Life On Hold:
Have you ever been at a point where you know you need to change, but you just don’t know where to start? Four years ago, I was at that point.
I had recently moved back to my home town, had a beautiful family, and was pretty much happy. Except that I wasn’t happy. I was pretty miserable in fact, but I wasn’t letting on. Why? Some of the reasons were related to my job, but a lot of it had to do with me being 40+ pounds overweight. I was weighing in at 5′ 11″ and 215 pounds.
“That’s not so bad,” you’re probably thinking. Well, no, relatively speaking, there are a lot of people that are a lot heavier than I was. But the reality was that I knew my life, and my weight, were spiraling out of control. I was always tired, having digestion issues, sinus problems, sleep apnea, and I plowed through it, being miserable and pretty much always exhausted.
But I knew there was a better way. Thanks to my friend Mike, I got interested in whole foods (which I knew practically nothing about) and realized how much garbage I was putting into my body. Somewhere in that time, my job started getting very frustrating. I was hating going to work, and I’m ashamed to say it carried over into my home life. I knew I needed a change, but I didn’t know where to start.
So, I bought a bike.
The Plan:
In retrospect, it wasn’t a very good bike… it was an aluminum mountain bike from a large box-goods store. It worked, and I started riding it. At first, five miles hurt. Then it wasn’t so bad, so I did ten. That hurt. Then it wasn’t so bad, so I worked up to fifteen.
I wasn’t very fast, so riding 15 miles took me over an hour. But I kept at it. I started getting up early, before work, and riding for an hour. I did that almost every day, for about two months. I started realizing that I felt better, but I still wasn’t losing weight.
I got some street tires for it, and started riding it more. I put lights on it, and started riding before daylight. I put in more time on the bike. But I still wasn’t losing weight.
The Diet:
That’s when all the information about nutrition I had researched came back to me. I decided I needed to cut way back on my calorie intake. The only way to do this, however, is to make sure you eat very nutritious foods to make sure you stay healthy… when you’re overweight, your body acts like it’s hungry not because it needs energy, but because it needs nutrition. I had to learn what foods were filled with vitamins and healthy things, but didn’t have a lot of calories. As it turns out, my body had plenty of calories stored up, waiting to be burned.
Let me insert this here: “diet” foods are low in calories, but they are also very low in nutrition. Stay away from them! Stick to natural, unprocessed/whole/organic foods. You know… the way God designed them.
Only after I fixed my diet did I begin to see pounds dropping off at a noticeable rate. I went down to about 1000 calories a day (yes, really). I made sure to eat salads, fruit, beans, unprocessed lean meats, and more salads. I cut out all soft drinks and coffee, and switched to hot green tea. I ate sugarless cereal, unsalted nuts, and all natural everything. All natural was good; USDA certified organic was even better. I cut out all preservatives, all additives, all sweeteners. Yes, all of them.
Eventually, I realized how ridiculous it was for me to get up, ride for an hour, and then get in my car to go to work. Why couldn’t I kill two birds with one stone, and ride to work? So I did. I got some panniers (saddlebags, basically) and began riding to work about three times a week on average, depending on weather, and so on. I would ride another 40-60 miles on Saturday every other week. I was knocking out 100 miles a week average, almost 500 miles a month. I started dropping 2-3 pounds a week. After three months, I had lost a solid 30 pounds and showed no signs of slowing down.
The Prognosis:
I found out that as I lost weight, I had more energy during the day, my sleep apnea (and snoring!) disappeared, I gradually got to where I could taste artificial ingredients in food because I wasn’t used to them any more. I could tell when my sugar level got too low, and would eat a handful of something to tide me over. Our grocery bills went down, because I was eating less than half of what I was before for dinners. I was in top shape, I could ride for 100+ miles with no problem. I found my tolerance to heat and cold increased, because I would ride to work in sub-freezing weather, or 100 degree heat… it didn’t bother me. Since I wasn’t carrying all that insulation on me, my body could regulate its temperature like it was supposed to. My allergies mostly cleared up. I felt better than I had since I was a teenager. I cracked the frame on my first, cheap bike… I rebuilt it with another frame. I saved up, and bought a new road frame for it (a Surly Long Haul Trucker) and built custom wheels for it. Swapped all the parts over, and kept riding.
What it boiled down to, was I was finally in control of my life. I controlled what I ate, how I felt, what I did, and everything was just fine.
Or was it?
The truth was, I had traded one kind of slavery for another. I was now hyperfocused on health, exercise, and riding my bike. Nothing else mattered. The bike always came first. My diet was second. Everything else fell somewhere after that.
It All Comes Crashing Down:
Then, in July of 2011, the world as I knew it ended. On my way to work, a kid ran a red light in his mom’s Honda Accord as I was crossing the intersection. He was doing about 35 MPH.
The impact shattered my left femur, right below the hip joint, into about ten pieces. The bumper actually hit my calf; it was the force of wrenching my leg underneath me that snapped it. The bike was knocked away (with almost no damage) and I rolled off the car’s hood and windshield, and landed on my back on the road.
Three days of intense pain later, they rolled me into surgery and inserted a large titanium shaft all the way through my femur, and another large pin all the way into my hip joint ball. The side of my femur got a handful of screws and a plate to hold all the chunks together while they healed.
A week after that, I was forced to leave the hospital. I couldn’t even stand up on a walker without passing out. My whole body was covered in road rash scabs, my left calf had swollen up to twice its size, and my thigh muscles had shriveled from disuse. I had a scar running half the length of my thigh, and I couldn’t do anything without excruciating pain or feinting.
I held on as long as I could, but at one point, I just couldn’t pretend to be okay any more. Being stuck in bed for weeks, unable to move my leg at all, I realized just how powerless I was. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without help. Couldn’t do anything without use of my legs, and the fog of painkillers kept me in continual confusion to where I couldn’t really focus on reading, talking, thinking, or anything else.
That’s when I heard it. You know that still, small voice? That one. I heard it loud and clear.
“Come back to me,” it said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
And when I thought about it, I knew God was right. I had been focusing all my energy on myself, and ignoring the needs of my wife and kids. In the struggle to replace one form of slavery, I had embraced another. Physically, I was in the best shape of my life. Emotionally I was running on empty, and it was just a matter of time before my family would have fallen apart. I felt a lot like Jonah. Maybe being stuck in the stomach of a fish would have been better! I was completely and utterly broken, physically and spiritually. I cried. I prayed. I admitted that I had been an unfaithful servant, and slowly, I began to get better.
Crawl Before You Walk
It was three months before I could walk again. I struggled through therapy, working very hard to rebuild the muscles in my reconstructed leg. I still have quite a long scar to remind me that God can make something good come out of any situation. I eventually went back to riding my bike, but only occasionally. This was extremely hard for me! In some ways, it was harder than re-learning to walk. Cycling had become such a massive part of my life, it was like starting over. Every time the weather changes and my titanium-filled bones hurt, I’m reminded how fragile life is and how much we rely on God for things without even realizing it.
So now, almost two years later, I’m working hard to keep my promise. I’m trying not to let things get between myself and what’s really important. Will I ever go back to riding to work? Probably not like I used to. Will it ever take a place of importance in my life? Probably not. I’ve proven to myself that I can do it, and I have nothing left to prove, not that God was impressed in the first place. All that’s left is my desire to get closer to God, and if that means giving up the bike or anything else that gets in the way, then so be it.
And I couldn’t be happier.