“You have the body of a movie star!”
My wife Roxana blurted out those words while I was getting dressed this morning. They sounded genuine and spontaneous.
If anybody had said those same words to me a few months ago, the movie star could only have been John Goodman. Back then, I could have rested an open beer can on my gut without spilling a precious drop. My waist spilled over the top of my jeans and I couldn’t manage a single chin-up.
I glanced in the direction of the full-length mirror. Glances like that had made me shudder for almost two decades. So I looked, as usual, with one cautious eye.
OK, Roxana was obviously appraising my body through love-tinted glasses.
But, the remarkable thing is, she wasn’t exaggerating by all that much! I saw for the first time that my love handles had completely disappeared, along with my gut. I now have the definite markings of a six-pack abdomen. The mound of fat that sloppily hung from my chest had been completely replaced by well-defined muscle. My biceps – and not my gut – were now stretching my t-shirts.
I had to sit down and pause to reflect. In terms of my dieting and fitness goals, I clearly arrived. I am as light as I was in my early 20s and feel fitter than I have ever been in my adult years. I started off barely able to do 20 pushups and I now start daily workouts with 90.
But that was one of the least remarkable of a wide sweep of recent changes.
The sparrows were chirping cheerily just outside the open bedroom window and the sun was starting to mist off this morning’s spring chill as I started to ponder these changes. Now, the sun is about to set on the same day and I am still pondering.
The physical change is the tip of the iceberg – the most visible sign of the depths I mined in the last couple of months with the goal of a complete personal overhaul. The transformation – right down to the heart of my reactions, thoughts and emotions – stuns me more than anybody.
Now, I want to write of that transformation – the most important story I have to tell. It’ll appear as a series every Monday and Thursday, until I’m done.
I don’t know exactly where or when my story starts but it certainly didn’t start in February of this year.
The beginning may spring from somewhere in the daydreams of my childhood in the farm country of Alberta, Canada. The story probably migrates to a heady period of optimism and enthusiasm at Carleton University’s School of Journalism in Ottawa. It tours the scattered ruins of relationships that I had for most of my adult life. The story certainly touches on my father’s slow degeneration through booze. He died at the age of 49 while I was fighting my own demons in Afghanistan during the U.S. invasion.
My story takes right and left turns here and there, many leading in surprising directions – a sleepless 72-hour period under fire in Kosovo that ended with others calling me hero and me fearing I might actually be a coward. Drinking alone on my 30th birthday as I hid from the Serbian secret police.
The story stagnates for a decade of bad choices and mismatches, both professional and personal, through my 30s. It was a period that erased every ounce of self-confidence I had left and prompted me to think I would always serve as little more than a doormat for others.
The story takes a brief and bizarre twist when, after my divorce in 2007, I became a bona fide pickup artist under the personal tutoring of the world’s best dating instructors – learning to meet and seduce random beautiful women in bars and clubs in London and Bucharest, as well as right off the street or in coffee shops.
So, I’m not sure where that story started and I have only vague ideas of the plot loops and twists. But I can now say for certain that I started writing a new chapter of that story on Feb. 19, 2011.
On that day, I was sitting alone in a Bucharest medical clinic, hungover from two full bottles of wine the night before and wheezing from the two packs of cigarettes I smoked while playing a marathon video game session of World of Warcraft.
Roxana was upstairs under anesthetic. She was two months’ pregnant and had just had a miscarriage. The remains of what would have been my second child needed to be removed.
I sat in Roxana’s hospital room, waiting for news of the operation. The room was cool and well-ventilated. A ticking clock was the most obvious sound. Traffic, although passing close by, was muffled. The room felt protected, womb-like, by the blackout curtains that also shut out the sounds and scents of the outside world. In retrospect, it was a fitting place for a re-birth.
It was a safe place to reflect. I had been sinking for years. I had peaked professionally at 30 years of age and had mostly stagnated since as my aspirations and hopes died one by one. I peaked physically at perhaps 22 and it had gone steadily downhill from there until I was a fat, out-of-breath man with high blood pressure and a fast track to a heart attack. Personally, I had turned from a dynamic dreamer and leader to the pathetic middle-aged man so often hanging out alone on the stool at the edge of the bar.
From the safety of that hospital room, I could see what I had to do. I had to make up for a lost decade, for starters. Then I had to fix all the damage I had done to myself through my adult life by adopting bad habits, assaulting my health, failing to maintain relationships and allowing myself to get stuck in self-defeating patterns of thinking. I had to use this sloppy shell of a body and oft-frustrated mind as the raw material for a dynamic, creative human being. I had to nurture my soul and create an extraordinary life out of everything I had left in me.
For starters, I had to become much stronger, smarter, fitter, more handsome, better disciplined, more confident, more focused, more ambitious, more serene, more centered, better dressed, wiser, richer and happier. Only then could I start to erase the winces of regret and embarrassment that sometimes haunted me – the things I wish I would have done differently – and the memory of the deadened years in which I had given up on leading the life of my childhood dreams.
I not only had to get my old self back – I had to become SuperMe. I gave myself a target of April 21 – two months.
So I cobbled together an impossibly detailed plan – a regimen of daily exercise, nutrition intakes planned to the milligram, a dizzyingly severe diet and periods of fasting. I would stop smoking – and make it stick this time. I would never touch another pint glass. I would cram my brain with self-help philosophy both common and rare and re-direct my focus, 24 hours a day, to becoming a better, more dynamic person. I would immerse myself in self-hypnosis, positive thought, neuro-linguistic programming and other methods of self-improvement. I would study time management to increase my output in both quality and quantity, measuring my performance and happiness for every moment of the day. I would start waking up at 3 a.m. and aim at having an average day’s work done before most people are even out of bed. I would ignore all advice to take this transformation project in moderation. Amid all that, I would devote endless hours to simply sitting and thinking.
What followed were two months of soul-plumbing introspection.
These last two months were also the best-recorded period of my life. I recorded my thoughts and actions in a journal all day long, every day – from blood sugar levels to moments of discouragement, random quotations from those around me, inspired thoughts, shout-out-loud frustrations and periods of silent bliss. I recorded my exercise sessions along with the smells and sounds that dominated the various portions of my day. At one point, I shut myself in the apartment for an entire week. I wrote rambling essays for myself on sudden epiphanies and occasionally managed to catch and immortalize those devilish thoughts that had me on the verge of backsliding all the way to ultimate failure.
Change took place with stunning speed – both interior and exterior. I like to think that the child who would never be born is somehow living in the new me that was born that day in the medical clinic.
The ending to that two-month period was always unpredictable but, when it came, it surprised me more than anyone. It ended with a chain-reaction series of epiphanies that left me a very different man today than I was on the morning of Feb. 19.
And that’s the story I want to tell now. For coming months, that story will dominate this blog. The story is very personal and uncomfortable at times. But here it starts.
(This is Part 1 of a multi-part series. For Part 2, click here.)
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