About Me - This will be a little long, but you have to understand my story to understand my need to change.

    I am a fun loving guy, who is happily married and enjoys his video games. This is a gift and a curse to have the free time to play like I do which I am hoping to overcome. I'm not very happy with myself or my body to be honest. I have so much excess weight that my body always aches and when I wake up in the mornings my entire body is stiff, no genital jokes peeps :P, and I find myself very sluggish and very grumpy. I feel unhealthy, but like most people who want to undergo weightloss, its hard to determine where to start. So in order to help me start my progression into a better me, I began watching a famous Tv show called, Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition starring Chris Powell, a weight loss expert and physical trainer who specializes in getting the morbidly obese into shape and into a healthier lifestyle. Now I am hoping that I haven't reached the point of morbidly obese, but if I haven't I'm sure its quite close with the way my body feels all the time. I want to live a long life for my future children and I want to be able to endure physical activities without chest pains and having to quit shortly in. This isn't how I was supposed to live and now I'm going to do what I can to take my life back and make it my own. So in the near future I will be undergoing weight loss exercises performed in 3 different levels of workouts by Chris Powell, changing my diet completely from the high carb high fat intake I currently have, and into a more healthy and more balanced one, as well as becoming more active in my daily life in order to make this change happen for my self, my marriage and my future children.

    It's safe to say alot of my inspiration came from watching Extreme Makeover and seeing how much they could change themselves in just one year, but I also drew inspiration from Youtubers who most recently began the "Draw my life" trend all across youtube, in particular I'm talking about Boogie2988. I've always thought he was a funny actor/webcaster, but to hear his life's story and to hear all the things he went through and then to remember all the things in my life that I went through as a young boy, I just thought to myself, I don't want to live my life like I am now. I don't want to wake up every day and hate how my life is, and I don't want to end up clinically depressed and suicidal again. In the early parts of my teens, I lost my mother to cancel and treatment overdose, which destroyed my teenage life, I started failing school, I started a really bad habit of cutting myself and feeling that I wasn't good enough for anything and I even started fights with people who did not deserve it. If anyone talked bad about their own mother, even without knowing their circumstances, I would walk up to them and basically bully them into never downtalking their mother or anyone's mother in front of me again. I felt like a school yard bully, but knowing how it felt to lose my own mom made me want to find a way to tell them how they would feel if they continued to insult their mother's name in public and something were to happen to her. I felt like crap to be honest, and I never said anything cross about my mom, so I could only imagine how someone who would put down their mother in public would feel. But, this wasn't my place to do so, it wasn't my place to be a bully, it was my job as someone who was going through the pain of loss to let people know how it feels and to let them know not to take things or people for granted. So in my 9th grade English class when we came across the poetry portion of our schoolwork, I felt more inclined to express my feelings in my heart and found it easier to talk to a piece of paper than to talk to a person. As far as people go, and I won't go into names, I didn't have much support outside my family, I had a really good friend who I still have contact with today who was there for me as well as his mom who I came to feel was my second mom and I felt truly happy to have their support as well as my families. 

    Our household was sad for a very long time and we all dealt with the pain in different ways. My brother chose a more healthy way of expressing himself by going outside and learning to hunt for squirrels with a BB gun which I enjoyed going with him as well, but I was no good at physicaly activities like he was, so to see him do so much better than me and being 5 years younger than me caused me to feel jealousy towards him as well as disbelief in myself as an older brother that he could look up to. Sooner or later, I stopped going outside except to go to school or to walk to a friends house which was my nextdoor neighbour. I stopped working out in gym and stopped caring about my physical appearance. I lived my life one meal to the next and attached to our console games. I always loved gaming since I was very little, starting with Super Mario and progressing to Donkey Kong Country, yes I was a Nintendo kid :). I started finding comfort in my video games because it was the only thing that I could beat my brother in and gave me a little self confidence, but it wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted a way to healthily work through the loss of my mom and, at the time, it just wasn't possible for me to see where the right direction was. So with gaming and food addiction getting worse, I started gaining weight and with more weight I lost more confidence and even more self vision. I could no longer see where my life was going and most of the time, I didn't care, and as time went by, my cutting turned into worse things. I started taking pain pills to numb myself. At the time, numbing myself was the only way to not feel the pain of my mom not being there anymore, as well as the pain I caused myself by putting myself through so much torture. I can't beging to tell you how dark my mind was at the time. I began believing that I could see my mom's ghost in the house still sitting in the chair where she was when she was taken from us, and I started talking to her/myself when no-one was around, but everytime I wanted to hold her or hug her, all I felt was the cloth on the chair so this only made things worse for me and my mental state until my first attempt at wanting to commit suicide. I've only tried a few times follow through with this, but something stopped me each time before things got too bad and let me just add now that I no longer have these self harming thoughts or urges thankfully. I'm not going to go into detail but just know that it was a complete failure and nothing permanent came to be except for the mental damage I endured from constnatly beating myself up.

