Captains Blog
I rolled into the year 2020 at my highest weight ever, over 280 pounds. I was miserable, my athletic six-foot frame was pushing its maximum density. I see pictures of myself from that time, my face puffy and wearing baggy clothes to cover up my ever-expanding body. I would begrudgingly buy bigger pants but convince myself that would be the last size I would buy. I made it to size 48 pants, always with stretchy waist band. Those had reached their stretchy limit. Exercise was painful, my joints would ache, and I would run out of breath quickly. Even walking was a chore. This didn’t happen overnight of course; I had been putting on size and fat since I returned from the war in 2016. How did this happen to me?
I grew up athletic and healthy in a small town outside of Flint, Michigan. We lived pretty much in the country on a 10-acre plot of land with woods and farmland around us. My younger brother and I played sports in high school, and when we weren’t doing our chores, we were running around the square mile of nature behind our house. We were very active. The summer of 1993, after my high school graduation, I earned my private pilot license and went to work on the flight line at the FBO at Flint Bishop Airport. This was physically demanding work, mostly outside in all the seasons and I loved every minute of being around airplanes as I completed my flying ratings. In 1995 at 20 years old, I started my flying career as a First Officer flying cargo on the EMB110 Bandit out of Pontiac, Michigan. I progressed through piston twins, the Lear Jet, Falcon 20 and the DC9 in my early career as a cargo pilot. I’ll get into the details of flying on demand cargo in another blog. I flew cargo, mostly out of Detroit from the fall of 1995 until the spring of 2004. During this time, I also got married, had three kids and was divorced by 2003. That was a very busy decade and a very unhealthy decade for me. I started off flying cargo in 1995 at 180 pounds and ended flying cargo in 2004 at 245 pounds. There were a lot of reasons for this that I will get into in another blog, but this is part of my history that will come full circle to 2020.
In 2004 I was hired at Spirit Airlines and was based in Detroit. The first year I was on reserve, however reserve at a real airline was a vast improvement from flying on demand cargo. When 2005 rolled around, I was holding a line, turning 30 and was ready to lose that weight I gained in my 20s. I did what everyone does, I started running to drop the weight and “get in shape”. Like most people, I was not successful. I needed help.
My brother loves football like I love aviation. He played football for our little high school, then went on to play D2 college football for Wayne State. He earned a degree in exercise science and kinesiology, then became a high school teacher. He coached football and other sports as well as running the weight training program for his school. My brother was an Offensive Lineman in college and at six foot two inches, his playing weight was over 260 pounds of bad ass. This of course wouldn’t suit him well after his college days, so he used his education to get himself into better physical shape and dropped down to a lean 190 pounds (which he has maintained to this day). I needed his help to do the same for me. He helped fix my diet of garbage to cleaner eating, set up an exercise program that focused on strength training with less cardio and eight months later I had lost over 60 pounds. I rolled into my 30’s at 185 pounds in the best shape I’ve ever been in! I had figured it all out with the help of my brother and I vowed to never get out of shape again. I was able to maintain a healthy size, usually around 200-210 all the way through my 30s never exceeding 220 pounds.
I enlisted in the Kentucky Army National Guard in 2010 at 34 years old and became a medic. More on this in another blog. During my enlistment I was able to stay in the top of my physical fitness tests usually scoring around 270 on the APFT, even competing and winning the Kentucky Army National Guard Soldier of the Year in 2012! Why I mention this is because from 2010 until 2017 I easily passed or excelled in Army physical fitness and in 2017, I failed my first Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT).
What happened to me? Here is where we finally circle back to the first paragraph.
In 2015 my Army National Guard unit deployed to Afghanistan for a year. We were stationed in Bagram and Kabul which was at around 5,000 feet elevation, surrounded by the Hindu Kush Mountain range. It was actually beautiful, very similar to the Denver area. I exercised almost every day there, sticking to the routines my brother taught me decade earlier. We worked 24 hour shifts on the ambulance, so my “on days” I would get up early and start with a run, about 3-5 miles or so around the base. On my “off days”, I would go to one of the gyms on base and do a strength day. I ate what I thought was healthy at the DFAC (Chow Hall) and thought I was doing a pretty good job staying in shape. I turned 40 years old on Bagram Airfield and felt pretty good rolling into my next decade of life.
