflower each day to get stuff to cook dinner that night (after Thanksgiving)
• Eating slower
• Choosing smaller portions, and
• Drinking more water

#3 is this blog and possibly a food journal.

I’m not sure what a food journal will look like yet.  It takes a lot of time to write down every meal and it adds a lot of guilt to something that should be pleasurable.  Keeping a food journal is like counting condoms before you have sex; probably not what you should be focusing on in that moment.

The reason I stopped going to Weight Watchers a few years back was simple: there was a poster on the wall that said, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”

For me, thin seems like the wrong word.  Healthy is the right message.  Nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels.  So I’m keeping that in mind.

I need your help to stay on track.

Here’s me at 254 lbs (what I weigh today).

My goal for one-year from now: get to 200 lbs. The “healthy” upper BMI for my height is 179 but for me that’s not a sustainable goal (at least, not right now).  Here’s what I looked like at 179 (side-by-side with this Halloween):

Keep in mind, I still thought I was fat at this weight.  Fucking nuts, right?  That shirt is a Medium or a Small and I thought I was a porker.

Here’s the thing, though: it was sustainable doing the things I do every day.  I wasn’t at the gym, I wasn’t hard-core dieting (although I was on WeightWatchers), and I kept that weight off for a good year and a half.  I’m not a guy who likes going to the gym; I’d rather have a back-to-back vasectomy and reversal.  But I am willing to do what it takes to get to a healthy weight (besides the gym).

I know I’m a bigger guy, but there’s no reason I can’t get down to a healthier weight and maintain it.  So, as I said before, I need your help to stay motivated.  I have to do better, but it’s easy for me to forget on my own.

If I eat lunch with you, remind me to get a smaller portion or save half for later or go for water instead of soda.  If I meet with you, let’s take a walk somewhere or ask me how my exercise went that day.  I’m committed to the goal of getting to 200, but I know I’ll do better if I have help staying in the game.

Maybe I’ll come up with some sort of contest.  Stay tuned.

Jane Paully has ruined my life forever on Beef and most other edible things.  About 10 years ago, Jane and her 60 Minutes rabblerousers did a show on Mad Cow Disease.  I watched as a girl from England deteriorated throughout the episode from a fully functional adult into a puddle of goo.

Each day that week they showed a new 60 Minutes, each one featuring a different food you should avoid, including: pork, chicken, fish and finally fruits and vegetables.

To 60 Minutes, the only safe food to eat is other humans and water.

My middle school-aged brain immediately made the decision that fruits and vegetables were in everything – and there was no way to avoid them and survive.  Beef, pork, chicken, and fish were a different story.  You can imagine the letters that my parents started writing to Jane that night.  Meanwhile, I stayed up all night learning everything I could about Mad Cow, prions and everything else related to the topic.

For the next two months, my meals consisted of Boca Burgers and MorningStar Farms soy foods.  These served to ween me off my former all-meat diet.  After that, avoiding chicken was way too hard – there’s only so many ways you can cook a Boca Burger and only so many soy meals that Dad would stomach.  So, chicken was added back to the menu… and eventually, so was fish.  Beef, pork, and other red meat stayed off.

Within the first 6 months, I’d dropped 50 pounds of fat and had a lot more energy.

Ten years have gone by since then and I still don’t eat beef, pork or any other red meat – much to the dismay of my family and friends.  I gained the weight I’d lost back by eating poorly and not exercising.  I also learned not to call it vegetarianism, and I’m reticent to call it “pseudo-vegetarianism”, because “real” vegetarians tend to swarm like rabid Twilight fans to tear the non-believer apart.

I keep it up now not as much for mad cow, but because I like animals. – when you’re raised in suburbia you don’t really make a connection from cows to hamburgers until later on.

Last thanksgiving, my extended family decided to order pizza the day before thanksgiving.  The toppings?  You guessed it… meatlovers, meatlovers, pepperoni.  It’s a recurring theme that my dietary choices are forgotten by my family.  I have to remind them at every gathering – “Should I bring some chicken-something-or-other?”

Beyond forgetful family, I also have a hard time at restaurants.  Don’t believe me?

Go into a Taco Bell.  Ask for the meal with the two chalupas and the taco.  Ask for the two chalupas to be chicken supremes and the taco to be a chicken taco.  It doesn’t matter which Taco Bell you go to – 90% of the time, you’ll get a beef taco (trust me – I’ve done the math).  More often than not, you’ll get beef chalupas, too.  Next time, ask them in person and watch how many button pushes it takes them to find “chicken taco”.  This is not a system set up for the beef-adverse.