    The years passed by with me still feeling depressed and that I wasn't good enough for people's attention, including that of my family. We moved from the place of my mom's death back to a city I was more happy in, Panama City, Florida. I was going into 10th grade and one of the things that kept me from being a total outcast, was my friend from middle school when I lived in PC before. He was also attending the same high school, and even though we weren't in the same grade or classes, we had the same lunches and we got to school mostly at the same time. As an added perk, he lived close. Through him I met 2 other great friends who helped me get through my daily life in school and helped me get back on the right track. I found myself taking advanced classes again and trying to correct my F's I received in 9th grade. I still wasn't at my best, but I was finally feeling like I was getting better. We would go to school early every morning just to play Magic the Gathering and I would go to their houses after school sometimes and feel like a normal teen for once, but when I couldn't go, I still felt like I wasn't good enough for my family so I stayed to myself at home. Most of my at-home time was dedicated to my new found gaming passion, PC gaming. Starting with Diablo 2 and going into online games like Halo 1 and 2moons, which is now called Dekaron. This helped me stay out of reality so I didn't have to face my feelings at home, on the internet, I could do whatever I wanted, and be whoever I wanted, no-one knew the real me, so I could pretend to be someone special and people thought I was cool, but this never helped me truly. As soon as I logged off, I would feel like the same insecure boy. For those familiar with the condition, Insomnia, you know its not fun, for those who don't know what that is, its very easy to desribe. I have a very hard time sleeping and sometimes I don't sleep at all for 2-3 days. I don't think it is full blown insomnia and as we didn't have money or decent health care, I never visited the doctor to have it diagnosed or checked on and I was afraid to add stress to my dad so I never told him until much later in life. I would normally just sit in my bed while everyone was asleep and stare at a wall, which usually resulted in me losing my attention and focus in school and sleeping on the school bus in the mornings just to get a small amount of sleep in. It was then, that I turned to the next thing that was horrible for my body, energy drinks. Now, one every now and then will not kill you, but when you drink as much energy drink as you should drink water, it causes a lot of problems. I was able to stay up during the day and do my schooling because of the drinks, but as a result, the added caffein caused my body more problems and increased the strength of my insomnia making it almost impossible to have a full nights sleep. Even worse, when I found myself not being able to get energy drinks, I made a turn for the worse and started sneaking beer and cigarettes from my dad when he was sleeping and left the empty cans and butts on his desk so he wouldn't notice. The buzz from the alcohol helped me mellow out and the cigarettes cause me to get the sort of energy I needed from the energy drinks that I wasn't able to get. All of this started before I was 16 years old.

    So we fast forward now to my next move. We left PC in an attempt to start a life in New York but things didn't work out, so we ended up going to Georgia. I did not like this move at all but I could only follow and not lead at this time and even if I had the power to lead my life at that point, I did not have the courage to stand up for myself or make my own decisions. My reason for not liking this move, is that I was now only 1 hour away from the city where my life changed forever and being so close to the city where my mind and my heart went to this dark place in the first place made me feel even worse about myself and soon those feelings came back. I could never explain to my dad what I was feeling and he blamed that on himself, and I wanted to tell him many times what was on my mind and the things I had done, but again, I did not want to burden him with my pains and my worries. Unfortunately, this caused my dad and I to argue, and my own hesitation to express my feelings turned into fights and hurt feelings across the house which even spread to my brother. It was around this time that I found a game called Lotro or Lord of the Rings Online. The book was my favorite epic story at the time, so the game was a huge deal for me. I was working at this time after graduating high school and even though it wasn't the smartest decision in the world, I found myself spending money on this game outside of the subscription. Some of you might think, well that's normal, I charge my gaming account all the time, but the level of money I spent on this game was to the point of idiocy. I spent nearly half my paycheck on the game and sometimes more, every 2 weeks. So not only could I not express my feelings properly, but I also proved to myself that I was nowhere near ready for the real world if I couldn't manage my money and my time better. When I finally stopped playing Lotro after losing my job, I found myself going back to playing private servers for my first Mmo, 2moons. It was there that I found 2 very good friends, and they are still my friends to this day. They helped me feel good again, and helped me feel like I did in PC, but they lived nowhere near me, one was in the northern part of the U.S. and the other was in Netherlands, Europe. 

