You want to know what pisses me off? I’ll tell you. It’s the phantom whispers. It’s my ex-wife leaning into my son’s ear, dripping poison into the well, never managing to scrape together a single positive word about the man who gave her half that boy’s DNA.
She lacks the mental capacity to understand the damage she does. She leans in and whispers, “Your dad’s never been that big. Your dad never made that much money. Your dad’s feet aren’t really a size 14.” It’s a pathetic, bitter attempt to emasculate a ghost. Who talks like that? A bitter old bitch, that’s who. One who is letting her mother’s double-chin genetics finally take the wheel.
So, let’s set the record straight before the revisionist history sets in. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and document the timeline of the flesh. Let’s talk about the weight, the mass, and the armor I’ve carried across fifty-seven years of a chaotic life.
When I was a kid, being tall and skinny meant you weren’t “big.” You were just a target. I remember looking at the older guys my freshman year and praying to the gods: Just give me some meat. Instead, I got drugs. By sixteen, I was a walking chemistry experiment. Acid, PCP, cocaine. Food wasn’t a priority; finding the next scrap of a high was. I was a skeleton. I remember staring in a mirror after a guy tried to bounce a shovel off my skull because I’d just had sex with his sister. The adrenaline was pounding, my brain cells were misfiring, and I looked at my reflection. Ribs poking out. Cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. The drugs were eating my beautiful sixteen-year-old body alive.
It didn’t help that my organic father’s wife ran that house like a Korean prison camp, rationing us to 800 calories a day. I was starving in suburbia.
I didn’t actually put on mass until I escaped to my grandmother’s house. She fed me beans. No milk, just beans and gallon after gallon of powdered, diabetic-coma-inducing lemon iced tea. By the time I scammed my high school counselor for a diploma so I could enlist at seventeen, I tipped the military scales at 210 pounds of pure water retention and bean fat.
The Navy stripped that off me in three months. Boot camp was a starvation diet of minimum food, high protein, and endless running. I graduated at 172 pounds. I was skinny again, but it was a man’s skinny now. There was wire underneath the skin.
They shipped me to Tennessee for A-School, and that’s where I found the iron. I lifted solo. The muscles finally formed, the veins popped, and I hit 186 pounds. That was the sweet spot. I had shoulders. I had a back. I wasn’t carrying Grandma’s syrup anymore; I was carrying armor.
For a long time, 200 pounds was my baseline. It was the ideal weight. I looked good, I felt useful, and life was in proportion.
Then came marriage, the shipyards, and the slow creep of complacency. The guys at work started poking fun at my side handles. My ass cheeks were crawling up my shoulder blades. I hit 230.
Luckily, the Navy gave me a final parting gift after kicking me out with a Bad Conduct Discharge. They stuck me on the USS Independence for a six-month cruise. I worked out three times a day. I lived on boiled eggs, peanut butter, and early-generation creatine. When I came home, I was 186 pounds of pure, single-digit-body-fat meat. I wore a size 32 waist but had to buy XXL athletic-cut shirts just so my shoulders wouldn’t rip the seams.
That was the peak of the machine. But the machine requires maintenance, and life has a way of burying you in calories.
We moved to Oregon. The land of the giant portions. Every plate was two meals. I embraced it, blossoming right back up to 240. I remember flying back to California to see Grandma. She looked at me with unconditional love, pinched my face, and said, “Oh my God, you have chubby cheeks.” It hurt to hear, but she was right. My chin was vanishing. My neck was thickening. The man-boobs were making an appearance.
Here is my Charles-level analysis on the biology of men: A man’s weight is a direct reflection of his comfort, his misery, or his bank account.
Think back to the Medieval days. If you were fat, it meant you were a king. It meant you had money to eat, you were happy, and you were a leader. The skinny guys were the peasants starving in the mud. I truly believe that still applies. If wealth is health in a capitalist society, the skinny guys are the ones working at Starbucks, spending their last dollar buying custom-shipped New Zealand meat for their rescue dogs.
When I was fat, I was making money. But I was miserable.
The marriage was cracking. I was bringing in over a million dollars, paying contractors to build a life, and getting absolutely zero love, zero sex, and zero respect from a woman with a deadpan, “fuck you” attitude.
I hit my breaking point in a pub in Wichita. I was sitting with my buddy Mike. I watched this man order a craft beer, bring the frosted glass to his bearded face, and drink it like a man fresh out of a ten-year prison stretch seeing a woman for the first time. He put the empty glass down, foam on his upper lip, didn’t blink, and just gasped with pure satisfaction.
I looked at him and thought: I want to be happy.
I ordered a Hefeweizen. It broke nine years of sobriety. I got happily, gloriously shit-faced, which was fine, because I was sleeping in my office anyway since there was no room for me in a bed with a pissed-off wife.
That beer opened the floodgates. By the time I was doing business in Singapore, I was ballooning over 300 pounds. I was working 18-hour days, eating and drinking craft beer, prime rib, and sturgeon every single night. Look at the photos from that era. You’ll see a 320-pound man with a balloon face and dead, sad eyes. Life was kicking my ass, and I was eating the pain.
The divorce dropped some of the weight, and I hovered around 290 for a long time. I dropped into the 270s in Sedona on a strict vodka-and-grapefruit diet. But then came Scottsdale, and Carrie.
I was playing house again. She’d work a 12-hour hospital shift, order Pizza Hut for her kids, and they’d eat two slices. In the middle of the night, while everyone slept, I would raid that oven and eat the rest of the goddamn pizza. I bloated right back up to 300 pounds. That’s how I knew the relationship was toxic. I was eating the baggage again.
The final wake-up call hit me recently. My body started checking out. The inflammation was out of control. My ankles were the size of my thighs. I was dizzy, fatigued, and my knees were screaming. By Thanksgiving, my face looked like a swollen peach cobbler. I would eat one fried meal and gain twenty pounds of water weight. I was standing on the edge of a heart attack.
So, I made the hard pivot. I isolated myself. I stopped drinking the craft beer. I starved myself through the holidays. I broke the 290 mark. Then, despite being wined and dined by a Mexican girl right before I left the States, I hit 282 just in time to get on the plane to Vietnam.
And here we are. Da Nang. Day 30.
I just finished a 48-hour fast after getting my teeth violently whitened by an aggressive Vietnamese dentist. I don’t have a scale, but I know how the armor fits.
I am confident I am under 270. In fact, with the walking I’m doing, I am probably breaking into the 260s—a weight I haven’t seen in years.
The XXL shirts I bought to hide my gut in the Asian heat are hanging off me like drapes. But those expensive, tight, double-X surf shirts I almost threw away because they made me look like a stuffed sausage? I had them washed. I put one on yesterday. My stomach isn’t sticking out. The shoulders fit. I look proportionate. I look sharp.
Here is the wisdom at the end of the road.
I feel younger in my body, but I look older in the mirror. That’s the trade-off. When you drop fifty pounds of fat, it stops stretching out your wrinkles. But I’ll take the wrinkles over the swollen ankles every damn time.
I’ve lost the intimidation factor. When you walk into a room at 320 pounds, people get out of your way. At 260, I look like a normal guy. I don’t look like a mob boss anymore.
But I’m not here to intimidate anyone. I’m here to live. I dropped the dead weight—the wife, the bad relationships, the pizza, the beer, and the water retention.
I am fifty-seven years old, sitting in Vietnam with white teeth, fitting into my old surf shirts, and waiting on a gorgeous woman to walk through my door to celebrate our one-month anniversary over crawdads.
Let the ex-wife whisper her bitter little lies into the wind. I’m too busy being happy to hear them.
