Among the self-assessments I’ve taken, the Clifton
Strengthsfinder has been my favorite. My top five strengths are Ideation,
Adaptability, Learning, Communication, and Connectedness. It was a
head-slapping moment of revelation when I discovered this natural skill set,
and how little of it I was using in the jobs I held over the years. I learned
that you are who you are and it’s best to try to be your best at that, not
something else. Which is why my goal to go from 185 to 225lbs was a losing
proposition from the start.
Gaining weight has never been among my strengths. In high
school I was 6 feet tall and 155lbs. I was recruited by the track team to be a
pole for the polevaulting event. In college I ballooned to 165 and had to put
away my 28” waist pants. All of them. They rode a little high anyway. As the
sedentary life of adulthood and middle age set in, my body seemed to settle at
183, give or take a couple. The biggest I got was a temporary foray into the
high 180s. Didn’t matter how active I was or what I ate. That was just what my
metabolism maintained. That and a general disinterest in food would be the main
reasons.
Being in an odd mental state overall for the past 6 months,
I was groping around for goals when 2015 rolled in. Gaining 40 pounds seemed
like a good test of will, mind over matter. My hope was that, when coupled with
my workout routine, I might see some weight gains in areas other than my
middle. I’ve always had skinny, birdlike legs, which my daughter recently
described as being “the kind that girls would like to have.” So I had that
going for me.
I started at the beginning of the year, late January, I
think. The exciting thing became wondering what Mike v225 would look like --
Chris Hemsworth or Jonah Hill? Day after day I ate as much as I could,
indiscriminately. I ate until it hurt. “Second breakfast” was one of my
favorite meals. Slowly, ever so slowly, the scale crept up into the 190s. But
it was going too slowly. I was frustrated and nearly gave up. I turned to my
wife for support and encouragement, but surprisingly did not get any. There I
am, pouring my heart to her about all my effort, all that fried food and ice
cream and steak that went in, without much to show for it. I could tell she
wanted to say something, but instead she just shook her head and walked off. “I
guess I’m on my own,” I thought bitterly.
Time to find out what I was made of. I kept eating, kept
pushing myself, kept shoveling it in until I dropped from the table in
exhaustion, which for some reason irritated my wife to no end. Then one day, I
hit it – 200 pounds! A breakthrough! This renewed my spirits, and over the next
few weeks I continued the battle until I plateaued at 204.6 pounds. That was
it. I hit the wall, and that wall’s name was 205.
One look in the mirror gave me the answer I asked at the
start, and the answer was “Jonah Hill”. Actually, Jonah Hill’s top half on
Orlando Bloom’s bottom half. Win win! I resemble two movie stars. One of the
drawbacks to gaining 20 pounds is that your pants don’t fit any more. I mean,
not even if I sucked in my gut and held my breath all day. Why didn’t someone
tell me about this before? Again I went to my wife for support and advice, and
again she offered none. At least this time she was in a better mood and laughed
as she walked off.
If I were to get a job now, I’d have to wear the only pair
of dress pants that currently fit me every day. Shirts are no problem, as the men’s clothing
industry assumes that every man is shaped like a rain barrel. When I was at 185, tucking in a
shirt meant wadding it up in the back to avoid having this bloom of bunching
shirt material all the way around my waist. So now it was either buy a bunch of new
pants or slim down again.
That was when I discovered something else: It’s hard to lose
weight. Why didn’t someone tell me about this before?
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