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Making the impossible, possible

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A Day At The Park

I’ve been talking to my wife about becoming more active now that I’m losing weight. Yesterday, she told me to get a good night’s sleep because she had an activity planned for Sunday. She wanted to keep it a surprise and wouldn’t tell me what the activity was. We had been looking at the county parks catalog so I thought it might be related to us going to a park.   She told me that there would be some hiking involved so I should wear comfortable shoes. There was also some mention of a picnic. I asked her if this would be a good opportunity for me to bring my camera since I had really been itching to use it. I have not used it since January. She hesitated about the camera and then said I could bring it but there really wasn’t much to take a picture of.   I tried to figure out all weekend long where it is that she might be taking me. Every time I mentioned a park, she would say, “No, that’s not it and I’m not telling you.” I really love it when she takes the initiative to plan an activity because it takes the pressure off me and its just fun to be surprised sometimes.   True to her word, this was a local park I had never been to before. In fact, I didn’t even know it existed. We parked and went to the visitor’s center to get a map of the walking trails. We walked down one of the trails for a bit until we got hungry and then walked back to the car and retrieved the picnic basket. We had discussed taking kayaking lessons but I didn't realize it was at this park.   We found a shaded picnic table under a tree very close to the river. After eating turkey and cheese sandwiches, pickles, and watermelon, I walked around shooting some pictures. I realized that I had forgotten a lot of what I had learned because the pictures didn’t come out as nice as I would have hoped.       Walking the trail     The view from the picnic table       I have no idea who this woman is. It just seemed like a perfect chance to use my telephoto lens and capture the greens and reds.
Jack Fabulous

Jack Fabulous

1
 

A Cross Between The Bachelor Party And The Hangover

You can find my complete blog HERE.   As I have written, I identified myself as an overweight guy who didn’t do much of anything. I went to work, I came home, and I was not social. I can’t identify myself in that way anymore because I’m more active and trying to be social. However, I am a baby when it comes to interacting with people. My weight used to hide me and give me an excuse to not have to deal with people.   As another strategy to break out of my shell, I signed up with Meetup groups in the area. Several are for photography and a general social Meetup. My wife and I made reservations to go and see a play and have dinner with about 20 other people from Meetup. That should be interesting. I’m actually quite terrified of how to act and what to say. Thankfully, my wife is going to be there with me and she doesn’t have these hang-ups. I can lean on her quite a bit.   For quite some time I’ve longed to have a group of guy friends. I watch movies like “The Hangover” or “Bachelor Party” and wish I had male friends that I can do things with like go to Vegas. I’d love to have a small but intimate group of guy friends to hang out, drink beer, eat chili dogs and cheese fries (burp!) and talk about whatever is on my mind. We could go out to see movies that my wife doesn’t want to see, play a little poker, car shows, chili cook-offs, fishing, paintball, you get the idea. All of those things guys like to do; I want to be able to do.   I was telling this to my therapist who suggested I look on MeetUp. I found many groups for women but none for guys to just hang out and be guys. So, I created a group for guys. Because of my self-esteem issues I have very low expectations for the group. I didn’t think anyone would actually join the group but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. I thought, “Oh well, I’ll create it and we’ll see what happens.” I paid for a group for 90 days because I figured that once this flopped, I wouldn’t be out a whole lot of money. Well, what happened is that I got 90 guys who signed up in just a few days. YIKES! So I guess this group might last a little longer than just three months.   When I created my “low expectation” group, I also created a happy hour. I picked a date and time I was available but I figured that since nobody would sign up that it would be a moot point. Monday night it not idea for a happy hour but since nobody was going to show up, it was not that big of a deal.   Within a couple of days, I had 15 men sign up for the happy hour. HOE. LEE. ****. I didn’t know I was filling such a void. Well crap, I guess that means I actually have to go and figure out where to have this thing. I really was expecting that no one would sign up for the Meetup, and no one would show up for the Happy Hour.   These are the kinds of things that the old me, the 330 pound me, would have thought: “I’m not worth it, so therefore no one is going to sign up.” However, this is the kind of thing I need to change my attitude about. I AM worth it. I AM interesting. People SHOULD like me, and if they don’t I’ll just beat the living crap out of them until they change their mind. Sorry, I got carried away!   Now, the Happy Hour is stressing me out because my wife is not going to be there. It’s going to be a bunch of guys I don’t know. It is all on me to make it a success. I don’t know how to act. I don’t know what to talk about. So we’ll have to see what happens. Anyway, that’s all the news that’s fit to print for today.
Jack Fabulous

