I belong to a faith tradition in which health is a core value. Through life I have been reluctant to live by those values and over the years my health has deteriorated accordingly. I've lived by the health standards of Western society and have paid little heed to the health message of my church and am now facing the reality that I have a lot of work to do to undo a lot of harm that I've done to my own body.
When I left home to join the United States Air Force at the age of eighteen, I was 6'2" and weighed 155 pounds. I had made a half-joking commitment to a teacher at my high school in my senior year to become a vegetarian for a year because I had teased her about eating veal parmesan from a TV dinner, a.k.a. "dead baby cow" and felt bad about it. Since vegetarianism is encouraged but by no means required in my church, I believed I could follow through with that promise. I don't know if she took me seriously but I lived as a vegetarian for the better part of two years, including through basic training. I stopped one day not through a conscious decision but because I accidentally ordered a cheese burger instead of a grilled cheese sandwich one day (I defined my diet as lacto-oval vegetarian, which includes egg and dairy products). Soon after I discovered the joys of the 99-cent Whopper at Burger King and had fully strayed from my healthy diet. I also began to dabble in the alcohol culture that often goes with military service, which goes even more against the teachings of my church but seemed to be quietly overlooked by many of my faith as long as there weren't any major problems caused by it.
After a few years I married a young lady I had grown up with in church and we got stationed in England. Our diets continued to lapse and we loved having roaming barbeques with our friends. The guest of honor was usually Captain Morgan (a brand of spiced rum). By the time I left England, which was nine years after I had joined the Air Force, I weighed 250 pounds and hadn't passed a fitness test in two years, but at that point fitness standards seemed to be an oversight in the Air Force and I woke up one day realizing I was now fat. Somewhere in my career I had also taken up tobacco, starting with an occasional clove cigarette, to menthol cigarettes, to cowboy killers (Marlboro reds), to Marlboro lights.
In my last enlistment in the Air Force, weight and health continued to be a struggle, and Air Force leadership either began to get tired of jokes about our bike test from other services or they realized that our standards had become too relaxed and our service was overweight and out of shape. The Fit-to-Fight program (also known as Too Fat to Fight) soon followed and my own complacency of personal fitness had not prepared me for the pendulum shift of a culture that now recognized strong physical fitness as a requirement to military service. Go figure, right? My weight went down from a high of 270 to a low of 235 pounds through exercise, but running left me out of breath and I found myself frequently facing back spasms and often in need of exercise requirement waivers.
I found myself seeking out God in Iraq, where there were plenty of atheists in the foxholes despite the old expression (many of whom I still count as acquaintances). One thing this encounter with God led me to deal with was that I didn't need to keep using tobacco, and after a few days of reading Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life, I walked outside, smoked my last cigarette, finished my morning devotional time and ignored the three packs of cigarettes on my shelf for a few weeks before disposing of them completely. I may have given them away rather than throwing them away, but I was done with that habit. I also came to the conclusion that I wasn't happy in my job in the Air Force. I mean, if I only found any job satisfaction when I was serving in combat zones, something wasn't right. Sure, always being on the fitness roster wasn't making life any easier but there was more to it than that. It was a little early for mid-life crisis but it was time to walk, and walk I did. With thirteen years and a few months of service, I felt God calling me to do something different in life. I decided to go study theology with the hopes of becoming a military chaplain eventually. I also quit drinking since I didn't think it would be ethical to keep doing so considering my church's stance on alcohol. And even though I was slated to get out and I had an injury waiver for many of the physical fitness requirements, a week before I got out my commander refused to let me be excused from taking one last fitness test. I actually passed with a high enough score to be removed from the remedial aspects of the program.
Unfortunately, that was probably the peak of my health over the last 10 years of my life. I quickly put weight back on after the exercise stopped and found myself back at 270 pounds within a year or two. I finished my bachelor's degree with little focus on health or diet, continuing to eat meat whenever I felt like it. A year into my master's program I did an internship at a hospital to focus on ministry within a healthcare setting and instantly hit it off with a classmate. Andrew Campbell was a few years younger than I was and was about my size and weight. We shared a love for God, good laughs, food, and England (where he grew up). We spent the summer working in the same program, living two doors apart in the dorms, and making midnight runs to the hospital cafeteria or to local eateries. We were about the same size and weight and we would both go back and forth between healthy and unhealthy food choices, often justifying a pile of junk food with a side salad drenched in dressing. Soon after our internship ended, I got a call telling me Andrew had died in his room after experiencing heart pain, and my visits to the doctor were showing that my health was headed in the same direction. My doctor wanted me to start taking medicine for blood pressure and I would likely be on medication for the rest of my life. These two events were the catalysts for me to reexamine the need for health reform in my life.
I enrolled in a program being sponsored in my local church because I believed that if I made lifestyle changes in diet and exercise that I would be able to both lose weight and avoid the need for lifelong medication. This program was helpful and I have yet to take a single blood pressure pill, but I haven't made all of the changes in health that I need to and because of this I haven't seen the great results that some of the people I went through the program with have. I am a reluctant health reformer, giving up beef and chicken but holding onto fish with the excuse of needing the Omega-3 to boost my HDL, eschewing eggs and milk but quick to order a grilled-cheese sandwich and fries, just beginning to let go of coffee and caffeine in favor of orange soda or other sugar-filled choices, with only a few days remaining to accept a slightly discounted membership at our regional YMCA.
Although I am slow at making health changes and have both progressed and regressed, I hope this blog can encourage others who struggle with weight and health issues from the perspective of someone who has room to grow (or room to shrink). I consider my faith to be relevant to this because the healthy lifestyle promoted by the Seventh-day Adventist church leads to longer and healthier lives. Adventists in the United States on average tend to live seven years longer than the average American. I intend to promote health values and share my personal successes and failures in reluctantly facing the reality that many of us need change in diet and exercise and that in implementing some or all of these positive changes we can improve our lives and live longer. This blog isn't meant to be exclusive to those who share my faith, and I welcome anybody who seeks health reform in their lives to participate in a manner that is respectful of one another.
I guess that's a lot for an intro, so welcome to my reluctantly reforming "fatventist" blog.
