Hello, my lovely people.
My name is Duncan—born in 1989 and currently 34 years old—and fairly recently, I was suggested by my personal trainer Tim Hilley to start a blog cataloging my health/fitness journey. I’m nearly a year into it, and I’ve decided to take Tim up on his suggestion because, even though I may not have the most refined understanding of this field (though my current understanding is becoming increasingly formidable), I know that my perspective could be of some use to many out there who are/were in the same situation that I was in a year ago—unsure of what to do in the gym and full of misconceptions about what constituted “healthy eating.”
For this, my first blog post, I only aspire to give some context as to where I was and what led me to the physical state that saw me seeking a personal trainer in the first place.
I come from a Hispanic family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. All major (and minor) family gatherings were food-centric… but oh, the food! It was wonderful. There was an ongoing dispute between members of the family as to what constituted “enough” versus “too much” salt in the cooking. My mom used to lick tortilla chips before salting them individually so that more salt would stick to the chip. Everything we ate was doused in chile, the hotter the better. When my mom cooked, she cycled between a few dishes, none of which were particularly healthy. In fact, apart from a few staples that she made (a stellar rigatoni with large chunks of beef, a sweet-and-sour chicken with Dijon mustard and apricot preserves, and a few others that stand out in my memory), most of what we ate for dinner came from freezer bags and boxes and pre-packaged mixes. Eating out was a luxury in my early years, and even then, it usually involved us going to a cheap hamburger joint close to our house, called Rex’s Hamburgers (I got the chicken fingers with cream gravy and onion rings). The older I got, as dad climbed the ranks and we entered into higher tax brackets, the restaurants we frequented got increasingly more rich and fancy. Speaking of restaurants, though, I used to eat straight-up sugar packets. In fact, I had gotten in the habit of eating literal spoonfuls of sugar at home. I can’t remember the original circumstance—maybe we’d just watched “Mary Poppins” for the first time—but I do remember at our house on Fostoria when I was very young, my mom gave me a spoonful of sugar, and I was more or less addicted after that point. For the majority of my life, I self-proclaimed an overactive “sweet tooth.” Once, I housesat for a friend of the family, and I asked for no money in return, so instead she made me a batch of homemade cookie dough which she delivered to me in a Tupperware and which I proceeded to eat by the spoonful sitting on the couch, watching “Avatar – The Last Airbender.”
That ain’t even touching the physical maladies that the older generations in my family seemed to suffer. A goodly portion of my family has had knee replacements, hip replacements, shoulder replacements, stents, pacemakers, triple and quadruple bypass surgeries, etc. It has been said frequently in my family, “That just our genetics; we have bad joints” (to say nothing of the heart conditions). I grew up believing that I was destined for a knee replacement as well, that it was just in the genes that I should have achy, weak extremities.
Around my tween years leading up to adolescence and beyond, my family began to go on fad diets. I remember the Atkins diet fairly prominently.
And somehow… I also complained about my “poor metabolism” as being one of the primary reasons why I was fat. Now, I have no doubt that my metabolism sucked… but I also now realize that my metabolism is malleable, and the extreme inactivity with a woefully unhealthy diet are the most significant factors, not just “poor genetics” as I’d become accustomed to blaming.
I knew I was fat. I never kid myself in those regards. It’s not like now where the higher your BMI, the more you can claim some kind of escalation through the “Fat Positivity” ranks and therefore receive kudos for living your #AuthenticSelf. I knew there was nothing glamorous or laudable about my physical condition. I used to put myself down very frequently because of my weight and build, and my friends would offer me encouragement: “You’re not that bad. You look fine.” I used to name parts of my body that I thought were particularly undesirable. I had “whale arms” and “martini legs” and “chin blabbage” and a “Jell-O cummerbund” and of course, love handles. And while I was comfortable teasing myself about these things, I wasn’t willing to change my habits.
