Finally Fit.

I grew up a fairly normal kid, fitness wise, and just slid under the radar of being a fat kid. In grade school, I was usually sporting a pretty nice fat roll with love handles to match, but my mom told me it was just baby fat, assuming I was just husky, and to ignore the kids at school. For the most part, that worked and in middle school, the baby fat finally wore off and thanks to puberty, I started to slim out quite a bit. When I turned 13, I was locked up in a youth camp where I started lifting weights and running long distances. Within a year, I was transformed into a lean machine and loved it. I spent most of my teenage years as a skinny kid, most summers with my shirt off, quite proud of my new physique.

The new metabolism I enjoyed as a teenager ran strong through my 20s and I was able to pretty much eat everything, and still be skinny. Along with my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, we did stay pretty active so I’m sure that played a huge part. We explored Southern California often and were always on some new adventure. Other than college health classes in the gym, I didn’t really work out, although I had weights in the garage and a heavy bag to pound on. I was also riding my bike still, something I’ve done my entire life, both for commuting and for fun. Overall, I cruised around 140–150 pounds most of the time, with a six pack even surfacing here and there. I figured I was in the clear and would just enjoy this thin body with good health for the rest of my life.

Well, life started to change as I got married and became a father, and settled down. We stopped going on the sporadic campouts, and didn’t make time to explore the country outside the city limits like we used to do regularly. We slowly slipped into a sedentary lifestyle that made no allowance for healthy activities. Granted we were busy. With family, work, school, and church all going full speed, there just wasn’t any time left. I started to put on about 5–10 pounds a year, not thinking much of it. I just figured that was a part of life and the changes I was experiencing were normal. I just gave in to the new sedentary life until I could no longer recognize myself.

A quick snapshot of our family at this time before I move forward with my story. I was heavily involved in church ministry as an elder and youth pastor. This landed us at a steady flow of weekly potlucks, BBQs, birthday parties, and other food-centered gatherings. We were so busy most of the time with work, school, and church that we just went to McDonald’s or Little Caesars almost every other day. When we did eat at home, it was usually boxed or canned processed food that we prepared quickly and ate in front of the TV. I didn’t budget enough money for my wife to buy good food so we ate a lot of stuff she could find on sale. Ultimately, we had embraced the fast-food diet and the sedentary lifestyle, and just blended into the standard American church life.

Sometime in 2012, I started having these “episodes” as I came to call them. I would be walking across the room casually when my world would start to spin like a merry-go-round. This would happen at work, at home, and even while driving on the freeway! One time, I was leaving night class in Portland, Oregon about 10 pm when I happened to enter a freeway tunnel that had an S-curve. I felt like I was flying the car upside-down like in a dream, and just closed my eyes in terror. When I came to, my Mustang GT was inches from the wall, and I just barely got control before I wrecked. Only by the grace of God did I survive that night.

The doctors told me I was experiencing acute vertigo, but didn’t know why. After multiple special doctors and different tests done on my heart and my brain and my blood, they came up with no real answers, other than I was extremely out of shape. For some reason, it never dawned on me that I was almost 200 pounds. How did that happen? All my buddies were packing on weight at about the same rate, so it never bothered me too much. I assumed I was just filling out at first, but soon I would not even be seen in the front yard without a shirt on. I decided to make some changes to my diet and try to start exercising.

I always loved running as a teen for stripping away that baby fat, so I convinced my boss at the time to sell me his treadmill. I parked it in the front room right in front of the TV. That way after we ate dinner, I could pound out a brutal 5 mile sweaty run. Eventually the treadmill was moved into an upper room and got used far less. I also got everyone’s bike working well and we started riding as a family when we could. Not much at first, but it was a start of a favorite family pass time that holds strong even today.

