A Little About Myself

Hello. My name is Bryan Foreman and I've lived here in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma practically my whole life... well, not "practically." I've lived here my whole life, period. I guess you could say that I've never had much of an adventurous spirit- at least as far as traveling all over the country or the world is concerned. I wish I could tell you that I'm more into people than places, but that's not entirely true either. People have always made me uncomfortable and I usually shy away from them, unless I'm inebriated or I'm in some predicament that forces me to reach out to strangers. Believe me, I'm trying to change. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to be sociable and have people in your life. Don't get me wrong, I've always had compassion for my fellow man. It's just that my insecurities and low self-esteem have kept me from getting too close to anyone. In other words... it's not you, it's me. Of course, I've had every reason to lack self-confidence.

This is me at forty-nine. I weighed 316 pounds and was in the worst shape of my life. I felt a sense of urgency once I passed the 300-mark, but there wasn't much I could do about it- or so it seemed. Sure, I wanted to lose the weight and I tried. But I was going about it all wrong. I put all the emphasis on working out, not realizing that dieting was more important. I must've burned thousands of calories at work. I worked as a laborer in my father's construction company and it was pretty grueling most of the time, tearing down walls and rebuilding new ones, sanding drywall, pulling up old carpet, and constantly sweating my ass off through it all- especially when I was working in the summer heat. After I got home and ate a big meal, I worked out on the stationary bike for an hour and a half and burned about 500 calories while watching the big screen TV in front of me. I usually didn't eat much at work, since we only had thirty minutes for lunch. A lot of times, I just got something out of the nearest vending machine. But a couple of candy bars, a package of mini powdered donuts or Hostess Twinkies, and a 150-calorie soda really adds up. I might as well have gone to McDonald's with the rest of the crew. Needless to say, I was famished by the time I got home, hence the big meal.

Weighing over 300 pounds was bugging the hell out of me, however. I needed to turn things around and get back into the 280-range before I became too big for my tiny apartment. So I started eating nothing but salads five days a week. The only problem was that they were huge salads, a ton of lettuce served in a "Jethro Bodine bowl" and covered with ham chunks, black olives, Parmesan cheese, a handful of Chicken in a Biskit crackers in place of croutons, and over half a bottle of ranch dressing. Let's just say that I knew how to make a salad! It was probably about the equivalent of two Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese, large fries, and a tall glass of ice-cold Dr. Pepper. So I was completely deluding myself, thinking that I was doing the right thing by eating salads when I was probably gaining an extra few pounds a week. I was afraid to get on the scales to make sure I wasn't just running in circles- or bicycling in circles, rather- because I had an eerie feeling that I was still going in the wrong direction and I didn't want to look. Plus, those salads were so damn delicious!

Since that's all I ate during the week, I figured that I could afford a couple of days off from the diet come Saturday and Sunday. Eating to my heart's content two days out of seven didn't seem like such a bad deal. But then I started incorporating Fridays into the mix to get an early start on the weekend, adding another 15,000 to 20,000-calorie day to my binge eating routine. And still I was quite shocked when I finally got on the scales and saw that I had gained ten pounds. I now weighed a whopping 326 pounds and I could see 350 just beyond the horizon. Soon, I wouldn't be able to fit through the door and the paramedics would have to lift me out with a crane! I was already busting out of my 46" jeans and feeling completely miserable. It was the only pair of jeans in my closet that I could wear because I'd stretched them out to the max. The zipper and top button were barely hanging on, and yet I refused to go to the store and buy a brand new pair of jeans that were one or two sizes larger. I'd rather blow my brains out than to accept the fact that I now had a 50-inch waist!

If that weren't enough, I was just one year away from 50- the age where a lot of men give up and let the middle-age spread take over- and I'd heard somewhere that the older a person gets, the harder it is to lose weight. So I pretty much felt like it was hopeless, even though I continued eating my salads and exercising in front of the TV. It didn't help that chunky male celebrities with their high-dollar trainers were losing tons of weight left and right, people like Drew Carey, Zach Galifianakis, Seth Rogan, and even John Goodman- a man in his early 60s! It made me feel even more like a piece of shit. About the only thing I had going for me was my strong work ethic. I was tough as nails and strong as an ox on the jobsite and I always gave my dad/boss a hundred percent. All my coworkers respected me for it. I was the man, whenever I slapped the tool belt on. But once it was off and I was away from that environment, I was just some fat, old loser that everyone laughed at.