Or rather, I didn’t know how. Now, that may seem pretty unbelievable… I mean, put the fork down and pick up something heavy! How hard could that be?! I had very basic understandings of what could lead to better health. For example, a spinach salad is preferable to Chili’s honey chipotle chicken crispers (deep fried chicken in a sweet sauce); fresh fruit is preferable to double-decker cake; walking is preferable to sitting; etc. But anything deeper than that, I wouldn’t have known.
In my twenties, I got into running. It turned out, with my build and at my age, the pounds melted off the more I ran, and so I became a running freak, putting in about 25-40 miles a week (depending on a variety of factors). I went from over 230 pounds to about 175 after nearly two years… and at one point, a bit later, I went all the way down to 147… And I’m 6’1”, so by the point I hit that lowest weight, I was extremely unhealthy and emaciated, but I was also addicted to that physical condition, after a fashion. I’d NEVER been skinny in my life, so despite people saying, “Duncan, you should eat something. You’re looking gaunt,” I didn’t much care because I thought, “Screw you. I ain’t going back to fat.” I had a very extremist personality, in those regards; I could see no middle ground, so I was either all-in and doing everything I could do dissolve myself, or else I’d be a tub of lard again.
Then I started my career, and once I had to balance work functions and my actual life, I started to lose momentum and get pudgy again. I had phases here and there where my weight might dip down again, but overall, the trend tended towards weight gain. Until I found myself in August 2022, three pounds away from my highest weight. And I made a decision. “I’m gonna hit the gym (again) and really take it seriously this time. I ain’t gonna be no pansy, shortchanging myself. I’m gonna go for the heavy weights.”
And on my first day back to the gym, I blew out my back doing some sloppy squats at a relatively low weight (so low that it is currently my “warm-up” weight. I don’t know what the exact diagnosis was, but it hurt to walk because that meant extended my legs forward (or backward) which put strain on my back and made it difficult to breathe. Based on my insurance, the orthopedic folks couldn’t do an MRI till I’d completed physical therapy. I began that in November 2022, and the progress was slow going. Around this time, I’d also gotten back on Instagram and followed models and “fitness influencers” and other hot-bodied folks because I thought it might give me a motivational boost (it all started when I came across a bloke named Gwilym Pugh who used to be quite heavy and now is a bona fide model. That gave me a wave of inspiration as I realized, “I don’t have to stay in this physical conundrum forever. Perhaps one day I could even have a model-status body”). One of the men I followed offered online fitness training; I never would have considered reaching out to him, but he reached out to me (I now know that I got “bot-fished,” that the only reason he popped up in my inbox is because a bot—however it goes—probably selected a number of his followers at random and slid up into our DMs). Suddenly, I found myself having consultation calls with some random hot guy who was offering me training services (for a not-so-nominal fee, of course). I told a friend about this, who recommended that I cut that guy off immediately, that it was likely a scam, and that if I was actually interested in pursuing personal training, then I should do it the right way and find someone local.
Enter Tim Hilley.
One of the first things that I realized upon my initial consultation with Tim was that… my technical knowledge of nutrition and exercise form was embarrassingly inadequate. He asked me to do a squat for him. I folded like a lawn chair and my knees buckled in, like the way Shaggy (from the original “Scooby Doo” cartoons) used to stand, and my heels came up. That was misconception #1, for me.
Also, I told Tim of a friend of mine who had lost weight and bulked up on a diet of boiled chicken and brown rice. Tim told me that brown rice is essentially kernels and contains lectins, which prevent the nutritional value of the food from being absorbed. And he told me that boiled chicken sounded like Hell, and that “just because it’s healthy doesn’t mean it has to taste like crap.” That was misconception #2.
I realized that 1) I had much to learn about the intricacies of the human body in order to know how to fully maneuver myself and maximize every exercise, and 2) I had to learn more about food and nutrition and that eating healthy doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice flavor (and therefore satisfaction) in eating.
And now that I believe I’ve set up the full context of my personal health/fitness journey, my next blog posts can get to brass tacks.
Until next time.
– Duncan
