BAIT AND SWITCH BLOG: MY WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY (PART I)

Last night I promised to write a blog about my personal experiences with narcissism and what I had learned from them. However, the subject proved considerably more complex -- and painful -- to write about than I expected. It is going to take me some time to organize and set down my thoughts and feelings on the subject, so in the mean time allow me to bait-and-switch, and talk about my weight.

This is not quite as self-involved and pretentious -- dare I say narcissistic! -- as it sounds. The obesity rate in North America for whites hovers from 39.8% - 44.3% in the age range of 20 - 60. It does not improve much over 60, either, with 41.5% of older adults now classified as obese. For Latinos it is worse yet, and worst of all for blacks, at a hair below 50%. The CDC lists obesity as "the leading cause of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer, and one of the leading causes of preventable, premature death." It also effects the quality of a person's life in every measureable way and many which are not measureable but not less important for being so.

I am, of course, a writer, and as such live a partially sedentary life, both by virtue of writing and by the fact my job, while not a desk job per se, does involve many hours of sitting at desks or in cars or courtrooms. I am also a person who has a long history of eating for the sake of eating, though I am also someone who takes great pleasure in food for its taste and the emotional effect eating good food produces. On top of this, I am combined-type ADHD and perhaps as a way of unconsciously self-medicating this, have a long and troubled history with drink, itself a gateway to unwanted weight gain.

As a small boy, I was highly active and perpetually outdoors. In addition to a bicycle addiction, I was on two swim teams and played many a season of MSI soccer. I ate garbage and drank too much Coke, but so does every American boy. Then, when puberty struck, things changed. I gained a lot of weight, lost interest in exercise -- in being outdoors, actually -- and became extremely lazy, my main pleasures being food, soda and television. I suppose I started to get porky around the age of ten, and by twelve was heavily overweight, though not actually fat because my growth spurt put me in the 95% percentile of height. This tubby, out-of-shape period lasted until the age of fifteen, when I was at Martha's Vineyard on a family vacation, spied a beautiful blonde twentysomething in a candy-striped bikini, and said to myself, quite literally, "If I ever want one of those, I'm going to have to lose weight."

My initial battle with fat was the first time in my life I began to exhibit adult characteristics. By "adult" I mean that having come to a conclusion, or an epiphany, about myself, I then came up with a plan to lose weight and executed it ruthlessly, undaunted by seemingly endless discouragements. This was 1987, after all, and there was no internet for me to do research on weight loss. Even I had been able to access the information available, I'm sure it would have been contradictory and full of errors, for the food industry still had an iron, claw-like grip on the public imagination, and things like "the four food groups" and "the food pyramid," all creations of the industry designed to get people to eat large quantities of things they didn't need, were taken as gospel. There also existed at that time this piece of nonsense known as the "well balanced diet," much advocated by doctors who could not define it at all, except to say you shouldn't eat too much or too little of any one food group. They left out the part where a lot of the things in said food groups were not only unhealthy in and of themselves, but terribly fattening. But hey, if you "balanced them well," you were golden. Thanks, doctors.

Despite my ignorance, which was appalling even by the standards of the day -- when I was twelve I believed fat loss was achieved by sweating -- my struggle to slim down was a complete if extremely slow and hard-fought success. Between the summer of 1987, when I made my pact with myself to become thin and thus desired by blonde bikini babes, and some point in late 1989 or so, I dropped from 184 lbs to a rain-thin 155 lbs. In practical terms, this meant that in the very early 90s, when I found some old but perfectly preserved jeans from 1985 or so in a closet, I was able to wear them quite comfortably: a college sophomore wearing jeans he'd stretched to the bursting point as a seventh-grader.

I achieved this loss through brute starvation. In high school I seldom ate anything, except perhaps an apple, a slice of bread, and some Tic Tacs, between seven in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon. (Yes, I was intermittently fasting decades before it became popular.) I would allow myself a single sandwich and a Coke when I got home, and then one more piece of bread, if needed, before dinner, when I ate what I wanted. But this "food window" was perhaps four or five hours at the maximum. The rest of the time, I starved.

