My Lot In Life

So I guess the first question is, where am I starting from?

Money

Money’s a real personal issue, and what almost stopped me from doing this blog.

Weight, after all, isn’t really a secret. No matter how well your clothes fit, when you’re toting 60 extra pounds, everybody can see you’re overweight. But when you’re sweating whether that last check going out will hit the bank before that next check coming in, you can grit your teeth and try to look like you’re smiling and nobody will be the wiser.

Trumpeting your financial situation seems to go against something ingrained in us as Americans. If you’re making lots, admitting it seems like bragging. If you’re making little, admitting it seems like you’re either asking for sympathy or, well, embarrassing yourself.

And I’m still not going to start tossing exact figures around. Anybody who works a 9-to-5 for a salary knows the conflicts it can create in the workplace when co-workers start finding out each other’s salaries, and I’m hoping that this blog will get popular enough that at least one or two of them will find their way in here.

I will say that I've got close to $20,000 in debt, and that my debt represents more than half of what I make in a year. Even when I created a monthly budget for myself based on the absolute minimum necessities of life, I still ended up about $140 short in my monthly cashflow.

So how much I make doesn’t really matter so much as the fact that at the end of the month I’m about $140 short of where I need to be. The proverbial, “Too much month at the end of the money.”

Whatever salary you’re making, whatever salary I’m making, that’s probably a situation you can relate to.

Weight

I’m in shape. Round is a shape.

I’ve seen that joke attributed to everybody from Steven Wright to John Mendoza.

Whoever said it, I feel you, brother.

Right now I’m on a collision course with 275 pounds. In fact, I may have already hit that and smashed through without noticing. My weight’s yo-yoed so much that if you watched a timelapse film of belly since I got married it would look like a pulsating egg-blob in a science fiction movie.

Okay, I’ll admit that imagery was sort of . . . not pretty.

But to one degree or another, I’ll bet you have some idea where I’m coming from here, too.