Editor's Note: This and subsequent articles are a first-person account of one man's attempt to get back to a healthier lifestyle after retiring from the U.S. Army in 2013.
Goals.
"What are yours?" asked Kelley Frans, the lead health educator at Fort Knox's Army Wellness Center.
I stared blankly at her for what seemed like more time than I should have devoted to it.
"Uh, well, that's a good question," I replied. I hadn't thought about my goals before walking in the door. Now I was scrambling to come up with one.
Isn't that typical of at least some of us, though? It certainly is for me. I don't waste time actively thinking about what my goals are for eating and exercising. Eating is about "go's." I go for that bread sitting on the counter. I go to the cupboard and pull out some chips and then to the fridge for some salsa.
On the other hand, exercise is not. "Let's go to the gym." "Maybe I'll go tomorrow." -- "How about going for a walk?" "Naw. I have that thing I gotta do--" (whatever that is).
Yep, for me it's crystal clear where my priorities are. All bite, no walk.
For Frans, it's about goals; get to the point of where you need to get, and then get going toward it.
"Well, I suppose I want to lose weight for one," I said.
"The most effective way to lose the excess body fat is going to be a combination of the exercise and healthy dietary habits," said Frans.
She explained that the goal for getting healthier is to change body composition from more fat and less muscle to less fat and more muscle. The age-old diet and exercise for the most part will accomplish this.
"Sometimes you'll see a maintenance in fat-free mass. It really depends on how much work you're putting into that change," Frans said. "If you start to implement some behaviors around diet -- maybe you're cutting out a little sugar, you're cutting back on your calories -- or if you start to exercise when you're not doing anything at the moment, you will start to see some changes over the course of the next three months.
"That's why we ask for regular follow-ups, in the BOD POD especially."
She said those follow-ups help them tailor and tweak your progress for the best results, and the appointments serve as an incentive to help keep clients motivated during the lulls. The key to the greatest success though, according to Frans, is exercise.
"Building muscle mass will really help you make that biggest change quickly," she said.
My head sagged.
Frans left me frustrated as I sat across the desk from her, not just because she had calculated my dietary goals based on a sedentary lifestyle. Yeah, that hurt. Why wouldn't it? Just the idea of a health expert setting my goals with no exercise figured in torched my manly ego. I had prided myself for years on being in tip-top shape. I had won awards for it.
No, it was more than that. It was the realization of why I had become inactive. I have developed problematic health issues over the years that have led to that sedentary lifestyle.
My problems realistically started about halfway into my first tour of duty to Iraq in 2005, when I woke up one morning in a cold sweat, feeling deathly sick and writhing in pain. Later that morning, I discovered my appendix had only a few hours of life left in it.
Four days after they medevac'd me to the International Zone for surgery to remove it, I found myself back in familiar territory -- flat on my back in my hooch for about a week, trying to recover.
During the next few months, I allowed myself to believe I needed to avoid physical exercise to keep my stitches from rupturing. Apparently my need to reduce activity didn't apply to my eating habits, however, and I found myself ballooning up in weight to the point that my uniforms weren't fitting so well anymore.
A year after I returned from Iraq, I found out I had dangerously high cholesterol and my lower back starting going out on me. I didn't know it at the time, but I was suffering from increased disk degeneration and arthritis all up and down my spine, which wouldn't manifest itself fully until about halfway into my second tour to Iraq.
During that second time in Iraq, a renewed desire to get back to my hard-charging glory years ended in non-stop excruciating pain pulsating from my lower back that left me nearly crippled. I lost weight because it was difficult even to walk to the dining facility. Physical therapy did no good.
It took over a month of failed pain management and a trip to the combat Army hospital down the road to discover the problem: I had a bulging disk that was shoving my spinal cord against the wall of my spine. Two days later, I found myself on a military transport aircraft being medevac'd back to the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany--
As I sat across from Frans at the Army Wellness Center, I pondered whether to throw caution to the wind and get back into the gym. The problem with lower back pain is that it sits at the very core of virtually every exercise known to man. At least the ones I needed to get me into shape.
I'm still pondering whether I want to risk my back with exercise, but the best part of all of this is, I don't have to. Because Frans worked up my dietary numbers based on no exercise, I can just focus on the diet itself if necessary.
And the diet is something my wife and I are already working on. Well, not a diet per se. More of a lifestyle change to our eating habits.
Gail and I have decided to go back to a change that worked for us four years ago when we lived in Nebraska. It's simple to explain, though hard to implement: Eat natural foods in moderation. The secret behind natural foods is the list of ingredients. If we can pronounce them or understand what they are, we avoid them. That's hard to do today.
I'm also planning to eventually get with the Army Wellness Center's Brent Newell, a health educator, to discuss fasting and other health-improvement techniques. No hippie hype; just simple, science-based techniques proven to work.
I'm determined. This fat man will get skinny again. And it starts here, now, with setting my goals and keeping them.
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