Every Thursday, I open up the Gay & Lesbian Times to, among other things, see how my column lays out on the page. Every week, just to my left here, the incredibly cute Ryan Halvorson has his fitness column. Look at him. Isn’t he cute?!

When deciding on a topic for this week, I took my inspiration from Ryan and decided to take just a brief break from all-things sports, and give you all a little peek into my twisted, Krispy Kreme world.

If you’ve ever seen me in person, you know I’m a big, beefy, bear of a man, and I need to lose some serious weight. I play two sports regularly, tennis and softball, and as I’ve gotten bigger, I’ve become less effective and less competitive at both.

I wasn’t always this big. I served in the Marine Corps and was always an athlete. Before moving here, I played football in Texas, all the way through high school and college.

But when I stopped exercising every day, I failed to change my eating habits. You know what happened next? I ballooned up faster than Tony Gwynn.

Now, granted, going from fit to fat didn’t happen over night. It was a gradual process, and there were plenty of warning signs along the way.

I remember one day when my blue jeans with the 34-inch waist wouldn’t fit anymore. I just thought they were shrinking.

Then, all of a sudden, I noticed I was receiving less attention at Flicks, and more attention at Pecs. I rationalized it was because I was over 25.

About six years ago, a friend who worked for Disguise, a costume company in Poway, asked me to be in its catalogue that year. It would pay me for the photo shoot, and all I had to do was put on some new costumes it was coming out with that year. Turns out these new costumes were for fat people. I did the gig. (Hey, I needed the money!)

Then four years ago, while walking around a Pride festival with a bunch of friends, someone came up and made a point of handing me a flyer for a new “plus-sized” clothing line. I assumed they’d seen my previous print work.

Probably the most obvious sign to which I was oblivious was a flippant comment made on a date a while back that I assumed was nothing more than a joke between friends. I was going out with this very cute guy named Michael, and we ran into one of his friends who commented on how good I looked. Michael replied to his friend, “Shut up, you don’t like chubby guys.”

I can be pretty clueless sometimes, so perhaps not surprisingly, I didn’t see any of those warning signs for what they really were; my inner child was fat, and was coming out of the closet.

The wake-up call came in the pairing of two incidents: the early death of both of my parents about 18 months apart.

In January 2005, my father died when his lungs failed suddenly. Granted, he wasn’t exactly the picture of healthy living. He drank. He had smoked longer than I’d been alive, and after he and my mom divorced 30 years before, he remarried a total of 7 more times. In the end, it was his quadruple bypass eight years ago and his double-bypass four years later that really sent him into a spiral. He was only 64 when we buried him.

Then last year, on Aug. 31, I had lunch with my mom just across the street from my office in La Jolla. The next morning, I hopped a plane to Milwaukee and she collapsed in her bathroom from some sort of a heart attack. She was just 67. While my dad was the mayor of Shady Town, my mom was the exact opposite. She was a Pentecostal evangelist who ministered mostly to battered women and their children. In 1980 she quit smoking and drinking. She always ate right, and whenever she would feel herself getting heavy, she would do something about it. But nevertheless, her ticker gave out, too.

Now, I’m 34. I don’t smoke or do drugs, and I never have. I do drink on occasion. I clearly have a family history of heart disease, yet I don’t exactly have a heart-healthy diet or lifestyle.

So several weeks ago I started a diet and exercise program. My goal is to lose 100 pounds by June 2008. At the time I started, I weighed in at 323 pounds, or slightly more than a baby elephant. Surprisingly, my blood pressure and cholesterol are within range of a normal-size person, so my doctor said any exercise program would be fine.

I am a naturally competitive guy, and I knew I needed some extra motivation for this plan, so my friend Shawn and I decided we would make a wager. We bet $100 on who could lose the most weight by Christmas Eve. So far, I’m down 15 pounds.

So now, most every morning I get up at 4:45 a.m. and head off to 24 Hour Fitness in Hillcrest. I do about an hour’s worth of cardio and be-bop to the music on my iPod. Before much longer, I plan on adding weight-lifting into the mix, because I know from reading Ryan’s column that doing so really helps melt the pounds away.

Now, 4:45 a.m. is a very early rise time, and for the first few days into this routine I was dragging. Then my friend Shawn told me about this stuff he takes before he goes to the gym that gives him quite an energy boost and is supposed to help the body metabolize fat faster during exercise.

No. It’s not crystal meth.

It’s an ephedra-free combination of vitamin B supplements smashed into a thick red liquid called Vitalean®.

The first time I tried it, it tasted like ass. It’s a semi-gelatinous goo that’s supposedly cinnamon flavored, but really tastes like ass, with a hint of Red Hots.

Every night, before I go to bed I lay the little red goo right next to my alarm clock so that when I wake up, the first thing I do is down the stuff, which is always accompanied by that head-shaking, pickled-face look that comes along with all things horrible-tasting.

Each night, I go to bed dreading the morning. It’s not that I hate waking up early, or even driving to a gym where I always feel like the largest mammal in captivity. No, what I hate is the thought that no matter what happens, my day is going to start off with the lovely taste of butt in a cup.

But that’s a small price to pay to get into better shape, or any shape not a sphere.

The whole point of this article is to offer encouragement to those who might be thinking about starting up a similar routine but are intimidated by the scary world that is the gym, and the hard-bodied inhabitants who live there.

Well, I have ventured into the scary planet called “Health Club.” I have met with their people, learned their language, and studied their customs. While some of their routines still confuse me, I can tell you they are a nice and cordial folk who ask for nothing more than you to bring a sweat towel to wipe down equipment.

They don’t even stare and say “hey, look at the fat kid on the elliptical!”