I saw a little segment on CNN just now about Steve Vaught, an overweight guy who's been walking eastward across the country since last April, and he's almost to the east coast. CNN was portraying the guy as very introspective and concerned about his weight (he was over 400 pounds at age 39 when he decided to begin the walk), and I thought he sounded interesting. I wanted to learn more, so I went to CNN's web site, but they didn't have anything that I could find, so I did some creative googling and found an excellent article from North County Times.

This writer went much more in-depth than CNN had (big surprise!), even detailing Vaught's battle with anti-depressants, his recent divorce from his wife, and his gradual realization that while the walk has been beneficial for a lot of reasons and he plans to see it through, he'd have been better off trying to lose weight under the guidance of a professional. Apparently, he's lost about 100 pounds, which is amazing, but he plateaued for a while, as most people do who try to lose weight, and he even took a month off from his walk to meet with a personal trainer in Los Angeles.

This one little paragraph, as basic as it sounds, was what really helped me to identify with this guy:

"Vaught left on his walk April 10 last year with a simple plan to lose weight by walking from coast to coast. Approaching his 40th birthday and weighing more than 400 pounds, he realized he was rolling the dice with his health and jeopardizing his future with his wife and two young children."

As you might imagine, I feel a tinge of jealousy for his kids that their dad came to this realization and has started on the path to taking back his health. My dad, though he tried several times, was never able to get much momentum on his weight-loss endeavors. Though it was a pulmonary embolism that killed him, his obesity had been complicating most aspects of his health for decades, and, naturally, "obesity" was listed on his autopsy report as one of the contributing factors to his death.

I'm not generally one for wanting to change the past and have things turn out differently, but I do wonder whether there were any circumstances under which my dad might have been able to get healthier and live longer as a result. I wonder how often he had thoughts like Vaught's about wanting to be around for my future, whether that ever spurred him onward, even if only for a little while. He didn't confide in me about his weight, and of course I didn't think as hard as I maybe should have about the possibility of losing my dad — how many kids do, really? I worried about his weight and about his smoking, but not enough to help him do much about them. I don't believe his willpower was strong enough to kick those things on his own, and maybe I couuld have helped him more, but one never knows.

Kudos to Steve Vaught for figuring out how he wanted his life to progress and attempting to do something about it. I hope that he and his wife have an amicable divorce and that he can still be a vital part of his kids' lives. They're lucky.

Labels: my dad

• posted by erica 5/08/2006 10:54:00 AM
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