Mitch bit into another slice of pizza and took a guess at who would win the BBQ Pitmasters episode he was watching. The judges awarded the grand prize to a team from Georgia. Mitch muttered, “I knew it.” He hoisted himself off of the sofa and headed toward the kitchen for another beer. He was thirty-five years old, nearly 300 pounds with a heart condition, single, friendless, and hostile toward everything around him. When he wasn’t working a futile technical writing job, he got drunk and mean in bars. He watched TV at home and gorged himself at all-you-can-eat buffets. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Mitch figured he might as well kill himself as soon as possible. He sure didn’t want to die a slow and painful death due to health problems. The trick was deciding how to do it. He didn’t own a gun, he hated sharp objects, and the house he was renting didn’t have a garage, so carbon monoxide poisoning was out of the question. Then a novel idea sprang into his head. He would run himself to death. He lived right at the edge of town. His bad heart would surely fail him in the heat of the day as he lugged his overweight body as far into the countryside as his legs would carry him. No one would be there to help him once he collapsed. There would be some pain at first, but then he would just drift away and never have to look at himself in the mirror again.
He changed into a set of workout clothes, put on a pair of running shoes he hadn’t worn in a few years, and checked the house to make sure everything was turned off. Then he stepped outside and gazed up at the cloudless sky. The sun shone down from a menacing angle, just as he had hoped. The thermometer by the front door read 93°. Mitch jogged across the front yard and down the sidewalk until he reached the edge of town, where the sidewalk gave way to dirt and mowed grass that paralleled a narrow two-lane road.
He staggered along for around a half a mile, then grew dizzy. Alcohol sweat burned his eyes. He quickened his pace and managed an awkward sprint for another fifty yards until his heart felt like it was ready to explode. A lone tree stood on the side of the road yet another fifty yards ahead. The perfect place to die, he thought. He staggered the remaining distance and plopped down in the shade under the broadest branches. He was nowhere close to death, just another exhausted jogger with blood pounding in his ears.
Mitch lumbered home in defeat and collapsed on his bed. He didn’t wake up until noon the next day. He rose to go to the bathroom and noticed that he felt better than he had in years. Although his entire body ached, the run had obviously done him some good. He took a shower, put on some casual clothes, to include his running shoes, and walked to a nearby diner for lunch. To test his willpower, he had a cheeseburger, milkshake, and fries–a mere snack compared to what he usually ate.
He smiled as he left the diner. It was the first time in a while he wasn’t disappointed in himself. The neighborhood looked different, like a more intense alternate reality. The trees seemed more detailed and colorful, and the warm breeze made his skin tingle. He could smell the soil, and his shirt, and he heard a sparrow chirping close by, flitting from one branch to the next.
From this point on, Mitch prioritized healthy living. He ran every morning unless his body told him otherwise, in which case he simply substituted his run with a short or long walk, depending on how he felt. In the first few weeks of his new regimen, he worked his way up from running a block a day to a mile a day, slowly and cautiously, but with determination. Sometimes, he would rest the entire day when he knew he needed recovery time. He stopped sleeping on the sofa with the TV running, too, and he made sure to get at least six hours of sleep a night.
Patience was the key. He monitored himself carefully, knowing that exercise was going to be part of his daily routine. If anything was sore or not responding well, he pushed himself only as hard as he thought he could. He didn’t want to sustain injuries that might set back his workout schedule. He bought a weight set and started lifting. The weights were a clear measurable he could compare to his high school weightlifting days, and he charted his progress in a notebook during every workout.
Mitch had always suspected that his diet was killing him in slow degrees. Still, he didn’t realize how much damage he had done to himself until he studied some Internet research. He found out that refined sugar is addictive, full of empty calories, toxic to the liver, and damaging to the nervous, digestive, and immune systems. This went a long way in explaining why years of drinking sugary beverages and booze had made Mitch increasingly ill.
Moreover, the white flour he loved so much in his food was killing him just as quickly. Its ingestion led to gluttony, obesity, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, and allergies. pH imbalances from the white flour resulted in calcium depletion. Mitch might have wound up with cancer and coronary disease had he not started running and eating better. His obsession with dairy products wasn’t doing his body any favors either. Since most milk is treated with hormones, preservatives, and antibiotics, it causes inflammations in the body that trigger allergies and other symptoms that might lead to disease.
Mitch knew he would never be able to completely remove unhealthy food and drinks from his diet, nor did he want to. Instead, he practiced harm reduction per the advice of a fellow office worker who moonlighted as an addiction counselor. Early on, partial or incremental changes seemed sensible and necessary. Mitch stopped drinking hard liquor completely, but he allowed himself three beers a day, down from the two six packs he normally drank. He transitioned from soft drinks to additive-free fruit and vegetable smoothies and juices, and he stopped eating pizza and sugary breakfast cereals altogether.
This didn’t turn out to be as much of a problem as he thought it would. He just ate more fish, salads, fruits, and low-fat proteins, which he wound up enjoying more than pizza and cereal anyway. He also introduced vitamin, mineral, and herb supplements into his daily diet, to include turmeric, magnesium, collagen, and boron. As his body and mind changed, so did some of his most entrenched habits. Most notably, he stopped hanging out in bars. He finally realized that he had done so up to that point mainly to get drunk, not to socialize. As a result, his expenses remained about the same, but his spending now produced useful, not damaging, outcomes.
In time, his pale, blotchy, prematurely aging skin grew more supple and lustrous. His circulatory and digestive systems, which had been giving him trouble for years, began functioning normally again. His hands and feet stopped feeling numb, and his joints didn’t ache so much in the morning. He lost 30 pounds in his first month on the new regimen. In the span of six months, he lost 70 pounds and was running a few miles almost every day. He also bench pressed 300 pounds, which was better than he had ever managed in high school. He didn’t get sick once during that time because his immune system was now much stronger.
And once in a while when the weather was good, Mitch would pack a lunch and stroll out to the tree he had tried to die under. He would sit down beneath the shadiest branches, think about everything he’d put himself through, and wonder why he was still alive.
