Obesity and How I Lived It

Obesity – like climate change it is a plague sweeping over our nation. Why though? Why are we so prone to shoving copious amounts of food in our face holes to stay level headed or keep ourselves busy?! DOES ANYONE REALIZE YOU CAN LOSE LIMBS FROM DIABETES AND YOU GET DIABETES FROM BEING OVER-WEIGHT?!?! So, I wonder how it will look. As China invades in 2050 creating WW3 or 4; their army finds us bloated and already dead from choking on chicken bones and not being able to walk. That may be a little extreme, but I have personally experienced both sides of the fence.

Growing up, I was an overweight kid. I had extreme eating problems. I would eat and eat and eat. I would eat when I was watching tv and I would eat before bed. I guess this isn’t so far out of the ordinary, but I would eat and eat and eat. Every time I would eat, I would eat so fast that I would make sure I was full. If I felt empty again, I would start eating again. Talk about an eating problem right. Put it this way…I weighed about 250 pounds when I graduated high school, but in the same note, I weight 250 pounds in 8^th grade as well. The difference was I started playing sports more in high school and I shot up 5 inches in height.

            While playing sports my diet never changed. I kept eating continuously. Eating more and more and more. I kept the weight off with sports. As soon as I graduated high school, I started playing college football. My daily diet consisted of about 5,000 calories. With morning lifting and running, the weight never affected me. I didn’t feel like I had an eating problem anymore. I worked hard and I kept working hard. This seemed to keep anyone from noticing my eating problem. I went to all you could eat wing nights at Buffalo Wild Wings and would put down 70-80 traditional wings at a time. I would go to McDonalds and eat 8 Big Macs at a time. All of my friends were just impressed.

        After transferring to Winona State from Moorhead State, I got a head injury from football and was unable to play. That didn’t keep me from eating though. I seemed to eat more because I wasn’t able to do anything physically. 250 pounds turned into 275 pounds and pretty soon I was 300 pounds. This all happened in a matter of months. This was my sophomore year of college. I decided to quit football and try focusing on my studies. If I weren’t able to focus, I would eat.

        I got a job at Fastenal Co., which entailed a lot of physical labor and work. I began to drop some of the weight and I began more self confident in myself, but not because I looked better, but because I was beginning to lose the weight. In December of 2011, I set out on a mission, I wanted to be as lite as I was when I was in 7^th grade, 230 pounds. Months and months of determination and hard work started to pay off. I went from 285 pounds to 225 pounds in 5 months flat. I cut my weight down 60 pounds through healthy eating and controlling my calorie intake. I was only consuming about 1,200 calories a day for rapid weight loss.

            After a whole year, I am at 235 pounds and I can finally say I have a 6 pack. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever be able to say I had a 6 pack of abs. I never thought I would be able to take my shirt off and not have to worry if anyone thought I was fat. I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be happy with my self and love myself the way I do now. It is possible and I am capable of living a healthy life and not being overweight. So why can’t America?

            Why is it so hard for Americans to realize that every candy bar, every little treat they get their hands on isn’t necessary. We need to stand up for our right to go from FLAB to FAB. We don’t need to be unhappy and live in a pool of fat and lard. Everyone can be happy. Everyone can have the desire to control who they end up becoming. So why don’t we? Why don’t we get off of our fat asses and do something about our flabby mid sections? Who controls your destiny? Stand up and fight for your right to a 6 pack. For your right to be skinny; love who you are and love being loved.

A Fraction of Difference in a Global Matte

           Where do you see yourself in 50 years? In my opinion, most college students would answer that question with a simple-minded answer, “Successful, Rich, and Happy.” Where do you hope your children are in 50 years? Again, I feel like most college students would reply with another simple-minded answer, “Just as happy as I hope to be.”

If you find yourself happy now and indulging yourself in the finer things that life has to offer, don’t you think your children would expect the same thing? Could you imagine a world with dark smog filled skies and rising temperatures in heat? Without being able to drive your SUV due to the oxygen level of our atmosphere containing too much carbon and having a breaking point for the clean air we need to survive. Animals dying, food and clean water are diminished, and world populations are continually fading from 6…5…4…3…and finally down to only 1 billion people left on our once healthy planet.

This is what our future holds. This is what our children and children’s children are going to have to deal with because of our over indulgence and our greed for more…and more…and still more. Drive your SUV’s and trucks; continue wasting food and wasting valuable resources. Continue wasting the only sources that we have been able to use as a source of prosperity and growth only to have it shoved back in our faces in a less valuable and a less manipulative state of matter.

This is how strongly I feel about this topic after seeing a documentary called Chasing Ice. This documentary opened my eyes to what our actions are really doing to our vast and beautiful world. James Balog, the creator of this documentary, explained his desire for science but his hatred for statistics. So he decided to make a spectacle out of scientific information through photography. Balog captured the beauty and horror of humans’ interaction with nature and how it is changing because of our presence and our growing impact.

James was looking for a new way to explore the topic of climate change because of how difficult it was to grasp the idea that our world was rising in temperature. He came to the conclusion that ice was the only solid way to explain the change in our climate. He decided to observe the glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and in Glacier Park, Montana.

Using Balogs’ background in photography, he decided to obtain the physical aspect of the change through pictures and the idea of creating a visual aid for people to see these changes over a 3-year period. A team of experts in Glaciers from the University of Colorado, a team of engineers in the field of creating camera systems that could withstand the forces of nature, and Balog ventured out on this expedition that they referred to as The EIS or The Extreme Ice Survey. The EIS developed a camera system that would take pictures of the glaciers every 5 minutes in the day as long as it was daylight. This occurred every day for 3-4 years.

Balog hoped that this physical and visual evidence would show some type of change. He knew how statistical evidence had been shoved down the worlds’ throat for years and how it had never made much difference in how the world reacted. After 3-4 years and hundreds of thousands of pictures from 30 different cameras spread throughout the world, Balog had his visual evidence and the change was catastrophic.

In his study, he discovered that the minimum recession of most of the glaciers he photographed was 1 mile and had a range of up to 2.5 miles. A glacier is supposed to grow and recede, but most of these glaciers were unhealthy and shrinking, FAST. Balog revealed that because the glaciers were melting this fast, the ocean would rise 1-3 feet in his daughter’s lifetimes, minimum. And his daughters are only 21 and 23 years of age. These changes are affecting the disastrous outcomes of tropical storms and giving them the opportunity to reach further onto the mainland.

The EIS team watched the calving process of the glaciers, which is when these glaciers have chunks as big as the South point of Manhattan break off into the ocean forming icebergs, (this is not normal for glaciers). The Fact is that our climate is changing and it will affect our children’s well-being. We need to make a stand and figure out a way to divert our tendencies of increasing the carbon in the oxygen from an average of 220 parts per million over the past 800,000 years to an increasing 500 parts per million in the last 10 years.

For more information on this topic, you can visit the site that follows. Also, view the trailer seen at the home page.

http://www.chasingice.com/.