It is my pleasure to share the following post written by my youngest son, Nate, for whom this blog was named. Please welcome him as he shares what he has been doing since he graduated from high school.
Thank you for your continued support! -Lorrie
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Let’s just start in 2020, shall we? Yes, I’m gonna bring up that forbidden 5-letter word, unfortunately. This might be a universal reality for everyone, but I think COVID made EVERYTHING worse.
I was a junior in high school looking forward to the next baseball season. It started off great, but the start was all I got because the remainder of the season was canceled. That was the start of what I consider to be the worst time in my life.
Quarantine was in effect, so I also had no school for a decent stint. Therefore, I had nothing to do except sit around and eat anything I could get my hands on. I was binge eating to distract myself from reality, which we all know is NEVER a wise thing to do. But I guess that’s what emotional distress did to me, mostly because I let it.
A few weeks into the lockdowns and whatnot, around April and May 2020, I was at least trying everything I could to stay active, even though I didn’t really have much to stay active for. But it almost seems as if it wasn’t enough to undo the damage I was doing while binging. Just maybe.
After that, I gave up on trying to get in shape for quite a while. I was more focused on applying for college and trying to get scholarships. I was heading into my senior year, so I figured the priority was attracting scholarships, not self-care. I thought self-care was a complete waste of time because it wouldn’t raise my grade point average or allow me to play college baseball. Yeah…
At the start of my senior year (2020-21), I was top 5 in my class. It ended that way as well, but it came at a hefty cost. I was around 260-270 pounds because, at 17 years of age, I was in the worst health of my life…
I was basically trying to force myself to be either a software engineer and/or a cybersecurity analyst. That clearly was not meant to be. But if I didn’t attend a certain vocational school, I wouldn't be one of the smart kids. And if I wasn’t a smart kid, I wouldn’t get any scholarships. It was one of the very few things I actually had going for me, especially as a senior. It seems like I didn’t know any better because that mindset had been pretty much drilled into my brain by so many people.
I believed that I had to be perfect to be seen as worth anything, constantly blaming myself for things I couldn’t control. That made it to where I was doing next to nothing to fix the things that I could control.
Taking advanced placement classes only amplified that. And COVID only amplified that tension more. My class schedule and assignment load sure did a number on me, it was terrible, to say the least. I was forced to take classes that were designed for students to complete in an academic year…not in a semester. The 1st semester wasn’t quite the best, but it wasn’t terrible. On the other hand, the 2nd semester was probably the most depressing 5 months of my life.
I felt as if stress is something I should just tolerate because I’ll be stressed for the rest of my life anyway. To express it lightly, I had way too much on my plate. It truly was a never-ending cycle of stress. As most people understand, that might lead to some stress eating. Just maybe.
This affected my performance on the baseball field. I didn’t do nearly as well as I was hoping to. Nights completely without sleep didn’t seem to help much either. But how could I sleep when I’m doing everything I can academically and I’m still 30+ assignments behind? It messed with me a bit.
I felt tired and lazy all the time, even though I was doing so much. There were nights after baseball games that I’d actually pass out while walking due to my adrenals being so fried. My dad almost ended up taking me to the hospital. I wonder what would’ve been discovered if he had…
I didn’t think I was strong enough to make it through the semester, and for good reason. I was to the point where I couldn’t even enjoy all the things that were meant to be enjoyed. I genuinely felt like quitting baseball and dropping out, and I had always loved the game of baseball. I was hiding all my pain and insecurity by being goofy on the field and during the games. I couldn’t enjoy my graduation all because I was stuck on hating the way I looked and being so heavily uncertain about my future. I just wanted all the “good” things to come to an end. Survival was the priority.
The best part of all this is that I ranked top 5 in my class just to go work in a warehouse. Even after all that happened in my senior year alone, I felt like I had worked so hard for nothing. All that just for a diploma that says I made it through school and I can trade my time for and base my happiness on something that can be printed. There was no fulfillment whatsoever. Keep in mind that I was still in the worst health of my entire life.
There is something that I still deal with to this day that amplified all these problems, and it’s been quite a long time since I’ve publicly shared it. Very few people know this, but I have Asperger’s. I was diagnosed at the age of 4. The reason I haven’t told many people for a while is that I don’t EVER want people to think I use it as a crutch.
But I knew I needed to say something about it eventually because I know my story is one that can and will inspire. If I can find my way, you can, too.