In 2013, I started trying to diet by counting my calories. At first I tried to get down to 2000 calories, and eventually down to 1200 calories. This was so difficult because I was still eating processed, sugary, starchy, fast-food, so basically I was starving myself. I was not getting anywhere near the nutrition I needed by eating so little, and I was not losing any weight either. I had to do something more drastic than just eating pickles all day and mountains of veggies. I would either starve myself all day and save my calories for dinner, or else hit my calorie intake by lunch with a couple taco bell tacos or some other cheap empty carbs, and then again starve through dinner until the next day.

In August of that year I weighed in at 192 pounds. I made a sudden decision to join a few friends and started a Beach body workout called T25. This was 25 minutes 5 days a week of mainly cardio in front of the TV every morning before my kids would wake up. I was like a beached seal flopping in a puddle of sweat by the end of each workout. This was when I realized how bad my health really was. My waistline measured in at 40 inches and I looked like an egg. I was determined to shed this fat suit no matter what it took!

True to my word, I lost a good 30 pounds after completing T25, then Insanity, followed directly by p90X. Then I even made my own hybrid program that combined all the hardest exercises from Insanity and p90X, before I moved on to finish p90X 2 and finally p90X 3. I made the best of the programs and gave it all I had, but I could not seem to lose any more weight and just got stuck at about 170 pounds. This was because I was eating a lot of food and most of it was not that great. I was still counting calories, but had learned how to eat lots of high carb low calorie food all day and cheat the system.

I had fallen into the cycle of extreme workouts followed by extreme eating. I was raised in a culture that told me as long as I exercised regularly, I was able to eat what I wanted. In fact, I would need to even eat extra carbs to make up for all the energy I used. I would drink big smoothies after my workout that were loaded with sugar and carbs, with no understanding of how my nutrition worked. I was working out more than ever and not losing a pound! It seemed I was just barely able to maintain my new 170 pound thick physique. And when I skipped a few workouts, I would see the difference in the mirror immediately. This system of weight management was exhausting, and ultimately unpractical. I know now, all I was doing was training my body to burn carbs faster and become even more carb dependent than ever before!

Even though I lost some weight I was probably worse off at this point because I was wrecking my overall health. I was experiencing severe pain throughout my body almost all the time. The worst pain was in my legs and my feet, but everything from my back down really hurt. I went to several doctors and had multiple tests done, only to find out that everything looks fine, other than some nerve damage in my legs from work. There was no reason to have the kind of inflammation and pain that I was having. The doctors started suggesting it was my exercise that was causing it. This was frustrating because I was doing all the exercising in order to feel better but now apparently it was hurting me.

Finally in fall of 2014, I gave up the Beach body workouts, which had become both sporadic and resented, and I committed instead to start riding my bike to work. I realized I still loved to exercise, I just needed to be outside doing things I actually enjoyed. I hated working out in front of the TV all by myself at 5am. I completely revamped my fitness and started going on short runs, and riding that bike like crazy. I was putting in a minimum of 53 miles a week as that was my commute to work, and on most days I rode even more. I soon bought my first real road bike in early 2015, and took things to the next level. This was a dreamy satin back carbon fiber cyclocross bike I have named Auger.

I also revamped my diet in 2015 by completely giving up fast-food once and for all. I went on a kind of local organic foodie craze that may have been wildly uneducated but it was a step in the right direction. No more big brands from the grocery store, and no more processed foods at home either. My mother and law and my wife began preparing amazingly delicious healthy meals filled with nutrients sourced locally and organically whenever possible. We completely gave up Diet Coke and Pepsi Max and started drinking Kombucha and tea. My diet was still a sad 50–75% carbs at this point, since almost everything I ate at work and on my own was carbs, but I had no concept of what carbs were. I just stuck to local organic foods, made with ingredients I could pronounce, and I lost tons of weight. I tried to shop on the outside of the grocery store and stay away from packaged foods, but like I say I was still eating PB&Js, bags of granola, and trail mix, it was just all organic food.