    As time passed we stopped playing the 2moons server but we still stayed together as a unit moving on to the greatest game in the world, also the most annoying and frustrating game in the world, League of Legends. Sorry Dota and HoN fans, but this game is special to me, because I met my wife in this game, so whatever you say about LoL isn't going to upset me :). At the time, we had just lost 2 games in a row because of stupid decisions that we and our teammates made, so by the time she came into our match, I was pretty mad. I remember the first thing I ever said to my wife was something along the lines of, "If you feed the enemy team, I swear I will rip off your balls and shove them into your eye sockets." Ironic, considering I didn't know she was a female. I guess I have to thank the meeting of my wife due to her awesome carrying abilties in that game because she absolutely destroyed the enemy team and won the game for us turning my losing streak around and changing my attitude. We played together for two weeks before she got over her shyness enough to use her microphone to talk with me and my friends over skype. That was when I found out she was a girl and shortly afterwards I developed very deep feelings for her. For the first time since my mom's death, I felt like I could open my heart again and this helped me so much. I was going to my new job with a smile on my face everyday, even though my job was horrible for my mind state. The only problem is that she was with someone else and she didn't know about my feelings. As time passed I was able to speak with my dad a little more and become slightly more social with my household, but not as much as you would hope. I still had an addiction to gaming and now, I had a huge reason to sit and wait at the computer to see her name pop up as she came online. My feelings grew and grew and I started feeling really jealous of her current boyfriend. After all, she's across the world in Germany, and I'm in the U.S. east coast, how were we ever going to be together? Something happened very soon afterwards that made me feel both sad, and happy. She started coming to me for help with her relationship, she wanted to get out but she wasn't sure how to step up and say it. Like me, she had feelings of always being the minority and the one without control of their life. I would never have suggested a breakup myself until I heard the things he would say to her and the thing he did and the way he acted. It hurt me to see that she was in emotional pain and all I wanted to do was fix that for her. So I helped her through her breakup and somewhere shortly after, during a gaming session we were doing I blurted out that I loved her and I always had. I was expecting the worst, I was expecting her to delete me from everything and disappear from my life forever. I braced myself for the moment of truth after that game ended and was gifted with a private conversation telling me she felt the same. That was the moment my life changed completely for the better. I sit here crying on my fingers as I type this so if I make typos grammar nazis, excuse me this time. We talked and got to know each other better over the next few months and we got to know each others weaknesses and past experience. This was the first time and first person I could ever open up to about my past and everything I had ever gone through. She had, and still has, this way of talking directly to my heart without my head interrupting. I knew that I wanted to spend my life with her, but the country difference was a huge obstacle. I started looking at costs of travelling and costs of living in both America and in Germany. 

    Things in my household changed, as I opened up to my dad we started to argue again, after all, I held everything back for years and then just suddenly I'm ready to talk? My dad wanted to know what happened to change my mind and I think he wanted it to be him that came in and saved me from myself and I wanted to talk to him so many times before but just couldn't, so he started to feel like he failed as a father, and that was not true. Eventually the stress of all this caused us to argue harder and I decided I needed a fresh start to truly make my life get in order. So in October of the year 2012, I arrived in Germany with my beautiful wife waiting for me at the airport to take me home, and this is where I have truly, made myself at home. I have my confidence back as a human, I find myself flowing with emotion and feeling warm for the first time in a long time but there's still one problem with myself, my weight. I want to change myself now physically to match how I feel emotionally. I finally love myself for who I am, now I want to love myself for how I express myself on the outside and that's why I created this page. Welcome to my weight loss journey.

Some of the infortmation on this page about me is going to be a shock to my dad, some of this he knows and some he doesn't but he is going to be the first one to read it because he's first person this time, that I will share my whole story with in words. To my dad, who tried so much harder than he had to, thanks for not abandoning us when things got rough, you didn't fail me or my brother.