Continuing on, the warehouse job was sort of a mess, literally. The warehouse was utterly disorganized and I felt like I was one of the only people actually trying to clean it up, while still fulfilling everything else that I had to.
I was doing pretty well at this job, but I felt like I was failing at life. I knew that I had some kind of higher calling, but I had no sense of direction or any clue what it could possibly be.
I was trying to impress enough people at work so that I could hopefully get a raise. I thought that might’ve been the way to magically become less stressed. This was obviously a flawed ideology, more of a theory than anything else. I was letting the thoughts of others dictate my attitude towards the work, just to not even receive the raise after my 90-day evaluation. So I used my 3 days of PTO and ended up quitting.
However, there was a silver lining. I was way more active when I got that job, so I was able to get into better shape. I severely needed that for my health. I was still stressed, but not nearly as stressed as I was in high school and I felt better about my overall weight progress. I wasn’t collapsing anymore, I’d say that’s a plus. If I remember correctly, I got down to about 215 or 220 pounds in that 4-month span.
But I still wasn’t fulfilled. In my mind, if I didn’t truly fix my life, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy what I’m supposed to, especially while I’m still young. I’d still see myself as a loser every single day because that’s how I saw myself. I was tough as can be, but losing. I had only been conditioned for failure up to this point.
Starting out in 2022, I knew that I could still improve my physique and figure out my life, but I had no earthly clue where to start. I wanted to have a career that allowed me to enjoy my life without having to work for someone else like I had been. I simply didn’t know what, though.
So I guess I thought it was a wonderful idea to start binge eating again. It was like quarantine all over again, but I was able to manage my weight better because I was more active than when I was in quarantine a couple of years prior. This went on for the first 3 months of 2022, and I surprisingly lost weight. That was mostly due to gradually less binge eating while staying as active as I had been.
But the sad reality was that I was still at square one regarding my career and aesthetic goals. When it came to finding a career, I was trying to be the jack of all trades and trying every idea I could get my hands on. None of those ideas fulfilled me whatsoever.
So in April 2022, I took a break from trying to find my career. I wanted to find myself. I wanted to be reinvented. So I decided to climb stairs for 4 hours a day for 3 weeks straight. I believed that if I were to look better, I’d suddenly be happier. Yeah…
Long story short, I became a cardio junkie. I cut it down just a hair and lost about 15 lbs in 3 months or so. I was so stoked that I bragged about it.
But because I became a cardio junkie, after those 3 months or so, I also became an adrenal/cortisol junkie. That basically means that I could feel good while working out for hours on end, which led to the point where I was no longer properly recovering so that I could keep making progress. My body was under too much stress.
And because I wasn’t making as much progress as I was beforehand, I started to develop a slight case of body dysmorphia. Sometime around June 2022, I started binge eating again. I wonder why. Maybe it’s because I felt like I was starving and I wanted to escape reality again. Who knows?
As I said before, I had been conditioned for failure by so many people over the years; my mind had been influenced with all these adverse and false beliefs.
Now that I am a nutrition coach, I’ve started to see that’s the case with everyone who have been struggling to lose weight. The fitness industry has put out so much information, misinformation at that, with such little context that people are trying everything under the sun and wondering why it’s not working. Then they blame themselves.
So in July 2022, I found it within myself to fix that issue. I hadn’t started pursuing nutrition coaching just yet, but I wanted to have a career in fitness. I was exploring my options.
In August 2022, I started working towards my nutrition coaching certification. I ended up learning about everything I was doing wrong in the next couple of months. It taught me that more is not always better and that physique progress is not any more important than self-care practices.
It still took me until February 2023 to actually start feeling better and making solid progress again because my body was so stressed and beat up. I was also still hitting reps until I couldn’t hit any more up until about mid-January. That’s when I realized I can actually get more from less. I received my nutrition coaching certification in February, as well.
As I’m writing this paragraph, it’s currently April 2023. I’ve gotten all the way back up to around 195-200 lbs; I look and feel better than I did last April.
2023 has been quite the year so far. I think what changed everything for me was believing that if I trust God and follow his master plan, everything else will fall into place. I believe that I’m now on the path that the Lord is wanting me to take, and he’s guiding me to a life of creating impact and canceling false narratives that live in people’s minds about themselves.
If you think that’s something I can help you with regarding your fitness goals, I highly and greatly encourage you to friend me on Facebook via N8SFit, reach out to me via messenger, and check out my website.
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