I was having the dream again. You see, for as long as I can remember I have had a recurring dream. I am outside, wearing shorts and a shirt, and I am running. Not only am I running, but I am doing so easily, and really enjoying the view while the scenery flies by. As always I awake to stark reality when I look down at my body and realize that running is in fact a dream. I roll over, see it is only two am and I get up to go to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror I see a man who just turned forty-one and has spent the last twenty of those abusing his body, this man has a huge, fat-layered, hanging over the belt line stomach. There is no way that he would ever be running. I am disgusted with this man in the mirror, how could he have let this happen? What can I do about this man?
Along with everyone else I have spent hundreds of dollars trying to lose weight, and nothing has really worked. Over the last two years I had been able to lose about fifty pounds, but I had not lost any lately. I might even have put a few pounds back on. I do know that this night when I had the dream I was morbidly obese, and realistically had only about another decade of life ahead of me. This was the day I turned forty-one, Dec 5 2005.
My mother and her husband John came down to visit us for Christmas 2005, and we had a good time. But that Christmas is very important in my life as that was the day I found out that my very good friends, Dawn and Steve, were losing weight with Weight Watcher’s Online. At the time Steve had lost about thirty pounds and Dawn was down almost forty. They were successfully losing, without completely cutting out their favorite foods. That day, as I ate my candy and drank my beer, I started to think. I thought about it for just over two weeks, and then on Jan 9, I took the plunge and joined the Weight Watcher’s Online program. I weighed myself on a good balance scale at work, and found I weighed in at 380 pounds.