Here’s another example:

Go to McDonalds (make sure it’s the drive-thru, this time).  Order the premium chicken sandwich (or almost any other chicken meal).  This will usually take anywhere between 6-8 minutes to deliver because they cook the chicken fresh.  I’m not complaining about that part, except to point out that normal human behavior for beef-eaters, when in a line at McD’s and stuck behind chicken-eaters for 6-8 minutes before getting to “the first window”, is apparently to wig the hell out and speed off.  There have been 3 instances when someone has zoomed around and yelled some sort of profanity at me (or the drive-thru window) as they pass.  Short of bullet-proofing my car, the only resolution is for me to go in to McD’s and order non-beef meals in person.

This is true for just about any restaurant – see bacon listed for a salad or in potatoes and you can bet, even if you ask the waitress for no bacon, it’ll be there.

This might seem like small fry stuff, but when you’ve been trying to avoid beef and pork for ten years, it really starts to piss you off when people can’t be bothered to remember “let’s get a cheese pizza” or “oh, the customer asked for chicken”.

My great grandma always taught me to be thankful for my food – everything that went into my food.  I try damn hard to honor that – and remember that when I eat a chicken sandwich, some chicken somewhere isn’t pecking around anymore.  It is a hell of a lot harder for me to be thankful for animals I didn’t even know went into a meal.

Any other “pseudo-vegetarians” out there who have horror stories about this?

I wrote a long time ago on Psychotic Resumes about Persistence – and how Wii Fit made me want to curl up into a ball and die.  That was back when I was perfectly healthy, still had an appendix, and the thought had never occurred to me that putting on pants would soon become an accomplishment.

It was, too – I wore pants for the first time since my surgery on Easter Sunday, and the lord saw it, and it was good.

And Wii Fit still makes me want to die. But I’m giving it another try.

I had a conversation with @empowerfitness on Twitter – she’s a personal trainer. She got me thinking that exercise is a really important part of my life that I’ve been neglecting.  As fast as I bounced back after the appendectomy – out of the hospital after two days, working after a week; I could have done a lot better.  I also think I could eat a lot better.  I want to be able to feel dizzy without thinking it’s some sort of stroke.

Starting today, I’m going to make it better.  I’m going to go to Kings and buy some somewhat healthy breakfast food.  I’m also going to get stuff for lunches and dinners.

The whole thing is hard for me.  Instead of cooking, I’d much rather go out and get something to eat, save myself the time, and use that time to be doing something creative.  Instead of bringing something to work that I’ve had to re-heat or leave cold, I would just as soon go get something and pay a little more.  And breakfast… well, I’m fickle.

I’ve taken a liking to these pre-split pink grapefruits, but each one has something like 300 calories and a TON of sugar.  Since it’s simple sugar, I guess I shouldn’t freak out so much, and I’m actually eating a decent breakfast.

Eating out works fine when you don’t have a ton of massive bills. I haven’t tallied them up yet, but I owe somewhere around $3,000 for my appendectomy. Maybe a bit more.

Besides the money aspect, I could be making a lot healthier choices for food.  I’d resolved to do this when I had my appendix out – mostly because my body just would not tolerate horrible food anymore.  Well, that went out the window after the first few BK chicken sandwiches.

It’s a difficult thing for me to think about – ultimately I know that I’m the one letting myself down. Maybe I’ll figure that out before it’s really too late to do anything about it.

Traveling a distance of up to 12 feet, sneezes have been clocked at 103.6 miles per hour.

You just can’t appreciate the power of a sneeze until you have an open appendectomy.

One week after my appendectomy, I sneezed. Nothing puts your life in context like the possibility of guts going from inside to outside at 103.6 miles per hour.

Well, that, or a vicodin-induced dream that you’re a Twitter page.  Hmm.

In any case, all this made me realize that simple, every-day things that you take for granted can become damn-near fatal (or at least excruciatingly painful) under slightly different circumstances.

I know that sounds all new-agey and probably isn’t new advice by any means, but how often are each of us put in a situation where, under normal circumstances we’d do just fine – but on this particular day, with this particular set of circumstances, we fall flat on our faces?