Jack Fabulous

3
 

A Cross Between Quasimodo And Joseph Merrick

This is one of those rare posts where I pour my heart out and it was very difficult to write because it is very hard for me to face the truth about myself and my painful past. I apologize in advance for any rambling I might do.   Body image has always been a sore topic with me. From the time I was born I always felt unattractive. No, not just unattractive – I felt like people thought I was repulsive. I believed I was so hideously ugly that people didn’t even want to look in my direction. I’ve honestly always felt like a cross between The Elephant Man and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.   A lot of that has to do with the abuse that I incurred when I was growing up. In addition to the physical abuse, my parents constantly berated me as being worthless and told me I was never going to get a woman to marry me. My mother was constantly telling me I was fat, unattractive and ugly. She would say that I needed to lose weight and order me to go out to exercise.   I hated to go out to do any kind of exercise because it just wasn’t fun and I wasn’t good at it. It would have been different if I had played sports, but we were poor and couldn’t afford the financial outlays that being on children’s sports teams required. So she would force me to “go jogging”, which I hated. She would peer out the window to make sure that I was exercising, so I would jog out of sight of her view and go sit on a log for 30 minutes and pretend to jog back. Imagine a seven year old (yes, you heard me right) being told all this and being sent out to jog by himself. The mental abuse started when I was even much younger, but my first memory of the “jogging” was when I was seven.   My mother would tell me that they were saying all these things to “help me improve”, but I didn’t take those comments in the spirit in which they were intended, I took them to heart. After taking them to heart, I modeled my behaviors based on them. If I was repulsive, I tried to stay away from people, especially the opposite sex. I didn’t ask girls out on dates, I didn’t even go up to talk to people. I was too terrified and shy to walk up to someone, smile, and say “hello” regardless of their gender.   When you are told something all of your life by people who love you, it is hard to not have it sink in. When I look back at pictures of myself as a young child, I realize that I was actually not fat, but I became fat as an adult because that’s how I saw myself.   This played into my social interactions with women. If the most important woman in my life at the time (my mother) didn’t like me, then what hope did I have for the outside world? I used to feel very sleazy at just the idea of walking up to a woman and trying to talk to her. I felt like she would think, “Oh my God, here’s a disgusting, repulsive, ugly man who’s trying to get in my pants or ask me out on a date. He’s so ugly, disgusting, and repulsive that he makes my skin crawl and I just want to get away from him.”   That’s why I never went up to anyone to try and talk to them. That’s why I kept to myself a lot. All throughout my life, I never got any type of positive reinforcement or positive examples of women liking me. No woman ever came up to me and started a conversation. The few people who I did ask out turned me down, which led me to stop asking anyone out on a date. All of those things solidified my opinions of myself and played into my self-image. This is the main reason there are no photos of me on the Interwebz.   I’m still fairly socially awkward and not good in situations around people. Oh sure, you might think by reading my entries that I don’t seem that way, but in person I am very shy and suffer from low self-esteem. I still don’t go up to strangers and talk to them – even at parties when I’m introduced to people, I just listen to what they have to say and not say what’s on my mind.   I’ve been thinking lately that when I weighed 325 pounds I probably did look hideous and ugly but at 240 pounds, maybe I don’t look all that repulsive. Now don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think I’m esthetically appealing. I still don’t think that there are too many women out there who would look at me and think I was good looking, or “Wow, I’d like to get to know him better”, but at least they wouldn’t say that I look dreadful. A woman isn’t going to avert her eyes when she looks in my direction.   It bothers me that at some point in my life, before I lost this weight, I was 240 pounds and thought I was repulsive, disgusting, and ugly. As I said before, I made social choices based on that. The negative self-image is still there, but it’s not as strong. I’m not sure how my attitude will change if I lose more weight. I hope that it will get better, but I think some of that will also depend on the reaction I get from people around me.   I’ll have to see if, with my newly lost weight, I’m treated any differently than I was in my teens and 20’s. I’ll have to see if people actually enjoy being around me – if women actually like talking to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to see if a woman would actually go out on a date with me considering that I’m married, but I’d like to at least find out what could’ve been possible, if that makes any kind of sense.
Jack Fabulous

Jack Fabulous

3
 

5 Months Out

It has been five months since my surgery. I have lost eighty pounds. That’s about sixteen pounds per month, or about four pounds per week. I would say on average, I am very pleased with my progress, even though I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. I’ve had two major stalls, which had more to do with my depression and food addiction than actual physical changes within my body. During those times, I was terrified that I would never be able to lose another pound again – or, even worse – I would gain some weight.   Fortunately, I didn’t end up gaining weight, and I feel like I am back on track to losing some more. I still need to incorporate exercise into my everyday routine, but overall, I think I’m doing okay. As I look back over the last five months, I can’t believe how far I’ve come.   This much weight loss would never have been possible without the surgery, regardless of how much time I took to try to lose it. I still want to lose another seventy-five to eighty pounds. My doctor would be happy if I just lost another fifty. If I lose another eighty pounds, in the next five months, I’ll be at my goal weight by Christmas. Clearly, the biggest struggle has been the addiction. If it wasn’t for that, I think I would have been able to lose a lot more weight, faster.
Jack Fabulous

Jack Fabulous

0
 

260 Or Die!

Today’s essay is on how angry I am with myself because I have been unsuccessful in losing any weight for the past three weeks. I have been stuck at 280 pounds for the last three weeks. I blame myself for … Continue reading →
Jack Fabulous

Jack Fabulous

0
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