My Name Is Corey

My name is Corey. I'm a 44 year-old Canadian male who has spent most of the last three decades eating junk. As a result, I'm 275-ish pounds and 6' tall... so that's pretty big. It's not the biggest I've ever seen, but combined with my sedentary lifestyle it's going to kill me.

On my mother's side, there's heart problems. My aunt had a heart attack and my grandfather had several. My mother also had a congenital heart defect which was repaired when she was a young woman, but I'm not sure that's a determinant. On my father's side, there's health problems. My father has had two heart attacks that I know of. Heredity is the primary predictor of heart disease, so the cards are stacked against me heavily. Even if I don't die, I'm looking at diabetes because my sugar/high fructose corn syrup intake is insanely high. That, combined with the amount of fat I eat (mostly through dairy and oil) is likely going to result in me not waking up one morning. Probably not this year, but... that train is coming down the tracks.

It's not just that, though: I don't look good. My clothes barely fit, I walk like a fat guy, and my stomach ruins the lines of most of my jackets and shirts. I find myself winded after even a little bit of exercise and obviously I don't sleep right and my breathing sounds like I'm always out of breath.

Ok, actually I'm lying. This was me about 6 weeks ago.

I decided I didn't want to be dead so soon. I decided I didn't want to look and feel like crap anymore. I decided that if I didn't do something deliberately, then nature would take its course... and I'm not ready for nature to put me in a pine box yet. So I started going to the gym and running. Just running. I get on the tread mill and I go for about half an hour. I can't run that well because I'm not used to it and I'm pretty heavy, so I walk for a while and run for a while. I've been gradually increasing the ratio of running to walking and I intend to keep doing so.

I've also committed to my daughter, Ruth, that I will run a 5k race with her in May. She's not a person with any problems exercising. She's a real jock. Runs, works out, the whole thing. So for her this is going to be no milestone... but for me, it'll be my first race ever. And I've got time to prepare for it.

I'm also about to start a short juice fast and will be recalibrating my diet completely. I'll get into that more later, but it's the next big frontier for me.

In the last six weeks I've gone from a guy who moves maybe 50 meters per day at most and eats crap at any opportunity to becoming a guy who goes to the gym and comes home to juice carrots and oranges as a post-treadmill treat.

I'm still fat. I'm still unhealthy. But this is how we change things, right?