The Vig

A friend of mine told me before Christmas that I was the only person he knew who had a good 2009.  Looking back, I think he’s right.  The funny thing about truly life-changing events is I don’t think you know they’re that momentous until you’ve gone through them and look back.  At least that’s how I feel.  The Summer of Bean has NOTHING on what actually happened.

I’ve known for years that I’m addicted to food.  I couldn’t stop eating.  Even after this happened, I stopped off at Muchas Gracias afterward for a burrito.  I was talking to a friend of mine about it a couple of weeks ago.  I mentioned it takes a serious time commitment to take in the calories required to get to 370 pounds and maintain it.  Forget about the money.  Forget about the food.  It takes time.  Daily.  I wondered for years why I never left the house.  Now I know.  It was because I was eating.

A friend emailed me out of the blue in July and told me about this program he’s been visiting which deals with food addiction.  I stopped in for the first time in July and haven’t stopped going since.  I’m down about 75 pounds.  A day at a time, as they say.  Now you know why you haven’t seen me at Whiffies or celebrating Tomato Pie Day for a while.

A month or so later I was chatting with my housemate’s girlfriend.  She’s in the mortgage business.  We were discussing the $8,000 first-time-homebuyer’s tax-credit.  I was starting to get the itch to leave Vancouver and get back south of the river.  That commute over the Interstate Bridge, even though it was only a half-hour or so, was becoming a real downer for me.  I felt isolated up there.  Friends and family were all a twenty-minute drive away at least.

I’d been looking into renting a place in Portland or maybe down in Lake Oswego.  The more I looked though, the more I thought it made no sense to keep renting.  Not at those prices.  So I asked my friend what it might take to buy a place.

To my surprise, she came back the next day with a pre-qualification letter.  The guy who, until recently, could never pay his bills on time was suddenly able to buy a freaking house!  Or, at the time, condo.

I immediately called another friend of mine who I’d known for years and asked him to help me out.

Sidebar: This is a story about friends, old and new.  The old ones, some of whom I hadn’t seen in months or even years, were happy to help however they could.  The new ones really don’t know me from Adam, but are equally willing to give.  It is, as the kids say, amazing.  End Sidebar.

After several weeks of looking we finally found my new home in Powellhurst-Gilbert.  It wasn’t my first choice, but now that I’m here, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.  My commute to work isn’t any shorter than the one was to Vancouver, but my life commute, to coin a phrase, is much shorter.  Friends who were a half-hour or more away, are now just up the street.  Family is a lot closer too and boy do they like that.  It’s growing on me.

So that’s my last six months or so.  Crazy, right?  If you would have told me at the beginning of July that I’d be closing out December down 70 pounds and in a house of my own, I would have called you crazy.  But here I am.  I really feel like I’ve won the lottery.  That’s what I tell my friends.  All of them.

No doubt you’ve seen those shows on TV or read stories of people who win some huge sum of money only to throw it all away.  Their stories are nearly all the same.  The issue is people never take time to figure out who they are with their newfound wealth.  Their lives have changed suddenly in ways that they can’t handle.  You see it with folks who’ve lost weight too.  Despite what the mirror or their friends might say, they still see themselves as that fat person.  They never take time to adjust.  And before they know it, they’re right back in their same old habits.

So that’s what I’m working on: figuring out who this new Bean is.  And thats what I hope to be writing about from here on.  Things that I’m doing to create this new life.  Posts may or may not be frequent.  I haven’t figured that out.  I do know they’re going to be focused on the positive.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage.  Let’s make 2010 one for the scrap book.