Within about six months of eating like this, riding my bike every day, and hiking more and more as a family, I lost almost all the weight. I was down to a slim 140 by the summer of 2015 and I looked great for the first time in a long time. I am still amazed that I lost all this weight while still eating a high carb diet, albeit organic. At the exact same time, my wife lost all of her extra weight too and was down to an amazing thin body as well. The physical transformation we both experienced in the span of a few months was nothing short of amazing.

I attribute this big leap forward in my fitness journey ultimately to two things: first was developing a new philosophy of food. What I mean is my wife and I went to the core of what food was for and found a healthy relationship with food was necessary. We realized food was needed for two things: sustenance and celebration. We need food to sustain our nutrition levels to be healthy and thrive, so it is important to achieve that first. We also enjoy food for milestones and celebrations like cake on birthdays, and pumpkin pie on thanksgiving. So we decided to cut out all the other food that didn’t fit into those two categories and the weight melted off in no time. This is what really did it for me and for my wife, it was a new philosophy of food.

The second big shift responsible for this radical thinning out was transitioning from a majority sedentary lifestyle to an extremely active lifestyle, not just individually but as a family. We started hiking every weekend together, building strength and endurance, but also building a love for the outdoors. Our family found so much peace and refreshment in the forests, beaches, and rivers, that we just never stopped exploring still to this day, and our lives were changed forever.

Unfortunately, even though I was thin and happy, I was still extremely weak, had no real core strength, and overall not much muscle. As a result, I was getting minor injuries left and right, from minor sprains, to severe fractures. My pain level was constantly through the roof and I was having a hard time managing it. I had lost the weight, and I appeared to be in nearly perfect physical shape, but there was something that was still terribly wrong with me and it was rapidly getting worse. I continued to see specialists of different kinds but there were still no answers. My primary care doctor had me taking NSAIDs for the pain and inflammation, but they just made my stomach sick, and gave me fatigue, so I only used them on occasion when pain was extreme. I had signed up with the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program in March of 2015, and switched from the prescription pills to vaporizing cannabis as a successful treatment for the majority of my pain.

I continued like this until July of 2015 when I had my bicycle accident, you can read that story on my page, called Broken. Basically, this landed me on my back for a few months with three pelvic fractures, and took a few rounds of physical therapy to get me back on my feet. I was not able to exercise for a few months, so I had to really watch what I ate, but I made it through this injury without gaining any of my weight back. I did whatever I had to do to stay moving and only ate a minimum amount of food. By that winter, I was commuting to work again, when I wasn’t recovering from a new injury. It seemed for the next year, I constantly had one injury after another. It was like my entire body was just giving up on me and I began to wonder if I would ever truly recover.

Finally in November of 2016, my doctor found an indication on a blood test that gave her an understanding as to what was going on. My primary care sent me to see a rheumatologist to see if I had Ankylosing Spondylitis. She gave me a brochure to look over, but told me she thought this was very likely what was causing my pain. It was surreal to read other stories from people I never met explaining this crazy discomfort exactly as I was experiencing. I think I knew, or at least had a strong gut feeling, that I did have this disease called AS.

After months of waiting to get into a rheumatologist, I eventually got an appointment for March of 2016. I went to see the specialist and he told me I fit the description perfectly for the disease in question. I remember how sorry it was when he tried to break the news to me that he thought I had this terrible disease. He was practically a kid no older than 30, he sounded like a textbook when he spoke. He started suggesting multiple treatments: ranging from bi-weekly trigger point injections, prescribing strong narcotics like oxy for breakthrough pain, and even a “meth-like drug” (his words) to get me going when I had that severe fatigue. I declined all of it and only agreed to keep taking the NSAIDs to try to reduce inflammation, because he told me if I didn’t I would almost definitely make the condition worse.

At that point my primary care doctor only made me take the NSAIDs on a when needed basis, which meant I wasn’t taking them much at all since I didn’t like them. So I promised the rheumatologist I would start taking the medication regularly, even upping the dosage for six months to see if it would reduce the pain I was experiencing. I did not want to do this, but it was kind of a compromise to make peace with the doctor. There was no way I was going to start taking a bunch of other drugs even if the pain was severe. I was a recovering addict and could not risk my livelihood taking on an oxy prescription. He told me to limit my exercise, set an appointment to be seen in six months, and scheduled an MRI and some more X-Rays.

