Fat Man Caving

  Day One: Fractions of Food Starting weight: Three Hundred and Twenty One Pounds of fluffy cavenertastic old guy.  I took my first dose at 5:00 AM and immediately discovered the greatest challenge of modern medicine: Waiting 1800 seconds untill I consume any coffee. Today it was real Kona (not a blasted blend) coffee, which made those seconds seemed to snear at me oppressively from nowhere and everywhere in the predawn thickness of our dark bedroom.  I survived, obviously, and by 6:45, my stomach had begun making observations of its own. Not pain. Not nausea. More like my digestive tract had received a memo from management and was quietly reviewing the new policy just prior to ignoring it off-handedly. On most 'normal' days, somewhere around halfway to work, my internal hunger alarm goes off. Every day. Like clockwork, I think of a greasy hot, instant something to shove in my face and I will admit, it's almost always a keto-throwback move, like the heavy cream I still us...

G randfather Weight- L oss P lan v 1 .0 Let’s pivot. Yeah. This has never been a sponsored blog. It almost was, once , but that didn’t quite work out, and not for a lack of effort , mind you. So, I’m left with a new path to follow and while it feels sort of a lack-luster, trendy thing to do, I’ve decided to bring you all along for my no-nonsense guide to this Fat Man Caving’s experience with GLP-1 drugs. There will be no brand dropping or advice on navigating the wreck that is prescription medication laws, just a guide from day one on to the day I can fit back into those Dickies that my wife hates on me. Watch this again and tell me I'm not marching  off to a surprise copay just before the cemetery.  I know. I know. Somewhere in the distance, I can already hear the keyboards clacking, sms servers humming and the sigh-laden eye-rolling. "Weight-loss drugs are for suckers." "Just have some discipline." "Looks like somebody found the easy button...

Filthy, Fat, Fifty and Back in the Hole! Not metaphorically this time. Though if we’re being honest, also metaphorically. After nearly five years sidelined by carpal tunnel, bad habits, career changes, middle age, work stress and enough excuses to pave I-5, I found myself wondering if the mountain still remembered me. But hobbies are fickle things; they tend to get-in-where-they-fit-in. Passions, on the other hand, care very little about my knee pain, cholesterol, employment history or carefully curated excuses. There’s something refreshingly honest about caving in that regard. Gravity still works. Mud is still slippery. And underground, nobody gives a damn about your LinkedIn profile. In the time it’s been since I sat down to write about this, or anything somebody besides Google’s search crawler might actually read, the maelstrom of life kept spinning. Career changes, injuries, middle age, funerals, inflation, stress and the general realization that the human bo...

Good Things Come to Those That Cave Stay Tuned

Guess who’s back? That’s right, it’s me, your favorite fat caver with a penchant for the dangerous, the whimsical, and the downright hilarious ways to end a day spending a copay at an urgent care! While you’ve been patiently waiting (or perhaps not-so-patiently, let’s be real), I’ve been busy cooking up some exciting updates for the blog. Firstly, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m working on updating the site. Starting in June, expect a fresh look, new posts, and—drum roll, please—video blogs! Yes, thanks to a few new interpretations of USDA filming rules where public lands are concerned, I can finally bring you along on my subterranean adventures with my compatriots, the Dead Canary Cavers in glorious high-definition. Stay tuned for some hilarious (and occasionally insightful) musings on my latest caving escapades, health tips, along my fitness journey. And speaking of adventures, I’ve got my eye on Sawyer's Cave, or was it Boulder Cave? Both? Either way, who wouldn’t want to wat...

Yes, I am still around here... somewhere. I suppose it is best to say that I've been on what the kids call a 'side quest' if I am using the term correctly. While performing one of those pivot maneuvers, the idea of which I was so causal in flaunting about in my last post, my wife and I ended up pausing and reordering quite a few of the details swirling about us and our family. My clever plot to jump on a parallel professional course rather quickly mutated into something of a perpendicular arrangement - and so far, we are all better off for it. After taking a few weeks off to travel with my wife and kids while kicking off the tail end of what I will call 'eight years of predictably chaotic jet-lag', I am safely back in school and life has returned to a much missed five-to-nine cadence. Children flourish upon a platform built on routine and stability and while occasionally hectic as I settle into it, my new schedule has allowed me to contribute to our home life in a m...

 Pro tip: when the perfect storm comes, rig yourself to ride the waves and wind away from it forever.  If raising a half dozen children has offered me an object lesson that has stuck, it is the virtue of being flexible and expecting to exercise that flexibility at a moment's notice, no matter what pushes against you. Being ready to pivot your gate while en route to any goal can greatly minimize the time spent off-track. I've inadvertently run though a growth spurt over the last few weeks that has served to recenter several aspects of my life. Frankly, it was overdue, but never the less, it has snapped me back into entirely positive frame of mind and I look forward to the next chapter of my life with renewed zeal. My new eating habits continue to pay off and I have not compromised in my goals in this area one iota. As a matter of fact, I stood in the kitchen today, frying a smoked sausage & cheese dish for my wife and I when a the pair of ill-fitting pants of the usual size...

We're going to try a change of pace this week. Instead of posting about the cheat day that came and went without notice, or the mostly carb-less Chinese food I had a few days after (no rice, no noodles, lots of veggies), I'm going to take a stab at answering some of the questions that have been generated by my friends and family. I am always flattered that the think enough of me to consider knowledgeable on one topic or another, when really, I'm just a guy that has issues turning his brain off when it finds something it reeeaally likes. The sword cuts both ways... any who, let's go! Oh and I'm not a trained geologist, so the following opinions are based on both independent research of the available data and personal observation, so feel free to correct me in the comments. If no one corrects me, then I will assume that, by default, I am the wisest caver that ever lived. You decide... "What are pressure ridges in lava flows? How do they form and how big can they ...

If I mention a product or service in a post or provide a link to somewhere, I do so because it's a reflection of how this road is unfolding for me and not because I'm collecting nickles from click-through traffic. I like to give a well deserved nod to those that I believe in from time to time. I'm not necessarily opposed to turning a dime by way of writing - as a matter of fact I write a bit of fiction as a hobby - but monetizing has never the goal with this blog. That said, I made a spur of the moment inquire to the good folks at Keto Chow a few weeks ago by entering a silly, one sentence request and a link to my fat melting plan into the chat window on their website. I didn't really think much of it. I work in technology and, hey, you never know if you're talking to a scripted chat-bot or a third-party fulfillment center with quotas to fill, in which case an unsolicited link to anywhere would almost certainly be filtered out as spam. In any case, I surmised that ...