Towards the end of my time in Afghanistan, I started feeling the stress of almost a year away from my life. My kids were having a hard time at home, I was getting anxious to get back to the US. I started skipping workouts and I noticed my weight and size begin to increase. I thought no big deal, I’ll fix this when I get home. When I finally got back home to Kentucky, I was about ten pounds heavier and a little softer around the middle. I went back to work at the airline and noticed I had a hard time getting back in shape. Then within a month of returning to work at the airline, we were bought by another airline. This of course became a very stressful time for us. I kept gaining weight and size. Three months after coming home I was up to 250 pounds! I got serious and employed everything I learned a decade earlier, but it wasn’t working very well. I would exercise hard, eat “better” and I would drop some weight only to see it return later. I was barely passing the Army height/weight standards and barely passing my fitness tests. I failed my first Army fitness test in 2017. I went from being a model soldier, to barely getting by. I was embarrassed by who I had become. Everything became a struggle, when I should have been living my best life ever. In 2018, I worked extremely hard to barely pass my last Army fitness and height/weight so I could separate from the Army with at least a bit of pride after almost 9 years of service. Without the Army to push me to keep up some standard of physical fitness, my health began to deteriorate faster.
There were many other things going on in my life during this time. My airline, Virgin America, was purchased by Alaska Airlines in 2016 and like any corporate merger/acquisition, it was a very stressful time for the next couple of years. My girlfriend (now wife) and I were planning on moving in together, waiting on my youngest daughter to graduate high school. In 2017, we bought a house together in Sonoma County, California and I made the move from Kentucky. Two weeks after that, Sonoma County had the first big fire that ravaged our area. Luckily our town was spared, but the tragedy affected everyone in the area. In early 2018, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and started treatment. In May of 2019, we lost my dad to cancer. I spent a lot of time in Ohio with my dad the last couple of months. We all knew the end was near and one of the things my dad wanted me to do was lose weight. I was up to about 260 by this point. My dad was very active and strong but was overweight and he felt that had something to do with his cancer. He knew I was once fit, and he wanted that for my overall health. In the months after, I doubled down on making his wish come true. I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I put everything into my health that I knew. It seemed to work, I “cleaned up my diet” and worked hard at the gym. I was down a few inches and about 20 pounds six months later for our wedding. We were married in the fall of 2019 and I was determined to keep up the work to lose more weight. Shortly after our wedding, we had to evacuate for another fire and almost lost our new house. That began another spiral for me and looking back now, I can clearly see the signs.
The hard work that I put in to get where I was all was lost. I gave up and immediately put on an enormous amount of weight. Over the next few months, I ballooned up to over 280 pounds. Then in early 2020 I was on a deadhead with my airline and came across a documentary in the onboard entertainment. I watched the preview, but didn’t have time to watch the movie, however I was intrigued. On my next trip I was in my hotel in Seattle, bored and too unmotivated to exercise so I was looking through Amazon Prime for a movie to watch. For some reason that documentary I saw on the airliner popped up as a trending movie. I clicked on it and for the next 90 minutes I was awakened. The movie is “Fat, a documentary” by Vinnie Tortorich and it turned everything I thought I knew upside down. This was too simple to be true and who is Vinnie Tortorich? This started my research. What I found on this journey brought me to where I am today, two years later.
This led me to more research, because just because it made sense to me in the movie, it went against everything I’ve ever been told. That research led me to more research and reading books I would have never picked up before that day. I decided to give it a try and change a few small things about my diet. Those small changes led to more changes and within a month, I had dropped some serious weight and size. I read more, learned more and kept applying that to my life and I slowly began to lose more weight and more size. I could exercise again because my joints didn’t hurt anymore. I had to cut my belt because I had reached the end of the holes, on the good side of course! I had to buy new uniform pants and jeans. That was a great feeling!
So what was it that made me gain so much weight? The simple answer was stress which combined with other hormones changed my body chemistry. A poor diet high in processed food, sugar and seed oils didn’t do me any favors. Exercise can only move the needle a little bit, so the small gains I made would be countered quickly without changes to the rest of my lifestyle. Chronic stress which I will talk about more in the blog and in GROUND SCHOOL is a huge factor in weight gain and overall poor health.
It took a complete change in lifestyle through diet and eating habits, managing stress (which I’m still working on) and exercise. I basically learned how to manage my hormones through these methods and that changed my biochemistry. It seems complicated, but it’s really simple and actually makes sense.
That is the story of how I went from healthy to unhealthy, to healthy to very unhealthy to the healthiest I’ve ever been. I now have the understanding to never go back to that very unhealthy person again and I’m going to share it with you.