I am never one to be told what to do, so in June of that year, I did something crazy and started training for a local 10K. Starting off, the running was brutally difficult, but within a few runs I fell back in love with the old sport. There is nothing better than the feeling you get during a run when you are just clear-minded, relaxed and tingly all over; a.k.a. runners high! The best part is this was a sport we were able to train and participate in as a whole family. We hit the track a few times during the week after work and school for 3–5 mile runs, then hit the local trails for a longer run or even steady hike during the weekends.

By the time I went back to see the doctor in six months in September of 2017, I had completed two 10Ks and even earned a bronze medal in a 12K for my age division. I was pretty excited when I went into the doctor's office because I was sure he would see all my progress and be as thrilled as I was. Instead the visit went far differently, and he was not impressed with my running. In fact, he went on and on about how bad running is for me and how it was probably the cause of part of my pain and could even be making my condition accelerate at a faster pace by increasing inflammation to the joints. I wanted to smack him right there but I kept my cool.

My pain had been getting worse and worse since at least 2013, gotten a lot worse after the bike accident, but not at all worse from the running. I explained how the running was one of the few times my lower back didn’t hurt, which was the worst of my pain. I had been reading a lot about how to train for running and not get injured and how we were actually Born to Run! I had become convinced by then and still am, that running when done at low heart rates (180 minus your age) is excellent for everybody. In the same books about ancestral running, I was learning about low carb eating and how this was helping people with problems like mine. I read how people with various inflammatory diseases were finding complete recovery through ancestral eating, essentially mimicking a hunter/gatherer diet. My young “Doogie Howser MD” told me without flinching that “there is no amount of exercise or diet that is going to help with your condition.” He only went back through the drugs he wanted me to start taking, even though the side-effects were often worse than my current symptoms.

With that, I stood up and told him no thank you and put on my coat. He looked at me confused, checked his clipboard then asked “what do you mean, no thank you?” I told him I would not take any of the drugs he recommended, nor was I going to take the NSAIDs anymore. I was instead only going to use medical cannabis concentrate for the pain, and experiment with a low carb diet to reduce inflammation. I reminded him that my X-rays and my MRI came back with no evidence of progressive injury and really he was just going off a guess at this point. He smiled at me like I was a stupid idiot and walked out of the room.

I immediately stopped taking all the pills and began my journey into a low-carb life. This has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding transitions of my entire fitness journey. It has literally taken me a year and a half to finally get a firm understanding of how my body and food work together. I think I will write an entirely separate article devoted to my experiences eating Ketogenic, because it has been amazing. While there are many nutritional coaches out there in the low-carb eating world, I have learned the most from Mark Sisson and his book Primal Blueprint and Primal Endurance. I also recommend his new book if you need a traditional diet book, called The Keto Reset Diet, although I don’t think of this as a diet, it is a new way of life.

Today as I write this in March of 2019, I am in the best shape of my life. Not only am I fit and strong, but I am healthy and no longer getting injured. My pain levels overall have diminished substantially. The fatigue has been resolved in only a couple days here and there. The inflammation I was experiencing has become a thing of the past. I am still in pain at the end of a long work day on the printing press, but it has really narrowed down to just my lower right back where I fractured my pelvic in 2015. I believe this is from my injury, not AS and it is for the most part manageable. Most of all the other crazy leg and foot pain I had is gone and the dizzy spells are long gone. I am healthy, I feel great and the best part of all is that I don’t need to take pills.

Before I close, I want to give a special thanks to my wife and boys for fully supporting me in my nutrition goals and joining me in all my wild fitness adventures. Only with the full support and love of my family would I have come so far in this epic journey through life.

© 2018-2023. Christopher Joy. All Rights Reserved.