Eating Yourself To Death for Dummies

I went to the doctor recently because of some swelling in my legs I've had for the last few months, it seems like a manageable issue and he gave me a couple of things to do, one of which is to keep my sodium level around 2,000 milligrams a day. Eating a low sodium diet lately has been great, but pretty hard. I have been fairly surprised how hard it is to consume so little sodium, as well as how crucial eating fresh food with barely anything canned and eating very little condiments has ended up being.

In any event, I was thinking about sodium while I ate my dinner tonight, and I started mulling over the fact that I must have really been eating a lot of sodium when I was actively binging. Well, long story (somewhat) short: I ran the numbers.

Now, I have listed the food I used to eat to myself many times, and I think I've even talked about one of my binges on this blog, but today was the first time I ever looked at the various nutritional elements of a day...the way I used to eat.

So, a quick note: the example shown below is typical (the food choices changed daily, but the below sample is standard) of how I was eating for the better part of the last 10 months, and, with the exception of the "1st Dinner" (roughly 700 calories), and with the inclusion of a whole fifth of vodka, nightly, (roughly 800 calories), the way I had previously been eating for the last 3 years.

Without any further adieu, I give you a rare glimpse into a very typical day of an actively disfunctional, morbidly obese man, tentatively titled: "Eating Yourself to Death for Dummies".

Breakfast - Nothing.

Lunch -

Taco Bell:

• 1 Cheese Quesedilla
• 1 Beef Grilled Stuft Burrito - w/Baja sauce (a creamy pepper sauce)
• 2 Grilled Chicken Burrito - w/creamy avocado sauce
• 2 Half-Pound Cheesy Double Beef Burritos w/Baja sauce
• 1 Side of Baja Sauce
• 1 Extra Large Raspberry Ice Tea

McDonald's:

• 2 Double Cheeseburgers w/mayo
• 1 Large French Fry
• 1 20 Piece Chicken McNugget
• 3 Packets of Ranch Dressing
• 1 Large Milkshake

1st Dinner (I would eat with the family so as to appear normal, then sneak a 2nd Dinner into the house):

This would always vary obviously, but a quesedilla w/chili beans, a serving of Spanish rice, and a salad w/caesar dressing would be a fairly regular example.

2nd Dinner -

• 1 Full Can of Pringles
• 1 King Size Reeses FastBreak Candy Bar
• 1 Foot Long Subway Melt Sandwich on white w/extra cheese and extra mayo
• 1 Foot Long Chicken and Bacon Ranch Sandwich on monterrey cheddar w/extra cheese and extra mayo.

So there you go, though the foods differed from day to day (other days lunches would be a similar amount, but from Burger King & Jack in the Box instead, and other dinners would be a couple of pizzas from Dominoes instead, etc,) that is a very accurate example of a day...the way I used to eat.

Now for the numbers:

Daily Grams of Fat: 600

Daily Milligrams of Sodium: 23,000

Daily Calories: 11,000

Six hundred grams of fat, twenty three thousand milligrams of sodium, and eleven thousand calories: daily.

DAILY.

That blew my mind.

Thankfully, I never have to eat that way again, and, by the grace of God, I never will.

I look forward to time passing, and to my health continuing to improve, and to those horrible numbers becoming memorials to an increasingly distant era of self destruction.

I look forward to seeing those numbers collecting dust, only serving to mark the death knell of that era because it was then that I was given another way, I was given another chance...

and I took it, and never looked back.