You can't really tell by looking at this picture, but I'm pretty sure I'm thinking, "Man, these pants are tight! They hurt like hell!" I'm probably also thinking, "God, I hope that top button doesn't pop off!" This picture was taken on my 49th birthday and as you can see there's a cake in front of me. So, no doubt my very next thought was, "Hurry up and get your singin' over with... and let's slice this thing up so I can eat it!" Another thing you can't tell by this picture is that I'm missing a toe. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when I was thirty years old and it was way out of control for a number of years following- even with the pills I took regularly and the 30 units of insulin I injected into my arm. I'm actually quite surprised that my heart, eyes, and kidneys aren't in worse shape. My disease definitely took a toll on my lower legs and feet, however. And my profession wasn't helping matters much, walking around all day in a dirty, old warehouse full of sheetrock dust, tearing down walls, pulling up old carpet, loading sheetrock debris into trash carts and hauling it off to the dumpster. I ended up developing a huge diabetic ulcer on the bottom of my left foot and it kept getting infected. I started missing a lot of work, often weeks at a time 'til the infection was gone. But the large hole on the bottom of my foot would most likely remain as long as I was working construction.

Things only got worse from there. When I took off my socks and shoes to go to bed one night, I noticed a little hole on the bottom of my left great toe. "Hmmm, that's odd," I thought. I figured that it happened at work somehow, since I was such a hard-ass and was constantly receiving bruises and scratches all over my body. Yet I was wearing shoes all day, steel toe boots at that! So a little hole on the bottom of my big toe that wasn't hurting at all seemed very peculiar. As weeks went by, I noticed the toe getting a little larger and redder, especially when comparing it to the other big toe. And the hole in it was also a little larger. I suddenly had a very eerie feeling and grabbed a needle from my desk drawer. I hesitantly stuck the needle into the hole and was shocked to see it go almost all the way through. There was no bone in there at all, it seemed, which caused my eyes to bug out of my head like Jeff Goldblum's in The Fly. Yet, like a complete idiot, I wasn't alarmed enough to make an appointment to see a doctor the very next day. I honestly thought it would heal on its own. Plus, I really didn't want to take off work for nearly half a day. I had to keep the ol' money machine rolling! Also, my mind was preoccupied with my second novel. I wanted to finish it by Christmas and I didn't have the time to worry about a little hole in my toe. Flash forward to a month later and my poor appendage is swollen to almost twice its normal size- a Fred Flintstone toe! Plus, it had turned white and had a terrible odor. And yet I continued working- up until the point that it was completely unbearable to walk on it. Only then did I have enough sense to drive myself to the emergency room. The diagnosis: an infection so severe that it ate right through the bone, most likely caused by an ingrown toenail. The doctor said that there was probably no saving the toe, since there wasn't much bone left. But I gave it my best shot, six weeks at home in bed, pumping antibiotics into my system intravenously... which turned out to be a complete waste of time. The toe had to go! I felt like such a fool, being wheeled into the operating room to get my toe amputated because I chose not to take care of myself!

Now it seems funny that losing a toe didn't compel me to become healthy and hopefully "diabetes free." The final straw came a couple of years after the big toe nightmare. As I went outside to dump the trash and was heading toward the dumpster, two young, hot, African-American girls came walking past, gave me a quick glance, and started laughing to each other. Of course, it makes perfect sense that something as small as that would bug me more than anything else that has happened to me. Like a lot of creative types, I have an enormous ego and it didn't sit well with me knowing that I was a joke to women... and probably men as well. Something had to be done about my pudgy face and enormous gut. It was do or die! This was about the same time that I got on the bathroom scales and saw that I weighed over 300 pounds- and then subsequently began deluding myself with the big salad diet while binging on the weekend. As I said earlier, I was about to give up, seeing myself inching upward on the scales with seemingly no end in sight. Then one night as I was busy writing on my laptop, I got on the internet and read an article from a certified nutritionist, who wrote, "The only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume in one day- simple as that. And the only way to do that effectively is to measure every single calorie you put into your mouth and every calorie you burn." I'd heard it before, but this time it really made sense to me. So I started making good use of all my measuring cups and spoons and ate just three to four small meals a day- as the nutritionist suggested. I never exceeded 200 calories each meal. For breakfast, I had a cup of Raisin Bran, which added up to 200 calories with a quarter-cup of almond milk. For lunch, I started brown bagging it and it was always ham and cheese sandwiches- one a day. Two slices of toasted white bread (can't stand wheat) came to 130 calories. Two slices of thinly carved ham was an extra 20. Add a piece of low-fat cheese, a knife-full of low-fat butter spread on both slices of bread, and a large tomato slice and you're looking at 200 calories... give or take. When I got home from work, I'd usually heat up a bowl of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, which came to a measly 150 calories. Crumble up five saltine crackers inside the bowl to add a little crunch and you're looking at 220 calories. I went a little over... so sue me!

