Holy crap, that got way longer than I intended, so I'll just post a tl;dr instead. feel free to read a few chapters of the reply for more details.
tl;dr: Everything hurts, existence is pain, but man is it gonna be worth it. Started 2026 @ 6'6 295lbs, making $1k /week and spending a hundred of it on booze. Currently 6'6" 245 lbs, making 1.4k /week, and I have a 12 pack that I may or may not drink this weekend. All because my old boss made a dumb decision on a day when he was going to the bathroom every 20 minutes and my ego wouldn't allow me to let him make that decision.
I've been in metals for about a decade now. Spent a year and a half doing hurricane shutter installation, which felt like hard work until work got slow, so I left there and went to work for a (relatively light-duty) iron shop. Steel is heavy. Worked there for about a year, learned a bunch of useful life skills (basic steel welding, CNC operation, metal finishing, and experience with various tools) until a disagreement with the owner of the company caused me to leave that job and go work for a bigger iron shop the next day (with a raise). There, I learned how to use almost every imaginable iron working tool, and really brushed up my skills over 3 years until they fired me cuz my attendance got spotty for the couple of months my mother was dying. Then I got into aluminum. It's much more difficult, as far as technique goes, but MUCH lighter, and MUCH cleaner. What's more is that I excell as a fabricator. So I went from processing hundreds of heavy parts every day in my 20s to using light pieces to create a handful of decorative pieces per day in my 30s. Job was more mentally demanding, but got physically easier by several large margins. Add to that the fact that I was drinking more (went from going out with friends once a week to getting blackout drunk every night. So my diet was crap, my fluid intake was crap, and I continually got weaker and weaker. Granted, I'm 6'6" and started this year at 290 lbs, so my "weak as hell" is still probably stronger than the average person, but I remember when I was at the iron shop, I could carry 300 lb rails across a parking lot all day. My grip strength and lifting ability were absolutely insane... and I let it all slip away.
Then, a couple months ago, the shop I worked in starting making repairs to their foundation, so a huge chunk of the shop is shut down at any given time, and we went from 3 welding tables down to 1. To my boss's tremendous surprise, my production went down, and things were taking longer now that all of my stuff was constantly being moved around, and I was constantly having to break off of a task I was working on to figure out logistics of moving the shop around so that it could remain active while *checks notes* they're literally drilling giant holes in the floor and raising it up (cuz I was apparently the guy for that too). Boss figured he'd send a message and lay me off for a few days, so he waited until a half an hour before closing on a Friday to have his GM inform me that I was gonna be off Monday and Tuesday, and that he'd give me a call when they needed me back. I told them to save the phone call, and that I'd be elsewhere by then. Turns out I was wrong-ish. Every other time I needed a job before this, I just picked where I wanted to work, told them to hire me, and started within a week. A week went by, no callbacks. Started to get nervous, wondering if I messed up, and how much lower I was gonna have to go, because I'd rather move out and sleep in my truck than crawl back to the last place and let someone think they own me. Then I got 3 calls back Monday, a handful on Tuesday and got an interview for a preferred job (which I nailed) So I ignored at least a dozen other callbacks after that. Background check and obtaining another license pushed it off a couple weeks, but I started at a steel fab shop, doing MUCH heavier work, welding hotter, and often using a torch to melt steel or stacking heavy materials in the sun. What better time than the beginning of summer in South Florida?
I'm absolutely miserable, physically. Every day a new heat rash, but it at least seems to be moving to different spots. My face was bad last week, this week it's my neck and shoulders, so it seems I'm building a resistance fairly quick). My muscles are sore, and I'm so physically exhausted when I get home that I don't even feel like drinking. I usually just get home, get a shower, get a nap, eat dinner, get another nap, then go back to work. But I've made a conscious effort and gotten my water intake from "a couple sips" to "a couple gallons" per day because heat rash is annoying but heat stroke will kill you. Between way more water, way less alcohol, heavy lifting, high heat exposure, and getting actual rest instead of just poisoning myself every night until I pass out, I think I'm on a good track. It's a lot less effort to roll out of bed in the mornings, I can feel the pieces at work getting lighter daily, heat tolerance is rising even faster than summer temperatures, and I stepped on a scale this afternoon... 245 lbs. It's been an extremely rough couple weeks, and probably still got a couple more bad ones coming. But I like to look at what it'll be 8 weeks after I started the job (I chose 8 weeks cuz I'm making 40% more at this job than my last, so 8 weeks is where I break even financially for the 3 weeks I spent without work). I figure by then I'll deal with heat better than ever in my life, pieces at work will weigh next to nothing cuz I'll have my Superman strength back, and my endurance and fitness will return to at least their levels of 10 years ago.
I feel you man, I'll be 50 (ouch that hurts to type) this September, I still think I'm 20 my back likes to remind me otherwise.
One week later:
It's still hot, but I'm not covered in burns and heatrash anymore.
Everything is still heavy, but (feels like) it weighs about half what it did when I started.
I'm still sweating, but I don't have to change my shirt every hour or two.
I'm still broke, but my check for 2 weeks is barely smaller than what i used to clear in 3.
I'm still a little sore when I get home, but nothing a hot shower doesn't fix, now that I'm burn-free and can actually enjoy such a thing.
Everything is on the upswing, much faster than expected (except the money part, that's on the exact expected schedule). I figured it would take about 3-4 weeks to completely break and repair myself to the point where work wasn't hell, then another couple weeks after that to get "comfortable". Looking like hell ended after two weeks, and by the end of week 3, I'm starting to feel more and more comfortable. I guess my body still remembered the years of experience in iron production before I spent years getting soft and lazy with decorative aluminum.