Added to this starvation regimen was a lot of walking. My senior year of high school I refused to take the bus even though I had no car. I'd get dropped off in the morning, and walk home in the afternoon, a distance of three and a half miles. Oftimes it was horribly hot and humid, and I'd come home drenched in sweat as well as hungry, but I rather enjoyed the feeling of sweating after spending the ages 10 - 14 or so in a state of complete and utter inertia.

In college I was rail thin for two years, before incessant drinking and the usual collegiate diet of subs and pizza rendered me soft once again. This period of softness was the second half of a pattern which has repeated itself throughout my entire life. I'm thin, get fat, and then batter myself back to thin again using this or that diet or lifestyle change: calorie counting, ketogenics, Whole 30 diet, low-carb, high-protien, starvation, increased cardio, weight training, etc., etc. Each state holds for several years, only to be surrendered to the other as the sun yields to the moon and back again. The one qualifier was that, up until 2013 -- in other words, when I was forty -- I never had any great difficulty shedding the pounds using my own crude methods.

After forty everything changed, in that with the exception of six months on a hard-core ketogenic diet, during which I lost 11 lbs and kept it off six months until I quit the diet, I was unable to lose any weight or, if I lost it, to keep it off even for a few weeks. I kept applying my old, tried-and-true methods, and kept failing miserably. This went on for ten years, ten years in which I exercised far more than is the average for an American male, and ate a much healthier diet -- soda, for example, I had almost completely eliminated in 2000, and fast food not much later than that. I didn't keep junk food in the house, and curbed my sweet tooth with remarkable effectiveness. Yet when I turned fifty I got on the scale and saw I was 207.5 lbs. To put this in perspective: I'm 5'10" 1/2. The recommended weight for someone in my height range and age bracket is 149-183 lbs. And while my muscles are much denser than most men's and I therefore lean toward the heavier side of this scale, well, there's leaning, and there's falling over.

What has changed in the last few months is that I have finally adopted the mind-set of the alcoholic and applied it to my weight. I simply surrendered to the fact that I was powerless to lose weight myself in a post-40s state of being. Through my health insurance provider, I enlisted the aid of a "weight management specialist," i.e. a Nurse Practitioner, with whom I meet electronically once every few months. Truth be told, most (not all) of what she told me I already know by virtue of decades of experiments, successful and otherwise, but it would be selling her short to leave it at that. What she primarily offers is accountability and moral support, the import of which I will discuss shortly.

Now, because I know many people who read and write also grapple with their weight, I'd like to share what I have learned, re-learned, or just rededicated myself to doing. This will not be helpful to all, especially to vegetarians or vegans, but I offer it simply as the benefit of my own experience as a 50 (almost 51) year-old man who tries to be as active as possible but also sits on his ass much of the day -- like now, for example. Ready? Here we go.

1. Eat more protien. I try to eat, with every meal, a portion of animal protien about the size of my palm.

2. Drink more water. Like most people I do not drink nearly enough H20 and now make a point of drinking between 45 - 70 ounces a day.

3. Cut down the carbs. Notice I didn't say "eliminate." We need carbs to think -- literally. But you can get what you need from vegetables. Keep the grains -- rice, cereal, crusts, noodles, bread, pasta, etc. -- to strictly controlled minimums. (When you eat grains, even though they are fatless, your body responds by producing insulin, which converts the calories to fat.)

5. Get more sleep. Easier said than done? Not really, if you budget your time (see below). If I hit the rack by 1030, I wake up much, much better rested than if I wait just one additional half-hour. No mystery there. REM sleep tends to occur in the first and the last 30 minutes of your sleep cycle. That's where the real rest is achieved.

