I am a man of faith, a father, and a physician – in that order. My other passions include art, literature, cooking, and physical health.
My introduction to art began as a child when my father, an avid painter (but an aeronautical engineer by profession), recreated Picasso’s Don Quixote as a wall mural for my mother. I became intimately familiar with the story – the novel by Sr. Cervantes is a must read, by the way. My family never missed a production of the musical, Man of La Mancha, at La Comedia Dinner Theatre, where I had occasion to play both Don and Sancho in my teenage years. As my life developed I began to identify with the themes of The Impossible Dream and found myself tilting at windmills more often than I’d like to admit. These works and others have touched my life deeply, and I cannot walk past a gallery or museum without stopping in. I’m an unaccomplished amateur artist who enjoys sketching and painting in my spare time.
I began to identify with the themes of The Impossible Dream and found myself tilting at windmills more often than I’d like to admit.
My love of literature has been inextricably, perhaps predictably, intertwined with a love of writing. My published works are, to date, limited to Cats magazine but as a hobbyist I have written three novels, a novella, and a short story. The last of these was a mashup story, written for my sons as a Christmas present, wherein Sherlock Holmes himself solves the ghostly haunting of Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge.
Cooking and physical fitness, like art and literature, or literature and writing, for me, are intimately linked. In 2013 I weighed in at 300 pounds and I was about as miserable as a man could be. I hurt everywhere, all the time. I couldn’t hike or even climb a flight of stairs without being short of breath. I slept horribly and I couldn’t bear to look at myself in a mirror. Worse, I had no idea how this had happened or how to fix it. I’d struggled with weight issues my entire life – remember when JC Penney sold “Husky” jeans to fat kids? That was me.
The difference was that now I was a physician. I had become a lifelong learner and I started a new journey with two simple premises. One, I wasn’t going to hold myself to any diet plan that I couldn’t maintain for the rest of my life. Two, I was going to approach this problem like the scientist I was. I scoured the literature. I started tracking every gram that went in my mouth – I needed data. A natural upshot of tracking my macros (protein, carbs, fats) was that I became much more intentional about what I was eating. Over years, not days or months, the weight started coming off revealing a second problem. I had a pitiful amount of muscle, I was “skinny-fat.” I had lost about 100 pounds but hadn’t been able to make going to the gym a habit.
… every morning I am beginning the first day of the best of my life.
I had a long and painful talk with myself and discovered why the lack of motivation: I’d been a gym rat at various points in my life and hadn’t seen any dramatic changes. In keeping with premise number two, I checked all my labs and there was nothing organic (like low testosterone) holding me back. The problem was clearly what I was doing at the gym, so back to the research I went. I became an expert in what worked and what was a devastating waste of time. I focused on the former. I enjoyed, “newbie gains,” then intermediate advancement – the point where one stops making daily progress but weekly or monthly progress persists. In two years I lost an additional 50 pounds of “old me” but gained about 25 pounds of intentional muscle.
It’s been a journey but I now have a 17 year old athlete who marvels at my stamina and physique. His friends at school call me, “Buff Dad.” Yet, I didn’t do anything extraordinary, but just followed two simple rules which anyone can apply to their own lives. Still, I feel like every morning I am beginning the first day of the best of my life.