The day after I had my surgery, they brought in a torture device known as a Volumetric Exerciser.  Lying in a hospital bed, everyone tends to breathe pretty shallow – particularly in surgeries affecting the abdomen; shallow breathing means low oxygen saturaiton levels, which means reduced healing and immune response.  The point of the Volumetric Exerciser is for the patient to breathe in slowly and surely, trying to reach a “goal number” with the power and duration of their inhalation.  Mine was 3500, which was surprisingly difficult to hit.  I’ve tried now that I’m healthy and I easily top 4500.

The point of this story? Well, you don’t just use the Volumetric Exerciser once.  You use it over and over again, each day, a few times in an hour.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. When you hit a rough patch – say, for example, one of your internal organs desperately wants to part ways with you – and things that you are used to doing (breathing, sneezing, walking like a human) suddenly aren’t as easy or fun to do anymore… it’s up to you to overcome those obstacles.

The only way to do it is to set yourself a goal and practice – a little each day, a little each hour, whenever, however, and how ever often you can spare or make the time.  Aim for your goal or more each time you practice.  Little by little, you’ll learn how to breathe, sneeze, walk like a human, sell a new product, program in a new language, or learn to speak Klingon.

Maybe it’s not the most original advice ever, but 6″ wounds seem to make me whimsical.

Might’ve been the vicodin.

My mobility has improved, I’m now about as mobile as your average 9-month-old. I’m going to drive again for the first time tomorrow.

I got the staples out from my appendectomy scar yesterday, which was more taxing than I would have thought.  It didn’t really hurt so much as pinch for a second. Leslie was there with me, which made it a lot better – things hurt a lot less when you have to concentrate on putting on your “manly man” face rather than focusing on the painful part.

I don’t know if it was just the real-ness of it all, or the possibility that maybe the incision hadn’t healed all the way, or that the doctor and his nurse were -very- concerned about infection even though my incision looks good.  I was definitely drained after getting those staples out and was ready for bed around 8 last night.

The weird thing is, the staples seemed to give me some sort of support – physical or mental, that now I catch my back hurting. My back is hurting because I’m subconsciously making myself lean forward so that I don’t inadvertently split open. So, after an hour or two walking around, I look like a decent rendition of Jeff Conway.

I’ve been working to fix that, but I still have trouble sometimes getting my abs to engage when I want to do something… so I look like an albino rollie pollie from time to time.  I’m not doing Yoga any time soon, but I’m definitely itching to do some sort of workout on it.

My only concern is that I still don’t have feeling on a small part of my belly.  If you imagine a clock on my bellybutton, the 6-9 area (lower left, if I’m facing you) has no feeling about 2 cm from the incision – which is a bummer.  The surgery wasn’t exactly an easy one, so if that’s the extent of the down-side, I’m satisfied.

On the plus side, I have stopped drinking soda/pop entirely. And I’m eating a LOT smaller portions than I was – I don’t eat to ruin anymore, for fear of splitting open like the guy in Monty Python (see video below if you don’t know… it’s gross).

I’m really enjoying my new job at DTS, these guys are programmers and know the drill.  I’d say this is aiming to be the best job I’ve had.  I’m getting really good at MVC, the C# is rolling like I never touched VB, and next week it looks like I’ll be diving into JavaScript/GIS/REST.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Bs1ZZ-7b8

About two hours after lunch, I started feeling really crummy.

I decided to go home early from work and see if I couldn’t rest it out… but since no way to lay was comfortable and I had a pack of angry badgers fighting it out in my insides, I decided to call the doctor.

She took one look, poked one spot, and I made a noise like a dying giraffe being eaten alive by a hoard of ferrel cats.

If you’re curious what this sounds like, you must first possess a sink disposal unit.  Fill a coke can with partially crystalized molasses and insert it into the disposal unit.  Top off with a collection of cat’s eye marbles.  Turn the disposal on.  Be sure to wear eye protection.

Shortly thereafter, I was in Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, doubled over and waiting for a room.  It didn’t take them long once we arrived and I was stripped of all the normal human dignities such as clothing and the right not to wear snap-on bracelets.

I was in too much pain to just lay around, so the excellent nurses decided to give me a morphine injection.  I’d never had morphine before, but I remembered that dad said that it stung him.

Morphine was not my friend – it didn’t do anything to fix my insides. I was pretty sure I was on my way out.  I had a little hyperventilation and a panic attack, kind of like if William Shatner had walked into the room.  A minute of multi-syllabic drama-induced panic attack later and I was doing fine.

