My Physically Fit Journey-Part 1
Please check out the transcript to my 2nd YouTube video. Enjoy!
Welcome back to the Fit Hippy Dad YoTube channel. My name is Scott.
I am beyond grateful that you are checking out my channel. Today is about my fit journey, specifically the physical part. If you checked out the first video now in podcast form, I mentioned that being fit is much more than being physically fit. It’s about being physically, and mentally, and spiritually fit. It’s about being sober-minded. I will address those aspects of being fit in another video. But ,for now, let’s dive into my fit journey, my physically fit journey. There is a hippy part of this journey as well. In fact, the hippy part was and is the motivation for changing my life.
My childhood was just being a normal kid in the 1970’s. I played outside, can you imagine that, and watched TV, just a few channels, can you imagine that, and played sports with the neighborhood kids. From what I can remember, I was tall for my age, not fat or heavy or really thin. Just normal I guess you could say. I was the tallest kid in my 6th grade class. By high school, maybe sophomore year, not so much. I stopped growing height wise in 6th grade. I remember being in good shape, not heavy, not thin. I think more athletic. The first time I gained a lot of weight was in high school, senior year. I have always been good at ignoring the scale. Just don’t weigh yourself. You can even be good at fooling yourself with the clothes you wear. Deluding yourself into thinking that you aren’t gaining weight. I think I reached over 200 pounds and it shocked me. So, I lost weight. It was about 30 pounds. I don’t really remember how I did it, but I did. But, that was the start of about 10 years of up and down weight through my late 20’s.
I did go to college and for the first couple of years weight really didn’t fluctuate. But, by senior year I was definitely way over 200. How? That part was easy. I could and still can eat a lot. Let me share…A typical example was I would work at Jewel, which is a major grocery chain in the Chicago area. I would get home late, like midnight, and pop a pizza in the oven. I would eat the whole thing. I may or may not have had dinner. There were times, more than once, that I would buy three footlong subs from Subway and eat all three. As I reflect on that, I can’t believe it. But, it definitely happened. Once I graduated from college in 1992, I kept eating and gaining weight. A buddy and I took a trip to California the summer of 92. I went back a month later to visit a woman I met and in that short month she looked at me and said wow you have gained weight. I was in denial. I knew my pants and shorts were tight, but still, I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. It was her, not me.
Now I was working in my early 20’s and still gaining weight. Still eating a lot. I remember going to McDonalds and eating 5 double cheeseburgers for lunch. Really? They were a dollar. In my mid 20’s I did try to lose a bit of weight but gained it back fairly quickly.
This is probably a good place to bring up my family. There were and continue to be many members of my family who are overweight. And, let’s call it what it is: they were and continue to be obese. My dad’s top weight at 6 ft was 422. In comparison, my top weight was 248 that I know of. Today luckily he is damn near 200 pounds lighter, but still in the 230’s. I have two sisters and just one niece. I don’t have much of an extended family, but needless to say, obesity is not uncommon. So maybe genetics wasn’t and isn’t my friend today.
Back to my journey, So, in 1992 at the age of 23 I wound up in the hospital with a respiratory infection. I took Prednisone for 3 weeks. This changed the course of my life. I was smoking at the time, so it’s hard to tell if that is the reason why I wound up in the hospital. I have asthma which is really quite dumb. Smoking will definitely come up as part of my physically fit journey. Anyway, I took lots of asthma medications as a kid. The medical doctors I went to couldn’t figure out what caused the damage to my hips a few years later. What is a fact, can’t deny it, my body changed a lot after taking Prednisone. It took four years, but in 1996 I finally went to the doctor about a groin pull that never went away. My legs were tight. I woke up walking like a penguin before I could loosen up for the day. I went to the doctor for my groin, but soon found out that my legs were compensating for the destruction of my hip socket. I never felt pain in my hips. But, I had what is called Avascular Necrosis or AVN for short. Basically it means no blood flow to the hip socket. My hips were dying. No blood flow, no life. I vividly remember the first doctor asking me whether I remembered Bo Jackson the 80’s 90’s dual baseball and football player. His leg contorted on the football field during a tackle in such a way that it compressed his hip socket and stopped the blood flow. The only option for him and for me would be a hip replacement. As for him, it was one leg, mine was both hips. On the scale of 0-4, with 4 being the worst, I was at a 4. Basically any time I was ready I could have a hip replacement on both legs. You know it’s bad when the insurance companies didn’t fight a 28 year old man getting hip replacements. I waited a year until I had the right hip done and 5 years for the left. But, this marked the beginning of my fit journey.
I think this is a good stopping point. I found out how bad my hips were at 27 years old. I had tipped the scales at 248. I am 5’11, never quite making it to 6 feet. I didn’t know at the time how this diagnosis, the AVN or Avascular Necrosis, would change the course of my life. Now I hope you are starting to connect the hippy part of my channel to the fit part. Next time I will dive into how I became physically fit, how I owned the change to my life, the fact that I would have to change my life to accommodate having hip replacements.
Unit next time, God bless!