Starting a new fitness blog - an introduction and brief history
- agreednospam
- Jun 6, 2016
- 8 min read
What I'm doing
My name is Jeff Baker. I used to go through life as a disabled, depressed, badly overweight and chronically injured pain care patient who couldn't get surgery for eight long years. I was injured at 19 and suffered four herniated discs, as well as signs of worsening lumbar stenosis even then. I spent 19 to 26 in pain care, unable to get surgery (my insurance had dropped me shortly after my injury, in the days before the ACA).
During that time I was given pain medications and related meds in increasingly high doses and to sum a lot of time up briefly I was a real mess by the time I finally found a surgeon who would work on me. I had got up to about 400lbs and was depressed and nearly hopeless. Thankfully, the surgery worked and I could for the first time in nearly a decade think about something other than how bad I was hurting. Once you can see something better for yourself, it gets easier to take the steps to make it happen.
I got surgery in 2013 and since then I've moved from Arkansas to Colorado to get off pain medication and work hard to get away from pain. I came out here to live a life dedicated to fitness, family, and music. (I have a music-related blog at geareview.wordpress.com, where I write about happenings in guitar and recording software - check it out if you'd like!). Here's a pic of me doing something I love in early May: visiting a local park with my son, who at four needs a healthy, capable dad to keep up with him and help him be the best hero he can be! Doing this for him as much as for me :)
I'm starting this blog to talk about what I'm doing, what I'm eating, how I'm working out, and in general what I'm going through. I might also review some supplements I use (and if that turns out to be popular, other ones that I'll try!).
I'm currently losing weight by a combination of plenty of exercise in the gym and good choices at the grocery store. I prefer weightlifting, and am following my own program of full-body, progressive overload based workouts, emphasizing dumbbells more than barbells and including progressively more difficult body weight exercises as well.
With regard to diet I keep things simple, no fads or BS products. I eat good, whole foods and avoid processed foods. My wife and I prepare our meals daily rather than doing a general meal prep, and we try to eat a variety of good, lean protein and low-fat meals (not NO-fat, very important to have some dietary fats in my opinion). I am not currently eating a vegan or vegetarian diet, but I am interested in learning more about plant-based protein options that provide good amino acid profiles for weightlifting. Leave a comment if you have any recommended reading there, please!
As of today I've lost 132lbs, with under 40lbs to go to my provisional goal.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I'd like to share my story, in the hopes that it might help others who feel they just cannot work out. I have been physically 100% disabled in my life due to my back and my weight (and make no mistake, they definitely went together). I'm working my way toward wellness right now, but I've made some great strides and I invite anyone who is even thinking a little about fitness to JOIN me in the pursuit of it. Whoever you are, you can do tremendous things if you believe in yourself and commit to making things change for your life.
My Story in Pictures
Of course it starts earlier, when I got hurt in college, but I want to focus on the period leading to the last major injury that finally left no alternatives but to get surgery. So here's a year before it happened... Me in 2011 - I remember how bad my back hurt traveling to Nashville for Summer NAMM 2011. This is in the lobby of the hotel after the (short, only 45-minute) plane trip
It got worse from there, though. Me in 2012, hurting a lot after a plane trip to Colorado. My wife was really worried about me on this trip, and I had trouble moving around the airport, even with the assistive walkways. Yeah. I'm leaning hard on the gear buggy thing in front of me because at this point, outside the airport, I can barely keep standing up.
I finally did get my back surgery. It took way too long to get it, as I had no health insurance when I was injured and to make matters worse it ended my career at the time. There were not a lot of options for me in Arkansas at that point but to wait. From November of 2012 until June of 2013, I waited. I left the care of my prior doctor and tried to get off the pain pills I had been on, but it was so terribly hard to do when I was in so much pain.
I suffered a worsening of the injury (yeah, it got even worse!) in March 2013, I ended up moving in with my dad for a few months to wait nearer to a hospital than our remote little southern Arkansas town had been. A few months later I finally got my surgery.
I wasn't out of the woods yet, and I suffered one more reinjury in Arkansas which thankfully resolved with rest and anti-inflammatories without needing more surgery. With support from my doctors and still on a lot of pain meds, I went back to live with my wife and started the process of tapering off of the pain medication and seeing if I could get my right leg to stand again. This was in mid to late 2013.
