The only thing that I had going for me in my twenties was that weight was not much of an issue. Thank God, I had that going for me. I can break up those years into three sections. The first section was my college education. I attended St. Petersburg Jr. College for two years before moving on to the University of South Florida, where I completed my Bachelor of Science degree in Biology/Pre-Med. I also began working on two Master’s degrees, although I did not complete them. A second portion revolved around work. I worked in retail for the vast majority of those 10 years, working nights on the grocery stock crews. The work was back-breaking, thankless, and you derived little financial compensation doing it. The other third was training and participation in Triathlons. This was the only portion that I benefited from both physically and mentally.
In the first section, I received an education that formed the building block of my knowledge base. A base that would facilitate my nursing career fifteen years later. In the second part, or work part, it served as my financial sustainer and provided me with social interaction skills that would also help in my nursing career. The triathlon section was the only thing that provided for immediate gain, but offered little long-term benefit. It helped me maintain my weight and physical conditioning for my early adult life. It also helped me recover from a back injury that I suffered while at work. Unfortunately, once I stopped training for my races, I gained weight. I planned to stay in triathlons for many years to come, but the level I had attained was too demanding to allow for any social life. After completing my Iron Man race, I was training over twenty hours a week. With my 45 hours of work a week, that left little time for anything else. During this time, I dated casually, but I never devoted any real time towards maintaining a lasting relationship. A word to the wise: while training for endurance events, I consumed up to 10,000 calories a day. This costs a lot of money, and it takes time to prepare all the food. One other side effect of eating so many healthy calories is that you may become quite flatulent. My flatus became incredibly malodorous. To give you an example, if you ever watched the Looney Tunes Cartoon PePe Le Pew, you will get an idea.
During my 20s, my weight was stable at 190 to 195 pounds. Unfortunately, during my 29th year, life took a change for the worse. I became involved with a woman that I affectionately named “Psycho Bitch”. I ended up losing 50 pounds of muscle mass, and I gained it all back, plus an additional 30 pounds in fat, which I carried through most of my 30s. It was during this time that my body started to change in other ways as well. I became less tolerant of healthy fruits and vegetables. My diet primarily consisted of carbohydrates and limited amounts of protein. My wife eventually graduated from nursing school, and after working as a nurse for a couple of years, her schedule radically changed, which required me to make a career change as well. I chose to follow her in nursing. I was now 35 years old. She had warned me that I would gain weight in nursing school, so I went on my first diet. I dropped over 30 pounds and went back down to my 195-pound fighting weight. I lost the weight fairly easily since I was still young. During my 2.5 years in nursing school, I gained the weight back mainly because I was not very active physically. For my whole 10 years of my thirties, my lifestyle was pretty sedentary.
I was 38 years of age when I became a nurse in Florida. My first wife and I moved to Las Vegas in the summer of 2002. While I did not lose any additional weight. I started lifting weights and converted some of that new fat back into muscle. I have to admit that I was never this strong before. However, my cardiovascular conditioning did not improve much. By 2010, I started losing weight again. I went from 255 down to 225 pounds. I maintained this weight till I became legally separated from my second wife in 2007. At this time, I lost another 20 pounds, which brought me to a low of 205 pounds. I maintained that weight till a year after I married my third wife. Unfortunately, as happened in my first two marriages, I started gaining weight again. This time, I didn’t stop at my previous high of 255 pounds; I reached a new high of 308 pounds.
Each time I lost weight, I did so for an established goal. One time, I lost weight to be in better shape for scuba diving. Another time, I lost weight before visiting a female friend of mine who lived in Thailand. Each time I reached my short-term goal, I would eventually regain the weight. I have learned some valuable goals from these successes. First of all, you need to find a sustainable way to lose weight. If you base it on some extreme diet or physical activity, you will never be able to maintain the weight loss. Second of all, you need to have a long-term reason for losing weight. Just like my short-term goals, many people, especially women, lose weight every year so that they can wear their summer bathing suits. So once the summer is over, their weight bounces back up. This type of activity is not healthy. In the long run, it only serves to feed their vanity.
Each time I lost weight it became a little more difficult to do so. One time I only had to stop drinking soda and I lost weight. The last time it took over a year to lose 20 pounds but only six months to regain the 20 plus another 80 pounds.