Opening Statement

I am an unemployed fat man with a few years of work experience and a degree in rocket science. I intend to change two of those things.

I've been unemployed since summer of '09, when ridiculous numbers of people working in all sorts of fields lost their job. Thousands of people were laid off from my old company, and those of us with fewer than five years of experience didn't stand much of a chance. It was a good company, and was kind to the employees that had to be laid off. I bear only good will towards it and the people who still work for it.

Since then, I moved halfway across the country to assist with a family crisis (series of them, really) and have finally reached a point where it has stabilized, and I can re-focus my efforts on personal improvement and serious job-searching.

This isn't my first time searching for a job, but it's different from the last few jobs I've worked. When I was a college student, I worked in a customer service position I had to beat pavement to find, where I stayed for several years. During that time I also did a brief stint where I doubled up with another company that one of my customers wanted me to part-time at. After college, I spent a few months helping my family with a move, and found the job I was recently laid off from after that. Now I'm looking for my first job where I'll have had real professional experience I can talk about, and, because of the current economic climate, I and everyone else in my experience bracket are stuck competing with new college grads for the same set of jobs.

This isn't my first time trying to lose weight, either. One summer in high school, I had a very successful experiment with a major workout schedule and a high protein, Atkins-style diet. Unfortunately, I wasted all that effort and much more in college and the following years.

As of this morning, I weigh 367 lbs. This number may be inflated by water weight from the weekend's activities (God I hope so, I am truly a fatass engineer) I went to school in lbs, I work in lbs, and I'm damned well going to measure my weight in lbs. If you try to claim that either Standard or Metric are better by default, you simply haven't had enough advanced education to realize it doesn't fucking matter. That being said, fuck stones.

I own a most excellent elliptical machine, a decent set of dumbbells, and a metal DDR mat. I've got a pantry full of Nutrisystem food, because having a framework to work in is something that I think will help me. I just drank all my beer this last weekend, and I'm not going to buy more until I either lose 100lbs or 3 months from today have passed, whichever takes longer (I mean, unless I lose like, 200 lbs or something ridiculous, which isn't happening). I briefly did Nutrisystem before the holidays and I liked the way the program worked, and I'm now ready to stick with it.

I intend to keep a visual and textual record of this madness, and several people recommended blogging it so that they can laugh at me. Time to get to it.