Holy Weight Gain
These first few posts will be an overview of how I got to where I am today. After that I’ll take a deeper dive into specific times and adventures and see what I can unearth. If I’m feeling it, I may even come back and link those to the proper spots in these overview posts.
Posing for a photo in Loretto, PA. Early 1999.
In the fall of 1998 I moved to a small town called Loretto in central PA. I was joining up with the TOR Franciscans to discern if I wanted to become a priest.
Loretto is a tiny town on top of one of the Appalachian mountains between Altoona and Johnstown. There is a university there, and the Franciscans have their formation houses and retirement house there.
The first nine months we studied philosophy at the college, did yard work on the sprawling estate and I taught music classes at the local catholic grade school. I walked everywhere, although the town is barely a half-mile across at its widest.
I had just earned my first black belt earlier that year, so I kept training on my own as best I could. Some of use would get up at 6am, go to the university gym for a workout and then face the day with prayers and breakfast. I often did forms and staff work in a corner of the gym while others used the machines or ran.
There were nine of us in the discernment process, and we also would often play football or basketball together. Three of us really got into basketball and would play a couple days a week with the women’s and men’s basketball coaches around lunch time.
The upshot is that for the first nine months I was there, I was moving, moving, moving. Then the second phase of our discernment began and a lot changed.
For one thing, we were down to five of us. We also had to limit our outside activity to 2-4 hours a week and spend our time really discerning why we were there. I had been doing well over 40 hours of various activities and now had a lot of time on my hands.
We managed to play basketball once a week or so, but getting to the gym was harder. There was a lot of opportunity to walk, but it also got very cold in the winter. And the food we ate was very carb-based and “comfort food”-ish. For the first time in my life I started putting on weight, but it wasn’t good weight. My pants got uncomfortably tight, and my middle expanded.
The pants were the big warning sign to me, but I lacked the motivation to do anything about it. I bought a couple larger pairs and just assumed I had hit the point that everyone said was coming where my metabolism had slowed down. It didn’t really dawn on me that my diet was causing the increase because I’d always been able to eat whatever I wanted.
By early 2000 I had decided I did not belong there, and officially left the TOR on Valentines Day. I moved down to Greensboro NC where my parents and older sister were and again started moving a lot more.
I played basketball at the local Y, started playing competitive ultimate for the first time and eventually found a new Tae Kwon Do gym. By summer I was back to my “normal” 140 pounds, and then I really started getting active.
