vituperation

First off — a few of you have asked about the purpose of the chicks. They’re for eggs, not food.

Unless.

If there’s a reason the flock needs to be culled (personality issues, noise issues, etc), there’s a chance that I’ll try the whole “kill it and eat it” thing. I don’t really want to do that right now (we’ve talked about raising chickens for food at a later time), but it seems a little hypocritical to be willing to eat meat but not be able to do the deed yourself.

Anyway, they’re first and foremost for eggs, which should be here in the late summer or early fall.

As most of you already know, until I was 33 I was pretty fat. Well, “pretty” is an understatement. I was very fat. In 2000, I decided to take care of the problem while I was still young, and over about an 18-month period, got down to a normal size.

I ate less, I worked out, and got really healthy. I reversed type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and a number of other minor things. I became very active, hiking and biking and kayaking regularly, and working out every day.

A few times over the last four years, I hurt my back (lower back) lifting weights improperly. I didn’t think much of it until about seven months ago, when I did it again. About a week after the weightlifting injury, I re-injured my back trying to carry a whole toilet (tank, too) through a doorway. My back never recovered from that. It came back most of the way, but it was still pretty easy to make it sore. I haven’t been able to lift weights since then.

As you know, we’ve been renovating a house in Smallville. What you don’t know (or didn’t until yesterday when I mentioned it) is that over that time, my back’s been getting worse and worse. For the last few weeks, the pain has been constant. Today I finally went to a spine doctor to see if there was anything he could do. Writing about it prompted me to make the call, and I was able to get squeezed in today.

The first thing he told me when he walked through the door was that he’d looked at my x-rays and thought he was looking at the spine of a 65-year-old man, because there was so much degeneration.

I’m two months shy of forty.

The long and short of it is this: being fat for most of my life did some irreparable damage to my skeleton, which I’ve known from previous doctor visits for shoulder, knee, and ankle problems. Now my spine is added to the list of things that are crapping out early.

I don’t like to lecture people, and I try to stay out of discussions about losing weight these days because I believe people are adults and free to make their own decisions. That said, as one who’s going through the long-term repercussions of carrying around extra weight, let me tell you that constant back (and joint) pain sucks. In a big way.

And it was completely preventable.

There’s an upside. With physical therapy, and a short regimen of OTC NSAIDS for the immediate inflammation, he thinks I can get rid of the pain and even resume lifting weights within a few months.

Anyway, it’s food for thought if anyone’s looking for one more reason to commit to getting healthier.