Tonight's Tourney - My Long Journey

If life were a Venn diagram, and you occupied the nail-thin sliver of Union between "Those who were interested in tonight's re-inaugural Very Josie" and "Those who did not play in tonight's re-inaugural Very Josie," I daresay you could find sufficient recounts of it by more successful runners than Your Obedient Servant. More entertaining, too, I'd warrant; nothing particularly noteworthy happened to me, with the sole exception of having my pocket 10s being sucked out on majestically by Grrouchie, who would eventually place, with 24o. Yep - I got Grumped, right in the ass. And to further add to the shame, none other than Poker Grump himself was actually sitting at the very table, making this an epic Grump, a 'Babe-Ruth-Pointing-His-Home-Run' once in a generation moment.

However majestic the moment, however, the cold reality that I lost a big chunk of my chips started to set in. And right around then, this was perhaps ten hands into the final table, I came down card dead. Stack creeps down down down, blinds soar up up up. Meet the new Very Josie; same as the old Very Josie. Went in with maybe 7 or 8 blinds left with double paint, got crushed by AA which held up stoically, and that was the story of me. Finished 6th in a field of 12 - the very definition of poker mediocrity.

Be that as it may, congrats to the winners, thanks Auntie Jo for the hosting duties (hee hee - duties) and look forward to the next one.

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Here's something, but it needs a bit of mildly embarrassing background first.

See, here's the thing: I've been overweight just about my entire life. Even as I child, though I wasn't one of those modern-day aberrations, almost perfectly round, forged by 6 pounds of sugar a day and three different video game systems; I was an outside kid, like all of us back then, but I had a roll above my belt for which I caught a lot of shit.

Fat kid grew up to be fat man. Weight blossomed to a high of 285-ish. 46 inch waist vs. a 30 inch inseam. Used sentence fragments. One after another after another. Cool quirky literary device at first. Tiresome and obnoxious after. Overuse.

I discovered the Atkins diet and lost 75 pounds, settling there for two full years. I think my fighting weight was 206. I lost just a hair under ten inches around my waist and a full inch and a half off my neck.

After I got off Atkins I gained back perhaps 10 pounds and stayed there more or less for yet another year. But even not being on the Atkins diet, there were still elements of it that colored my daily choices: juice, for example, would never touch my lips again. Similarly did I realize that sugared soda was one of the worst substances you can ingest into your body. And for some reason I remember quite vividly that if I start drinking sugared soda, I've ceased caring utterly about my food choices and it's time to stop the party and have some discipline.

Well, fast-forward quitting smoking, and ten years of slow weight gain, and some time last year I found myself once again wearing size 46 pants and 4X shirts and such. I realized that I was once again drinking sugared soda and knew that something had to be done.

So just to start off I guess, and to get the easy stuff out of the way, I just stopped drinking sugared soda. And would you believe that just by doing that one thing I lost more than 20 friggin' pounds! With just about no effort whatsoever I dropped a full pants size and that made me pretty happy.

So there I stayed, about 20 pounds under my heaviest weight and not really travelling much up or down over a few months. Then, here maybe two weeks ago, I made another pretty small tweak to my choices (no more refined flour or sugar, pretty much cutting out simple carbs in giant quantities, like a giant grocery store muffin or a heaping plate of white spaghetti) and damned if I didn't drop another entire pants size! I'm a comfortable 42 waist and judging from where I am mentally I think that I could get down another pants size, maybe even two, before my motivation starts to cool.

I think that the total amount of weight I've lost thus far is maybe 35 pounds, maybe a little more. I could easily hit 50 pounds gone without too much effort. I tell you what - that will be a REALLY good day for me.

Over and above the cosmetic benefits of losing weight, it's just a fact that as you get older your body becomes less tolerant of extra weight. Think about it: how many fat old men do you know? That's a thought that takes root sometimes. Believe it. So yeah, for all those reasons and more, the day I lose 50 pounds, I'm letting the world know.

Oh, and regarding the Crafty and Skinny Southpaw: I have pictures, haters. I have pictures.