After dinner, I'd get on the exercise bike, which luckily has a calorie counter on its little screen, and I'd burn off 250 calories after a 45 to 50-minute workout. Then I'd do four sets of military, curls, and bench with the 25-pound dumbbells, eventually graduating to the 35-pounders. Since I have trouble sleeping on an empty stomach, I'd throw in a late-night snack before hopping into bed... usually peanut butter and crackers. That's two saltine crackers loaded with two heaping tablespoons of Jif Peanut Butter, which came to 216 calories. Again, I went over the 200-calorie limit, but it was chump change. I always washed it down with a glass of cold water, until I discovered Diet Cherry Dr Pepper. That stuff has zero calories and yet it tastes better than a 140-calorie can of Coke or regular Dr Pepper... just ask Lil' Sweet. So every day, including Saturday and Sunday, I consumed about 800 calories, burned off 250 calories on the bike and God knows how many at work- well over a thousand, I'd say. That left me at a huge deficit calorie-wise every single day, which probably wasn't safe and I wouldn't recommend it. But that's how determined I was to lose every single pound of fat on my body. I wanted it all off- do or die! In one year, I went from 326 pounds to 170 pounds and had only 16 percent body fat. More importantly, I was no longer insulin or drug dependent. I threw the insulin and pills out with the trash now that my blood sugar was in the 110 to 120 range, which was still 10 or 20 points too high but a far cry from 220- my old norm. It seemed clear to me that if I was to ever get off my low-carb diet, my blood sugar would shoot right back up there again. So I wasn't "diabetes free" as I'd hoped. I would have to keep dieting and exercising my butt off every single day for the rest of my life, and I was prepared to do it. It was a new chapter in my life, my second act... and I welcomed it with open arms!

Here's me now- a lean, mean, fighting machine... or lean, anyway. Again, I wouldn't recommend anyone to go to such extremes as I did to lose the weight. It was a tad dangerous and was pretty much a starvation diet. But I was extremely eager and determined to be thin and attractive to the opposite sex... and to find love for the first time in my life. And I'm living proof that the "burn more calories than you consume" formula really works. If I can do it, anyone can... as they say. My advice to you, though, is to take it slower. If I had done so, maybe I wouldn't have had so much loose skin to deal with after all was said and done- and I wouldn't have had to visit the plastic surgeon (more on that in a later post). Consuming up to 1200 calories a day is recommended by most doctors and dietitians to be the safest way to lose weight. You should lose one to two pounds per week, which will require two years of dedication... if you're like me and you need to lose a lot of weight.

All of my struggles and triumphs mentioned here... my food addiction, obesity, diabetes, foot ulcers, amputation... are covered in my new book, "Heaven Is a Gay Bar," which was just published in May of last year. As the title suggests, the book deals with a hell of a lot more than just my physical and mental problems. It's about my partying days back in the early to mid 90s and how I found unrequited love and a lasting friendship inside a gay bar, of all places. To learn more, just visit my website at http://www.bforemanbooks.com/ or go straight to my Amazon Author Page- http://amazon.com/author/bryanforeman. Next time, I'll talk about how extreme shyness and low self-esteem stunted my growth as a human being and led to my food addiction and obesity. But don't worry, I'll make it a fun read. And in future blog entries, I'll talk more about food in general and list a bunch of quick and easy recipes that are 300 calories or less. I'll also talk more about my book, plus the new one I'm working on. I might even give you sample chapters to read. So I guess that's it for now. See you next time and have a good one, as they say!