Chicken of Tomorrow —

When I was around 10 years old, I remember going to my Uncle Ray’s house for the weekend. Uncle Ray worked in an auto-body shop, but in his free time he was a weightlifter and an avid “coach” to each of his sons who wrestled, two of whom went to State Championships in the 1980s.

Staying at Uncle Ray’s was always a little awkward because the only other people there beside him and my aunt were two of their kids who were in their late teens/early 20s and weren’t often home. I spent most of my time in the basement watching movies from a papasan chair because they had cable and our house didn’t. I vividly remember watching Three O’Clock High, nestled snugly in the overstuffed baseball glove and loving every minute of that gratifying underdog story about standing up to bullies.

Some 25 years later, I don’t remember what triggered him, but at one point during that weekend, I pissed off Uncle Ray. It may have been something minor, it may have been major, I don’t recall. I only recall his blazing face, his throbbing veins, and his ear-piercing screams. My Dad was a screamer as well, but he paled in comparison to Uncle Ray’s fury. I felt both afraid and angry. What a jerk!

Three days later, Uncle Ray had a heart attack and died.

This wasn’t the first family death I had been through. Two years previously, my Grandpa Ray died of colon cancer. But at the age of eight, I had only known of him as fairly sick man. Over the many times I spent the night at Grandma Kate’s, I mostly remember Grandpa on his death bed.

So Grandpa’s death didn’t really hit me hard, a fact my parents remember quite distinctly when compared to my two brothers. I just remember playing in the parking lot of the funeral home with my siblings and cousins.

Uncle Ray’s funeral was different. Uncle Ray wasn’t supposed to die. He was too young. He was only 46. While Grandma Kate remained relatively stoic at the funeral of her husband, her grief overwhelmed the room at the funeral of her son.

Uncle Ray’s death triggered my first adolescent panic over the possibility that my parents could spontaneously die. They came to my bedside and reassured me that Uncle Ray’s death was unexpected, but was not going to happen to them. I remember hearing a lot about Uncle Ray’s temper and the stress he was under as the culprit. Physique didn’t exactly explain his death — he was solid as a rock. It was something in his personality, in his behavior that explained his sudden and tragic passing.

While that fact orbited my fixation with his death, it was the frailty of life and the unpredictability of death that left the deepest scar. Starting in my teens, I began feeling absolutely convinced that I would not live to be 18; I harbored intense feelings of impending death. Of course, 18 passed and I was fine, so all was well… until I became convinced that I was going to die at 21. It was (and is) irrational, but obsessive thoughts don’t exactly work on a rational level.

Because my Uncle Ray died from a heart attack, any weirdness in my chest immediately induced anxiety. There have been times where I’ve had a pain when I breathed too deeply, like a needle in the chest. It would persist for a few days, then disappear. Despite reassurances that it wasn’t heart related, I remained convinced each time that I was about to have a Red Sanford moment.

My morbid narcissism and cardio-hypochondria persists to this day, which is why research on weight, fitness and cardiovascular disease interests me so much. Grandma Kate had a heart attack in her 80s and my dad had one in his 50s. This is the family history I’ve been dealt, along with colon cancer.

So, as I turned 35 this week, I couldn’t help but begin to countdown to 46. One benefit of fearing an early death most of my life is that I resigned myself to investing in each day as though it were damn near my last. I have very few regrets in my life, and the ones I do have are born of difficult circumstances and Sophie’s choices. I have no regrets of omission. If I die at 46, I will have poured as much of my soul into living as I possibly could. But obviously I don’t want to die at 46. I have a wife and three young kids I want to spend as much of every day with as I can.

In the past, I have felt a kind of resignation about my health because my Uncle Ray was in such great shape, so I spent much of my formative years equating fitness with futility. I was saddled with a damning genetic inheritance, so there isn’t much I can do about my impending heart attack. I felt like my energies were better suited to controlled the family temper, which long-time readers have seen flare up from time to time. I also focused on being as low stress as I could, although driving near dumbasses often bends my resolve. But exercise? Pah, that was pointless. I mean, have you seen the startling mortality rate of professional wrestlers?