They got me in for a cat scan, which revealed that my appendix was actually 3x the size of an average person’s.  I guess you could say that I have the body of a caveman.  The size wasn’t the problem, but certainly explained why I was in so much pain and in so many areas.  Anyway I explained to the technician that I absolutely must be back on stage by 11 PM for my company’s tap dancing recital – I was the star and the understudy was pure drivel.  Otherwise the show would have to be canceled.  She laughed and recommended an increased morphine drip.

I met the doctor, who reminded me of a blond, upset Al Borland, who informed me that my appendix was just screaming to come out.  I knew this day was coming.  For 23 years, my gigantic appendix sat idly by, quietly biding its time and laying in wait for the day that it could spring into action.  Having finally gathered up enough material to form some sort of magical stone, it faked injury and prodded my other organs into a state of rebellion.

What should have been a 45 minute surgery and 3 1″ cuts to remove my appendix turned out to be a 2 hour surgery and a 6″ incision with a ton of digging, the doctor told me.  I knew what had really happened.  My appendix had burst forth like a brilliant, bile-laden ninja and had lain waste to the majority of the surgery team, who would never be seen again.

It was a terrible battle, but my organ’s feeble training could not beat the quick eye and nimble fingers of Blond Al Borland.

I woke up in the Oncology Ward.  Yeah, I didn’t think it was funny either, but I guess they’d run out of beds for surgery peeps.  It was fun for all the folks visiting, though.

I do have to say, Poudre Valley’s Oncology ward is fantastic.  There was a bed for Leslie to stay, a spacious room, and it was very comfortable.  When I was moved to the Surgery Ward later on, the room was smaller, but the bed was fantastic.  My only complaint was that the buttons on the bed are hard to reach and often required maneuvers from a Britney Spears dance number to hit.  Not an easy thing to do when your insides have been split like a kid eating a Twizzler.  But, whatever responsiveness the bed lacked, the staff made up for 100 fold!

Thursday they checked my vitals every 2 hours, so it didn’t account for much of a day unless you’re a crack addict.  I don’t honestly remember much except that mom and dad came and they brought me a bear, and my major accomplishment for the day was eating a Popsicle.

Friday was a better day, and I ended up checking out of the hospital that night after taking a shower and walking around as much of the surgery ward as I could.

My thanks to the surgical staff and the entire nursing staff that helped me out – they were all fantastic, very helpful, and apparently have no sense of smell (appendectomy is a gassy surgery).  My hat is of to them!

The weekend has gone by in a flash… but now I’m at least not so drugged.  I have the attention span of at least 3 goldfish put together and the mobility of your average 70 year old.

Throughout all of it, Leslie has been by my side.  She’s been so good and so helpful, that to say “I owe her one” just doesn’t cut it.  She’s amazing and wonderful and… geeze, I will have to write her her own post someday.

Below are pics… I only have one really gruesome one that I won’t post but peeps who know me can ask to see.

Finally, I don’t care what anyone says.  That ice cream sandwich was definitely worth it.

The way to read these cat scans… the big white part that looks kindof like a butterfly or something is my spine.  So, in this picture the left side is my right side and my head would be shooting out into space (behind the computer monitor) and my feet would be jutting out from the monitor.

That thing in the first picture that the arrow is pointing to is an obstruction, and the mirrored, very-thick “r” shape is actually my appendix (and this isn’t all of it, it took 3-4 “slices” of cat scan to see all of it).

My eyes are considered in the normal range when you take into account all the variables.

Even so, the Dr. wanted to get a scan of my optic nerve as a baseline for future comparisons.  He performed a Heidelberg Retina Topograph. It basically uses a low-intensity laser to scan the surface of your optic nerve, layer by layer, and then uses that data to generate a 3D picture. The results were very good – I have very high nerve density in both eyes.  I check out just fine, even though my eyes aren’t very symmetrical on the inside.

You’re basically looking into a microscope with a chin-rest, and on the inside, there’s an LED on the left or the right side, depending on which eye they’re scanning.  Each eye takes about 5 seconds, during which you look at the green LED while a checkerboard square of red light pulses rapid-fire style, centered in your field of vision.  There wasn’t any pain or discomfort, the light wasn’t particularly intense and it didn’t leave any ghosts or after-images, although it did feel like I felt the checkerboard on the back of my eye with each pulse.  It wasn’t unpleasant, just… odd.

The best part was the 3D image – the technician showed me the lines and contours of my optic nerve, which was gee-wiz level cool, so I thought I’d share the paper they gave me.