BODY WEIGHT: A FAT MAN’S CONFESSION WITH NO SHAME

Body weight became an issue for me in 7th grade. And it wasn’t fat shaming.

That came later.

In seventh grade there was a football weight limit for playing in the backfield. One twenty if I remember right.

What I remember very accurately is I weighed slightly more, like five pounds.

Coach Peasley, a small man, told me to lose five pounds to play quarterback, or play on The Line.

I chose the line and started eating more and haven’t stopped since, except for special occasions.

As a high school sophomore I started one varsity game at tackle weighting a beefy 175 lbs. The program listed me at 172. The other lineman had me by fifty pounds easy. I used technique and tenacity, the first Tenacious D.

Over the winter I choked in the state greco tournament at 180.5 lbs. Instead of moving on to the round robin finals for medals, I pinned myself by throwing flat at the end of a match I was leading.

I took the sixth place pink ribbon. Tenacious Pink.

The next year I played football around 190, wrestled at 178, then entered the state greco tournament at 165. And got wiped out. Weak and hungry, I lost to guys in matches that I viewed as a third person. My internal voice said:

“If I hadn’t cut weight I would pound you,” while they rag-dolled me around.

Senior year I played football around 210, wrestled at 191, and entered the state greco as a hundred and ninety pounder. In my first match I threw flat and lost, but not pinned.

Since it was a black mark tournament, not getting pinned mattered.

I settled down, got some advice from Robin Richards, “Don’t beat yourself. The goal is to beat the other guy,” and won out for the gold medal.

Freshman year in college and no football. I cut to 177 to make the varsity squad. And got stomped.

The next year at the All-Army Team tryouts I came in at 180. Weak and hungry and you know the rest of the story. I didn’t make the team, but didn’t get pinned.

So I had that going for me.

Weight Watcher Ditches Scales For Body Weight

For ten years I ran and ran and held firm at 185. Push-ups, sit-ups, lifting, and eating small did the trick.

I entered the Marriage Match as a svelte 210. That was the beginning of “Are you going to finish the rest of your food?”

Two kids added to the message mantra of, “Don’t throw it away.”

Remember how sad it felt to see once stellar sports stars go to seed, gain more weight, and wheel around on a golf cart like the great Earl Cambell of Houston Oiler fame?

An extra hundred pounds seemed unreal, even when I stepped on the scale to see 280. OMG!

Should I go for the 300 Club, or back that shit down?

I dropped to 260, then a steady 240. It’s funny how a number once thought of as too, too, fat, becomes a slim weight.

At 240 I made a run at another 300 Club, the Bench Press 300 club. In a cruel irony, I topped out pushing 280.

My fattest man goal had once been to dip under 200 lbs. That was when I stopped using a scale after being frightened off.

Achieving Body Weight Goals.

After I got a neck cancer diagnosis a few years back, the docs said I needed to beef up for the treatment ordeal. All I really heard was, “Eat like a horse.”

I bumped back up to 260 before I stopped getting on the scale. I didn’t stop eating, though.

The regular weigh-ins for chemo and radiation were a throwback to wrestling days. I was fat and happy right until I wasn’t. But body weight was key to staying on schedule to deal with fucking cancer. Lose too much and the treatment stops since killing cancer, which feels like voluntary suicide, is a warm-up for a death march.

I marched down to 199 lbs. with a neck on fire, got the best pep-talk ever given from wife and kids, and turned it around.

Adele’s song “Hello” kept me on my toes. “Hello from the other side” reminded me I was on the wrong side.

Now at a steady 220-225 I can reflect on body weight with better context.

The Immune System

Our immune systems work too keep us safe. Like a border wall of ignorance, we believe our immune systems keep all the bad stuff at bay. Also like a border wall, no immune system keeps all the bad stuff at bay.

The cancer that tagged me was of a virus origin. The HPV 16 virus targeted my lower tongue, which wasn’t enough, so it jumped over to a lymph gland that graduated to a tumor.

From beginning to end I heard the same thing: “As we age, our immune system weaken, and diseases it once fought off become more aggressive.”

Works for me, but I’ll add this tidbit: If the immune system is limited, and we tax it with more territory to cover, then the door to illness opens a little wider.

It’s no conspiracy theory that older people are more susceptible to covid19. And no old wives tale that pneumonia is called “an old man’s best friend.”

The term “old man’s friend” is often used when referring to pneumonia. Searching for it on Google yields 16,400 results in 0.33 s for this combination. The term is attributed to William Osler, who in the first edition of his book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) wrote:

In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class [i.e. the elderly] that it has been termed the natural end of the old man.

In the 9th edition, published after Osler himself already died (in 1919 from pneumonia at the age of 70 years, this excerpt was rephrased as “.. . one may say that to die of pneumonia is almost the natural end of old people”. But that was 100 years ago. Fortunately, a lot changed for the better in the century that followed.

Reading this, and writing about body weight, I think of my hip, my knee, my heel, and wonder about other related maladies.

Chronic pain is no one’s best friend. Neither is an addiction to pain killers that evolves to chiva when the prescriptions run out.

Stay on your game, sports fans, and you’ll avoid shopping the Big and Tall Store.