But over the past few years I have reclaimed control of my fate. What ultimately brought me around, what ultimately shook me out of my complacency, was Health at Every Size^® (HAES). I always saw exercise as either something you do to get ripped or something you do to get thin. You can even hear a bit of my ambivalence toward exercise in this interview I did with my wife, Veronica, back in 2009, when I first started blogging. It was V who reminded me that what really mattered were the health benefits of exercise.

So, when I began practicing HAES, when I began exercising and improving my diet, I felt like I was reclaiming control of a part of my life that felt already written. But there was something else that both my Grandpa and Uncle neglected to do, which I later learned was a major contributing factor in the development of their respective diseases: they feared doctors. When Uncle Ray had chest pains or felt inexplicably fatigued, he refused his wife’s insistence that he visit a doctor. That may have saved his life.

As with exercise during my apathetic phase, I only went to a doctor if I needed an antibiotic or some other acute care. Check-ups? Pah. Waste of time. I felt fine.

But after learning about HAES, I made the first appointment in my adult life with a primary care physician (PCP), who I clashed with immediately. V recommended I try her doctor. I wouldn’t be able to see her for several months, but once I did I found her far more understanding and accepting of my views on HAES. She drew my bloodwork, compared it to the bloodwork from my first PCP nine months previous, and congratulated me on my improved numbers. She told me to just keep doing what I was doing and to check back in later. I’m due for another checkup, especially since my high risk of colon cancer means it’s time for my first colonoscopy.

So for the first time in my life, I actually have some semblance of control over my health. And yet, this approach that I have adopted, which has led me to take on healthy behaviors and improve my metabolic health in quantifiable amounts is still so offensive, so heretical, that trolls and douchebags are openly boasting about that heart attack I have feared my whole life.

Last weekend, Shaunta courageously led an AMA (ask me anything) on reddit about HAES and body acceptance — talk about a lion’s den! The result was basically a bunch of shouty dipshits downvoting all of Shaunta’s answers into oblivion. Among the (mostly) respectful critiques, was this question, which I decided to respond to with a wealth of resources to counter his skepticism. Of course, I was downvoted into oblivion, but the guy I was responding to said I did a good job answering his question.

And that’s what I notice in a lot of these forums: there are people who are skeptical and want to debate me, but there are so, so, so many others who just want me to SHUTUP! SHUTUP! SHUTUP!

For example, there was this person who claimed to be an ER nurse, who absolutely flipped their shit when I said that I wasn’t that heavy at 5’7″, 265 pounds. For those who don’t want to visit the cesspool of reddit, I’ve captured it for posterity:

There’s nothing I can do but laugh at these comments. This person is gloating over my death. And they’re not the first. I’ve seen quite a few comments in the various toxic subreddits talking about how awesome it will be when I die of a heart attack. The whole thing makes me think of this:

As Crow says near the end, “Dear God, I hate you! I hope you die!”

It’s just so odd to think that for the first time in my life, I’m actually trying to make positive healthy changes in my own life, as well as encourage others to do the same, the response is this unbridled contempt and hatred for me and all that I stand for.

This experience just feeds into my theory that for the people out there sending hateful messages, trolling Lindsey, disrupting Shaunta’s AMA, and wishing me a happy heart attack, this is all just a game. They can hide behind anonymous accounts and spout whatever rhetoric and “common sense” they’ve gleaned off the internet because they have no real skin in the game. After all, we’re the ones who end up pissed and stressed and pulling out our hair at the stupidity of it all.

For me, writing about my health and my weight is not a game. This is something that has very real life or death consequences for me, personally, yet these anonymous internet assholes act like I’m playing the same game they are. I’m not. The research I do, the writing I share, is almost entirely about asking questions I desperately need answered. And if the haters don’t like the answers I have to share, they can just keep playing with themselves, for all I care.