The Stylin' Lounge

Hi Blogsphere, it’s me, Steve. Can we talk?

Fair warning, this is going to be a long post, so if you don’t want to read it, I understand.

Those of you who want to go down the rabbit hole, let’s get started.

Well it’s been a while since I talked about my health and fitness and this journey I’ve been on for the last three years. There’s a reason for that, I gave up, plain and simple as that. Now the reasons for my giving up are a little more involved than that.

Most of you reading this have seen my posts from this past year about how difficult things got with my former workplace and my working a varied and ridiculous set of shifts just to make it to my forty hours in any given week. But behind my simple posts about what was happening, was a deeper and more challenging story than I was telling.

I’ve worked nights for most of the last twenty years and my body has adjusted to that for the most part. Some of us work nights more easily than others. I developed a way to live a reverse day, I’d work midnight to eight, and then go to bed at about noon or so and get up again at about eight pm to start my night. It worked for the longest time.

Then my hours got cut and I was working only a four hour shift most nights from midnight to four am. Now what did I do at four am? What is there to do at four am in this city? Nothing that’s what. I’d go home and try to watch a movie or surf the net for a bit and pass out on my couch. I have the world's most awesome landlord but even he I don’t think would have been impressed by me doing life’s daily chores at five am.

So I slept, but usually for no more than two hours at a stretch. And some days I’d get home by four thirty only to have to be back at work for nine or ten am because I bumped someone out of a shift so I could make up hours. I gave up days off just to make up hours I went from March to June without a day off and that’s not an exaggeration. And that’s the pattern I fell into, work, sleep, work, sleep, work, work, work, sleep maybe, work, repeat.

My former employer will say that I did it to myself, that I didn’t have to pick up shifts, that I could have accepted the schedule I was given and somehow lived off of twenty four hours a week. I chose to want to work forty hours a week and it wasn’t their problem.

What I did have of a social life suffered or was eliminated almost completely. If it wasn’t for some early morning video chats with one of my very best friends, I wouldn’t have had any social contact outside of work from March to September.

Working seven days a week with no end in site and no sign of it ever changing in that work environment and being told by management that no, the shifts and hours are never being restored starts to take its toll mentally. First, hope goes away. Hope that things will improve gets crushed and when hope gets crushed, depression finds its way in. I started to get introspective as to why things were going this way and I got lost inside my own head. I started feeling helpless, and worthless and thinking maybe there was something I had done to have this happen and maybe, just maybe I deserved this. Then came acceptance that since I deserved this, this is how things had to be and there was no changing it. Sounds stupid and foolish right?

The biggest problem with getting lost in your own head is that despite wanting to fight the voices that are talking to you, they’re all your voice and it’s hard to ignore your own voice and what it’s saying to you, no matter how wrong it may be or how ridiculous it may sound if it was someone else saying it to you.

So I was stuck in a depressed funk. If I wasn’t in bed tossing and turning, I was curled up on my couch ignoring the world, or I was at work slowly being crushed under a schedule that was impossible to keep up. I did the Tely in July because I had promised myself that I would.  I hadn’t prepped near enough for it and I paid the price on the course for it.

And in the midst of it all, I gave up. I stopped meal prepping. I stopped going to the gym. I stopped visiting my mom for breakfasts and weigh ins. I retreated more and more into myself. As a result, I’m almost back to square one.

At my best, I had getting under three hundred pounds in my sights. And now I’ve put back on just over sixty pounds. You read that right, I put back on sixty pounds just this year. Thankfully my blood pressure is still regulated and normal and I haven’t developed any other potentially long term issues.

But now is where I say NO MORE! The line must be drawn here and no further!

As of Monday, November 25th, I’m starting over.

The fog has finally lifted. I crawled out of my head and shook off the funk to see that I deserve better, that I can and will make things better. I’ve got a new job in what I’ve found is a far better place, a healthy work environment.

Now, I recently hurt my back and though it’s feeling better, I am taking things easy to start. Monday I did some specific stretches to help alleviate sciatica and I did some of a body weight exercise routine that I was given a long time ago by a good friend. It’s still hard as hell to do and still worth every ounce of sweat.

I am going back to the gym, but until my back feels one hundred percent, I will be taking it easy to start. Walks on the treadmill, workouts on the elliptical, until I feel strong enough to go back on the rowing machine and start using weights.

Meal prep has begun anew in earnest. I know what foods I like, I know what I can prepare and freeze in advance. I have all the tools at my fingertips to change my situation and I’m going to put them back to use. I changed my lifestyle over the last three years to be a healthier me and I’m not going to let this setback, and that’s what it was a setback, not a failure, stop me on my path to leading as happy and healthy a life as I possibly can.

I have new challenges ahead but I’m a stubborn and determined fucker and life isn’t going to get the best of me. Not by a longshot.

I said it before and I still mean it now, WeCanRebuildHim  WeWillRebuildHim