Seasons: Part 1: Where I've been

"Little-Eric" - awww

Hello you lucky reader!  I'm glad you found my blog.  I'm Eric!  I'm 29 years old, going on both 15 and 50.  In this first post, I'm going to tell you a little bit about where I've been.  This is the heavy stuff, literally :)  This past year has changed my life and I will tell you how.  Throughout my life, being overweight was the primary source of my pain and failures.  I survived my childhood and adolescence by making people laugh and putting on a defensive shield of faux-confidence and denial.  In addition to the pains and standard struggles of growing-up fat, I had been cut-from sports teams, denied entrance to the military, failed physical ability tests for law-enforcement jobs, had my heart broken, and suffered other embarrassing emotional scars because of my weight.  The cumulative effect of obesity related failures in my life resulted in the self-esteem the size of....something really, really small, a quark maybe.  The consequences of my obesity didn't just impact my life in the present-tense but it hindered my confidence to chase my dreams and passions.  On two occasions, I was a semi-finalist to be a contestant on NBC's The Biggest Loser, only to be rejected from a show about fat-people, Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot. 

After the birth of my daughter Emma in 2008, I seriously looked myself in the mirror - What the hell am I doing with myself? I spent the next couple years in a real-intense struggle losing weight through hard exercise, then gaining it back and repeating the cycle countless times.  I had reached a top weight of 409 lbs - but perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that my daughter was born at 4:09 AM.  During the Summer of 2010 I decided to inquire about my options for Weight Loss Surgery.  At first, I thought Weight Loss Surgery was the ultimate failure, but I couldn't have been more wrong.  I started going through the process with an awkward conversation with my Primary Care physician, and after almost a year of jumping through hoops, I had my date.  On June 6, 2011, I had my laparoscopic RNY Gastric Bypass procedure, and it has changed my life.  Deciding to take control of my life was the best decision I have ever made.

So far, I've lost over 140lbs, and I'm not done yet.