5. Budget your day. I'm an anarchic, Bohemian procrastinator by nature ("writer"), so planning ain't my strong suit. But I've found that by sharply dividing work, play, exercise, creartive time, etc. I can get a hell of a lot done in the same amount of hours as before, when I was achieving precisely jack and shit. I also know when to say "Fuck the schedule" and have some fun.

6. Track your food. There are many means by which to count calories, calculate macros, monitor water intake, and generally just keep track of what you are putting into your body. I personally use My Fitness Pal and link it to the dedicated step-counting app in my Android phone. It's a pain at first, but becomes reflexive and even addictive in a short time.

7. Invest in yourself. When I started my "lifestyle change," I bought a good electronic scale (Amazon, about $30) and also a medical scale ($127 on some medical website). I didn't like parting with the cash, but I was determined to prove to myself that I was serious about this change, and I wanted the right equipment to calibrate both my weight and my BMI and body fat percentage. Now I don't have to guess at my progress.

8. Live. Most attempts to lose weight fail because they are miserable and overly restrictive. When I was trying to slash pounds on my own, I allowed myself 1,750 calories a day, and was always "hangry" and sometimes weak and even faint. My N.P. started me on 2,100 calories, which is far more humane, and which I have not needed to adjust further downward. I still eat dark chocolate, whipped cream, some (homemade) fried food, drink a little beer and whiskey, etc., etc. I just don't go crazy with this stuff, and if necessary I'll skip one of the three traditional meals. Again, if you budget yourself, you can make room for the fun stuff, and you may surprised how little you need.

9. Adapt -- and overcome. Many people, myself included, use sick time, vacations, or just plain old bad days as a reason to give up and resume their crappy habits. There are days even now when I go over my calorie limit and get no exercise at all. I just say, "I had X good days this week, minus one bad. That's pretty good math." And keep stepping. Also, when on vacation, or in a hotel with no gym, you can still get in a few YouTube workouts, or just avoid Uber and walk everywhere possible. I was just in Quebec for a week, eating and drinking as I liked, and lost two pounds.

10. Go easy on the sauce. Alcohol is a genuine pleasure in life, at least for many, and it is not without some health benefits, but it is also an inhibitor of good sleep and a huge potential source of calories and sugars. Stick to straight hard liquors without sugar (no rum), and lite beers, of which there are endless numbers. Avoid mixed drinks, and keep wine to a single glass, no more than one a day.

11. Stimulate the muscles. Cardiovascular exercise is great in any form, including walking, but it can be overdone, stimulating cortisol (stress horomone) production, and can also fuel chronic injuries. Lifting weights, even light weights, or performing isotonic or isometric exercises (planks, push ups, etc.) builds and strengthens muscle, the existence of which burns fat, in addition to lookin' pretty damn fine.

12. Read before bed. Huh, what, you say? It's a proven fact that staring at electronic computer screens, especially cell phones, overstimulates the brain and makes sleep difficult. Put away your phone a solid hour before bed, and pick up a book. Books engage a different part of the mind entirely and can often facilitate sleep. And sleep is at the core of losing weight, since proper rest lowers stress which in turns lowers fat-boosting hormone production.

13. Stretch. Tai chi, quigoing, or just plain classic stretching exercises you can pick up off any of 10,000 YouTube channels are great for increasing your flexibility and improving posture. They can fix plantar fascitits, ease compressed vertebral pain, reduce sciatica, assist blood flow, and just generally help you everywhere. (The glutes exercises I perform almost every day have unexpectedly done wonders for my hamstrings.) Though not tied to weight loss per se, they improve the body's ability to exercise, which sure as hell don't hurt.

14. Be accountable. It has long been known that having a gym buddy increases by about 50% or more the likelikhood that you will exercise regularly. It is the same with weight loss. I have a nurse practicioner to hold me accountable for my choices and give me advice. You may not need a professional, but if you don't use a personal trainer or some other type of paid advisor, you should at least enlist a lover, friend, relative or co-worker to join you in your quest to change your life.

