Fat — February 13, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Weight Loss🏋️
Without You🎶
Transformative✍️

The Brady Bunch is the best

THE DAILY UPDATE

I learned I was fat shortly before having neck fusion surgery. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. More precisely, it was confirmed that I was fat shortly before neck fusion surgery. The increasing tightness of my pants and shirts and a good look in the mirror had clued me months before into what might happen should I dare to step on a scale.

But in preparation for said neck-fusion surgery, there was no avoiding stepping onto a scale at the doctor’s office before I met with a surgeon. I mean, I could have fought the nurse, but that would have gotten our relationship off on a really bad food, so I didn’t.

What I saw still was somewhat shocking.

How shocking? Well, there I sat about 15 minutes later, meeting with the man who would cut open my throat, remove a piece of bone from a neck disc, put in a dead guy’s bone and some titanium plates and screws, and all I was hearing was the voice in my head saying, “For the love of GOD, John, how did you get so mother flippin’ fat?!?!?”

Thankfully, Wifey Poo was beside me to pay attention to the man who literally had my life or future as a non-quadriplegic in his hands.

When we left the doctor’s office, Wifey Poo noticed I was abnormally quiet and erroneously assumed this was merely because we’d been told how involved the surgery would be and how long the recovery time would be.

“I know this has to be scary,” she said.

“Your goddamn right it’s scary to be this fucking fat!”

… Was what I wanted to say.

But I didn’t.

The truth was, there was little I could do about it at the time. A small part of the reason I’d gained … oh, let’s just say somewhere around 40 pounds in the past three years was because of the neck pain that had grown in intensity over that time period, from low-level annoying to please-kill-me excruciating on the daily. Every time I thought about exercising, my neck hurt more, and when I actually tried to exercise? Yeahno. I spent multiple days wishing for death.

And so in the back of my mind I had this thought that I would go through the neck fusion surgery, and, should I not end up a quadriplegic or dead, I would, ya know, do something about my growing girth.

The thing about neck fusion surgery recovery is that it is extremely sedentary. For the first few weeks, my life consisted of journeying from the chair I slept in to the bathroom, maybe to the couch, and a few trips up and down the driveway as instructed by the surgeon. How fucking sad was it that those driveway walks, slow as they were in the early days, were more than I’d done in the month leading up to the surgery itself?

Damn sad, that’s how sad.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from my company’s benefits telling me I’m eligible for something called Omada. I was familiar with Omada. I’d had a hand in launching it as a tool for members at a previous job. They were offering me a free scale, a free coach, a free community to support me along my “weight-loss journey” or some similarly stupid phrase that I’d used to market the program to others.

Those who know me know that I’m a sucker for anything free. My love of free food is part of the freaking problem.

My love of all things free also makes me a pain in the ass at conferences with booths that give away stupid little tchotchkes (a great word, by the way). I basically need to bring a second suitcase to haul back all the free crap I pick up, most of which then sits there for a few years until I wonder why the hell I picked it up in the first place.

Offering me a free digital scale is like laying out a bag of high-quality cocaine for a coke addict and leaving the room after saying, “Now don’t you touch that, you bad boy you.”

My scale arrived Monday, which meant by Wednesday I was ready to open the box and, ya know, do something about my fatness.

The first thing the scale had the nerve to do was ask me to step on it. The second thing it did was … send my motherfucking weight to my “health coach!” This is a person, I must tell you, I have yet to meet in any sort of way, digitally or physically.

By the very nature of me writing about my life on this here site, it’s easy to tell that I’m not a very private person. I routinely embarrass both myself and the very few people who give a rat’s ass if I live or die with my transparency. So when I tell you that the Motherfucking Scale sent my fatass weight of 230.6 pounds to some stranger and that pissed me off, you’ll see I’m committed to not being 230.6 pounds and nothing greater than 230.6 pounds ever fucking again.

To be fair, I had all my clothes on when I stepped on Motherfucking Scale, so it’s not hard to immediately be just a tad bit lighter.

Last night, me and ChatGPT had a date. I have been working hard to what Career Dorks call “upskill” myself by learning how to be one badass mamma-jamma prompt engineer. I love when people get all bitchy with ChatGPT or other Gen-AI because it spits them back crap, and when you inquire about what they asked of it, their prompts are the equivalent of “Tell me something.”

AI, at the moment, is the epitome of garbage-in-garbage-out. Give at a trash prompt, you’ll get a trash response.

I have worked hard to be a better prompter. And so, I queried ChatGPT with this work of AI art:

You are the United States’ best life coach, personal trainer, motivational speaker and expert on everything diet and fitness related. You know how to combine diet, exercise and mental well-being into plans for middle-aged men who are out of shape and need to lose weight. In fact, you are so good that you have won dozens of awards for helping middle-aged men get back in shape, lose weight and be mentally well.

Create a plan for a 50-year-old man to lose 30 pounds safely and responsibly, get in better overall shape, take care of his mental well-being and live a happy life. The plan should include diet recommendations, including meal planning and meal prep, exercise, meditation and other activities that promote overall fitness and mental well-being.

The 50-year-old currently weighs 230 pounds and would like to be under 200 as a starting goal. He has not been doing anything physical for more than a year because of severe neck pain. He had neck fusion surgery on C3-C4 in mid-November, and he is now pain-free in February, but he knows he cannot work out too hard. He also has had left ankle and right elbow/shoulder injuries in his life that sometimes limit his physical activity.

This plan should include day-by-day meals, activities, exercises for a month.

And yes, I did lie to ChatGPT and leave off the .06 after the 230. Sue me.

It took a little bit of follow-up prompting, but in the end (and after some discussion with a real-live human in the form of Wifey Poo), I now have a plan I’m ready to start.

Monday.

Oh, calm down. I’m only saying “Monday” and not “Right Fucking Now” because all my meal planning starts Monday and my Omada group officially starts Monday. It’s not like I’m doing nothing in the days between Right Fucking Now and Monday. I already have put some guardrails on my eating, and I did shovel the driveway yesterday evening even though there was only an inch-and-a-half of snow that wouldn’t have prevented Wifey Poo from getting out this morning (but most definitely would have made taking my badass sports car out a challenge). I have a long-ass driveway, but less than three months after neck fusion surgery, I spent an hour-and-a-half shoveling, didn’t hurt myself, gave anyone outside with a listening ear within a mile radius one helluva rock concert as I sang the songs I was listening to, and I cleared the stupid driveway.

Today, I forgot to weigh myself first thing in the morning. So I weighed myself after getting dressed.

Motherfucking Scale said 230.6.

Motherfucker.

Something I’m grateful for today: Coaching my last regular season basketball game this afternoon

Something I’ve (ghost)written: Elevating Underwriting in Developing Regions: A transformative opportunity

Song of the Day: Here Without You, by 3 Doors Down

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

But all the miles that separate
Disappear now when I’m dreaming of your face

Something good from today/yesterday: An extremely productive day at work and with my side biz.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Seeing Schucked on Sunday

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