The price of trying, is failure.
To succeed you have to try… and when you try, you often fail or have setbacks.
And currently, I’m trying real hard, and failing real hard.
Ever since high school, I stopped trying. I coasted along, living a fairly easy middle class white guys life.
I tried once or twice since then. I went to Kombat Group to lose weight, hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, told myself I would never undo all the progress I made there.
Lie.
I went from a slab of Woodstock bourbon and coke a week, to a 4-pack of Wild Turkey a month. So, small victory then.
But then LATE in my thirties I actually started to try again.
I was up to 170kg (20kg over the weight I was when I was a lost cause sent to a Thai concentration camp) and finally decided to make a positive move in my life.
In combination I went on Ozempic, and started bouldering.
Now, here I sit, with two broken ankles, and a gut that is bubbling up hell fire.
I tried to control my weight through Ozempic, the new wonder drug. Finally a little weekly injection and the fat just melts right off you.
Except it doesn’t, you still need to work at it, and fair enough too. But the side effects are monstrous.
One false move, be it an order from a restaurant that cooks in ghee, or a second helping when you haden’t let the first helping settle and fill you up yet… and boom… you are in for a hell of a week.
I’ve had one major type of side effect, with two different side dishes of side effects… which has been a fun learning experience.
The main one is diarrhoea. Your body just wants to get whatever is in you, out of you. So you will be going back and forth to the toilet, pooping out whatever you have in you, for about a week. One of the benefits of Work-From-Home, is also Poop-At-Home.
Hope you enjoy waking up at 3am and 5am each morning to go to the toilet, because you don’t have a choice.
And why? Because you ate a little too much four days ago, and you are being punished for it.
And the side dishes of discomfort?
Well, first up is a delicious Sulfuric Reflux. Or to the layman, Fart Burps. You will be as gassy as the hindenburg, and every single time it will smell like rotten eggs. Not only will it smell like rotten eggs, since it’s coming up your throat, it will also taste like rotten eggs. I took to every time I had a burp coming, I would burp and then forcefully exhale the entirety of my lungs, while holding my tongue out of my mouth so that it didn’t pick up the taste.
I looked like an idiot, smelled like an actual asshole, and felt like both.
And more recently I got a much more comfortable kidney pain. It had me having to lay on the laundry tiles for about 8 hours a day to get some relief, and had me Googling things like “kidney stones”, “gall bladder exploding” and “new kidney how much”. But I would much prefer that over the fart mouth any day.
And when I say “any day”, I mean “any week” as that seems to be about how long these bouts of side effects last.
As I write this, my kidney still hurts, but I stopped pooping out my insides two days ago, but still feel like my intestines are made of playdough.
But, as I said, Ozempic doesn’t work on its own, you need a bit of movement in there. And I had Bouldering. For all the memes of “You are turning 40, please chose your hyperfixation: World War 2 Soviet Victories or Bouldering”, it’s true. And I chose Bouldering.
I love it. It’s amazing exercise, amazing socially, and I even manage to earn a bit of money from it.
Except, there is no try without fail. So both my ankles are fucked.
Specifically I have grade 2 and 3 tears and lesions in both ankles, I have a free floating nubbin in my left ankle that needs to get cut out, and just overall, both my ankles are now 80% made of that gristly bit of crap you find on the edge of a cheap minute-steak at Coles.
I try, and I fail.
I try again, and I fail again.
I try so hard that when I fail, I’m back at a worse place than I was before I even started to try. At least back then my ankles worked.
But I guess I have to keep trying.