15. Be kind to yourself. People who are obese, fat, overweight, chubby, flabby, round, big-boned, and "zoftig" all have one thing in common: they live in a society that laughs at them and devalues them as human beings. Fat people are encouraged to laugh at themselves, and not in a kindly way. If you've let yourself go, it's enough to recognize the fact. You can stop there. There's no need to indulge in self-loathing and no use in giving in to despair.

16. Be strategic. Sit down before you even begin your journey, and ask yourself exactly -- EXACTLY -- what you are trying to achieve. Visualize what success looks like, feels like. Understand clearly what your goal is, and then craft a strategy not only to reach the goal, but to....

17. Maintain victory. Losing weight is only part of your battle. Once you've arrived at your target, you damn well want to stay there. So have a second strategy to prevent yourself from slipping back into bad habits. Remain accountable, humble, adaptable, and smart. (This is often the point at which exercise begins to come into play as a tool of weight maintenance, rather than weight loss -- exercise is, believe it or not, a totally inadequate method of achieving weight loss [by itself.])

18. Be realistic. If you want to shed 5 lbs, you can probably do that in a couple of weeks without any drastic changes at all. Walk a little more, eat a little less and better, drink more water, bam, you're done. On the other hand, if you need to shed 50 lbs, or 150 lbs, you are in for a haul, baby. And that's okay. The greater the task, the greater the reward. You just need to be realistic about the timeframe, and learn patience. Many initially successful people fail because they grow discouraged at the pace of things. They want to be thin, now. It doesn't work that way. So...

19. Set short-term goals. I set for myself a series of weights I was trying to reach, one after the other and shoved the main goal into the background, where I could see it but not be intimidated by it. I also looked forward to such things as: adjusting belt notches, wearing clothes that had been too tight previously, comparing "old me" photos to new ones, etc. In this way one of many flaws, impatience, was continuously being rewarded.

20. Don't get stuck in a rut. Most people take some comfort in routines, but the deeper a grove gets, the closer it becomes to turning into a rut which bores you and ultimately drives you away. Experiment with different forms of exercise, stretching, and food. Experiment with healthier snacks and desserts. Reward yourself in small ways for successes, and punish yourself in small ways for failures. Keep it interesting.

Now, my results are follows, after 46 days:

Sunday, June 13: 207.5 lbs
Thursday, August 3: 196.7 lbs

This is a loss of 10.8 lbs in 51 days, or about a pound and a quarter or so per week. This is a healthy, safe, generally sustainable weight loss: I know that much from experience. In addition, I've cut 1.9 off my Body Mass Index and 1.4% of my body weight. I still have quite a long way to go. I'd like to settle around 187 lbs and then assess how I look and feel, whether I want to go further or maintain, whether I want to start lifting weights again or perhaps increase cardio by boxing regularly. But for now I am extremely happy. Everything is going in the right direction, I'm not starving or hangry or weak or faint, my clothes fit better and my self-esteem is inflating like a balloon. And a healthy self-esteem tends to reap dividends in every other aspect of life.

As I said above, you probably already know most of this, and may disagree with some of it. You may be a vegan or a vegetarian and not wish to consume animal protiens. You may drink soda or alcohol fairly heavily and be unwilling to reduce your intake, or you may not drink at all and find these injunctions redundant. That is not an issue. It's just a question of synthetizing together a system of points that works for you, accepting what is useful and rejecting what is useless or harmful. And while I may once again seem as if I am brutally overstating the obvious (my besetting sin), I think it manifest that much of what I listed here is not obvious, given the terrible statistics for obesity in North America. There is a vast difference between merely having knowledge and putting oneself in a mental, spiritual and psychological position to act upon that knowledge in an efficient, effective way. For many years, I was that difference: I lived within it, a double-chinned denizen of the ivory tower, ever the theoretician and ne'er the practicioner. What I offer here I offer humbly in the hopes it might be of some use.