It was a really hard time in my life and even writing about it here is difficult for me, to be honest. Tapering off pain medication is really difficult but very worth it when you're ready to be done with it. I hope someone finds some comfort in the knowledge that even as screwed up as my body was, I've been able to turn things around dramatically. Gotta know how bad the low was to appreciate how well things are going now. And things are going great now - Colorado has been a fantastic new start for my wife and I. We moved here in June of 2014. Here's a pic of me on the way, with my boy - already growing up too fast as you can probably tell, haha. I was at my heaviest here.
When I came to Colorado, things started to change. I started going up and down the stairs as often as I could, on just my left leg at first because my right quad and calf had atrophied from nerve damage as I waited for surgery. I would lower myself down on my right when I descended the stairs, holding onto the rail for dear life as my heavily weakened muscles strained to control the descent down just one 6" stair. But it got a little easier over time, and eventually I was going up on my right leg, too.
All the stairs started getting some weight loss results! I was really enjoying that, and wanted to make the most of it, so I decided I needed to start working out. I'd done some dumbbell complexes in college, and I started again, barely able to curl the 30lb weight three times the first time I worked out - on my strong arm! Even that accelerated my weight loss, though, and I was getting pretty hooked to the feeling of working out. It really, really helped my pain!
At that point, however, I still wasn't in a gym. I waited for a lot of reasons, but I wish I had gone to a gym right away. My results really started taking off when I signed up at Fitness 19 in Colorado Springs, a small box gym with a great mix of powerlifting and crossfit-style equipment and affordable childcare with quality kiddo-watchers. Hey, that matters! If you need any proof that you ought to be in a gym, take a look at how different I looked from the above photo, taken in March of 2014 before I joined a gym, to the following photo just four months into beginning to lift weights. At this time, I had barely progressed past messing around on machines, but I was starting to see some real results thanks to all that machine work.
From that picture to now, June of 2016, I've more or less eliminated machines from my main training. I still do some auxillary stuff on the cable machine, and there are a couple row machine variants I quite like still! Hammer Strength has a great isolateral high-row, both a stack-based and plate-loaded variety (and they're both good). And Life Fitness even has a seated row with chest pad support that I think is fantastic, great for working upper-to-mid back and arms without hitting your low back in particular so hard. I don't use a single press machine, though, as I have found them to tweak my joints. I'm a pretty big-framed guy, so it can be hard to adjust some machines to a comfortable range of motion.
These pics were taken in December of 2015. Think I made some pretty good progress in 2015!
I work with dumbbells, when I'm able to train as I prefer to. I actually haven't picked up a free weight heavier than 25lbs since March 11, when I was in a parked Chevrolet Silverado extended-cab at a stop light and was rear-ended with such force it bent the truck bed in the middle and ruined the left and right side of the frame in the back! Needless to say, my lower back and body in general did not need that kind of stress! I've been doing rehabilitative exercise with the great folks at a local physical therapy clinic, and working hard in the gym with resistance bands, the TRX suspension trainer, and some other specialized equipment to rehabilitate a separated AC joint and a lot of lower back inflammation and muscle spasms I got in that wreck. Happy to report it's going well and I expect to "graduate" physical therapy soon!
Today I weighed 268lbs, putting me at -132lbs total and leaving me only 38lbs until my first goal weight! To me, that says "2016 is going to be your year, Jeff!" Also, note the lack of a walker in the background. Back in storage until I need it again, if I do - no worries, I know now that even when things seem rough, I can come back from injury and be the best dad, the best husband, the best man I can be. Just gotta get my butt into the gym and work myself better.
Find your way to fitness too!
I'll try to offer whatever tips and advice I can on this blog. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a personal trainer, I am not a nutritionist, and I am not a physical therapist. I cannot offer you anything those folks offer exclusively. But I will share my experiences, my thoughts, and things that help me - what works for me, and isn't just BS as far as I can reckon - and hopefully someone else will find some of that useful.
Thanks for reading! Let's make 2016 our year!
Comentários