Before & After

This is a photo of me taken prior to a Carolina Hurricanes game in March of 2006. Prior to the game, I was tailgating in my favorite location, the N.C. State Fairgrounds parking lot. This, before the greedy bastards—under the pretense of safety issues—began roping it off, stationing a cop there and forcing you to pay $8.00 to park in the lot across the street. But I'll save that rant for another day.

I was cooking Kenney Burgers. Specifically, Kenney SMO Burgers. To do this you need Kenney Sauce (available in Roanoke, VA in Kroger Stores as "Mr. Kenney's Mild Barbecue Sauce"), mustard and onions. You cook the burgers on a grill, dip them in Kenney Sauce, then serve on a Sesame Seed bun with onions and mustard.

I should note that Mr. Bill Kenney, the man who invented Kenney Sauce, still makes appearances in the Roanoke area, selling sauce for charity and sometimes actually preparing Kenney Burgers. He loves this photo and carries a copy around town with him, proudly showing it off and using it to tell folks how they, too, can add Kenney Burgers to their sports tailgating fun. A good noble cause!

But I really need to go out and reshoot this photo because the idea of Mr. Kenney showing it off to my hometown makes me wish I were dead. At least he doesn't have a caption under it, e.g. "Here's former Roanoke radio personality Pat Garrett, who became a big fat 217-pound pig eating Kenney Burgers, showing you how to make them while tailgating before a sporting event!" At least I hope he isn't doing that.

Anyway. The point is, I was then a big fat 217-pound pig. This was partly due to the fact that I'd had ACL reconstruction surgery about seven months earlier which deprived me of doing any real exercise, save the physical therapy, for several months. Then about the time I was able to get active again, the Hurricanes went on a long playoff run and actually won the Stanley Cup.

And, being the superstitious sports fans that we were, the B-Man and I soon established a pre-home-game ritual. We went to Harrison's Bar & Grill around 4. I ordered a Rogue Dead Guy Ale and he got a Diet Coke. I then had a Red Hook IPA. I then ordered a hamburger with fries and he had a shrimp dinner. I then had a Sam Adam's Spring Bock (while they had them, by the end of the playoffs they didn't and I switched Beer #3 to being a Sam Adam's Summer Wheat). We then got in the car, put Chicago XXX (which had just been released) in the CD player and headed for the building, arriving just as "Caroline" was blasting out of the speakers. This was followed by more food and drink inside.

Crux of the point: by the end of the playoff run I was a fat 217-pound pig, even larger than in the above photo that was taken about ten weeks earlier when I was only a fat 212-pound pig. My knees hurt, I had no energy, and generally felt like crap. All I wanted to do was sit on the sofa. Walking up the stairs was a CHORE. It was horrible. Something had to be done about this.

Unfortunately, the impetus for finally doing what I had to do came as a result of the death of one of my oldest friends, Bucky Stover. Bucky had a heart attack and passed away in August, 2006. Bucky had always been a bit on the heavy side, and was from a family with a history of heart problems. There's no way of knowing if his weight was a factor in his early death or if this would have happened anyway. Nonetheless, this incident motivated me to do something about my own situation. As my very devoutly Catholic former neighbor Howard once said, "JESUS CHRIST! WHEN GUYS YOUR AGE START DYING, THAT SCARESTHA FUCKIN' SHITOUTOFYA!"

So I began by walking on the trails where I work. My company sits on a huge parcel of land that includes about 60 acres of woods. Our owner's house is in the middle of the woods and there are small roads and trails all around it and he doesn't mind if we go walking back there. So I began doing about two miles a walk, twice a week. Soon I was up to five miles per walk, three times per week.

I then began supplementing this with trips to the weight room in the company gym (site of the second photo, above) for upper body work. As of the time of this writing (September, 2008) I have been doing this for about two years. I accompanied the efforts by going about 95% vegetarian. I almost NEVER eat beef—the exception being the 3-4 times per year that I make Kenney Burgers or a Kenney Meat Loaf. I occasionally have chicken. I do still eat seafood, but am very picky. Only wild salmon (NEVER the farm raised kind), crab cakes, or other broiled or grilled fish.

I also now exclusively eat salads for lunch at work every day. This is easy to do as we have a salad bar in the cafeteria in the building that houses my office. For breakfast, 1.5 cups of some sort of whole grain cereal, munched from a cup, eaten dry.

And, from February 3 through August 29, 2008, I completely quit drinking. The drinking was getting WAY out of hand so I summoned up all the will power I could and went cold (as opposed to wild) turkey. This gave my system a chance to recover. At the time I started, I weighed about 192 but soon dropped down another fifteen pounds and now weigh about 177. After almost seven months of abstaining I decided it was time to try drinking again but in moderation. So I finally ended the ban and drank a cold Rogue Dead Guy Ale on August 29, 2008. This, because it was exactly 40 years after August 29, 1968 which was commemorated on one hell of a good song on the Chicago Transit Authority LP.

So now, and for the foreseeable future, I exercise four or five times per week. Twice in the weight room and two or three five-mile walks. I generally only drink on weekends and when I do I drink no more than two 25-oz beers (which is way down from the three to five I was drinking before!). I still eat a light, mostly vegetarian diet. My weight has stabilized but I do believe I'm adding muscle while losing more fat (and some day will begin having body fat measurements done to check this).

The point of this entire page was to tell this story and to communicate to you that if I can do this, so can you. But you have to WANT to do it. Getting started is the toughest part. The first month or two can be downright discouraging. You have to change habits and this is not easy to do. You must lose some of your old "bad" ones and begin some new "good" ones. In my case, this required me to avoid many friends and family—folks and situations where I loved to eat and drink—for a while until I knew I could see them and not cave. But I did it and now I look better and feel GREAT.