I have always struggled with weight. I’m no scientist, but by looking at my relatives on both sides, I can see that there is an unmistakable predisposition toward rotundity in my genetic code. Not everyone has been struck by it, but it’s certainly there.
During my junior year of high school, I made my first attempt at being a homeschooler. I was fed up with public school and I plunged into the murky depths of learning at home. It wasn’t for me, but what was for me was the opportunity to get into shape. Going into that year, I weighed in at 214 pounds. I was pudgy and soft and felt quite far away from being the chick magnet I wanted to be. Granted, I was nearing my final height of 6′4″, and with broad shoulders and fairly large build overall, 214 wasn’t very fat. It wasn’t, however, where I wanted to be.
Performing little to no cardio (I always had asthma problems as a kid) I began crafting my own diet, high in carbs and extremely low in fat. The carbs weren’t intentional, they were simply the only things I could find that didn’t have much fat in them. I absolutely refused to snack, and never ate late at night. At the time, I didn’t care about alcohol, so that wasn’t an issue. I didn’t worry about sugar at all.
In the mornings, I did a bunch of crunches and bench presses, and that was pretty much my workout. At the end of six months, I had dropped 34 pounds and hit my lowest weight of 180 pounds. I thought I looked great. I could feel my abs with my hand on my stomach, even if they weren’t ripped, and I was lean as could be. Looking back on my pictures, I was emaciated. 180 was way, way too skinny for me. I also royally screwed up my blood sugar levels, and have suffered from low sugar attacks ever since. Don’t know if the two are related.
My senior year added back some of the weight, and I found myself at a healthy 206. I was exercising a lot, so it was a less flabby 206 than I had experienced before. The summer before college, I worked in a physically intensive job with a family of German farmboys in Idaho, and added another 10 pounds. I was back to 215 when I started my first semester at Steubenville, but I was in great shape.
College is fairly sedentary, however, and includes large quantities of foods like pizza and beer. After fluctuating up during the semesters and down during summer jobs that were very active, I graduated from college weighing 245. I was a bit more pudgy than I would have liked, but I was still in decent shape and had reasonably good reactions from the ladies. It was in fact at this time that I met my wife, who was at the time sporting a lovely physique of her own that was often well displayed through the use of miniskirts (which she has since gotten rid of…to both my relief and chagrin.)
There was a problem, however. Jamie and I both love to eat. In fact, our first real encounter was over lunch, where we discovered our mutual passion for food. I was also entering the phase of my life known as the “sedentary white collar career”, which involved increasingly longer commutes and even more epic stretches of time sitting on my butt in front of a computer screen under unnatural fluorescent lighting.
The pounds began to add up. They peaked just before my wedding, then I managed to fight them back down, only to move to a different place and schedule and allow them to stack back up. Now, as I mark the first full year of my thirties, I shudder to admit that it’s not a fluke, not simply the result of a binge or a bender, but that the scale consistently tells me something I utterly don’t want to hear.
I weigh 300 pounds. Yes, that’s THREE HUNDRED POUNDS.
Granted, a guy my size at three hundred can still see his toes, walk up stairs without panting for breath, and doesn’t look nearly like Jared before he did the Subway thing. But three hundred is three hundred. I’m carrying an extra hundred pounds over my senior year of high school. That’s like having an entire Ewok strapped to my chest, 24/7. (A full-grown Ewok. Not Wickett.)
The time has come for things to change. I’ve added 10 inches to my waist since high school. Stuff doesn’t fit that should. Tying my shoes without an elevated platform of some kind to rest my foot on is a chore. I’m sluggish and tired even when I get a good night’s sleep. I feel like crap, my back hurts, and I’m a chronic grump.
I used to have a little something called willpower. I find that concept elusive these days. I’m gone from home for nearly 12 hours a day, and when I arrive, I’ve got screaming babies to attend to, a frustrated wife, a messy home that said wife couldn’t stop from being destroyed by said babies while she was making dinner, and a whole butt-load of stress that I carry with me from day to day because of any number of reasons, including the fact that I’m a psychopathic worrier.
I could etch out a little bit of time at night to exercise, but it would be tough. When things finally settle down, the time I do have is coveted relaxation time, usually on a full belly. I still haven’t figured out the trick to waking up early and getting moving. I am a zombie when I awake. Exercise is as far from my mind as it can get.
So I have an uphill climb ahead of me. The fact is, I don’t want to weigh 500 pounds by the time I’m forty, or need quadruple bypass surgery before I qualify for a senior citizen discount, or become a diabetic like my grandfather (who also hit 300 at some point). I love my wife and kids, and I’d like to not only be around for them, but in a better mood. And of course, I really want to look better in my bikini…wait, no. Forget I said that.
So this is it. This is the first step toward accountability. This is me, telling you, my 3.7 readers, that you can nag or encourage me as you like, and heap scorn, derision and public humiliation on me if I fail. I have about 350 days left this year, and I want to lose thirty pounds. This is, I think, a reasonable (if not nearly sufficient) goal. It’s 0.08 pounds a day, or 2.5 pounds a month.
I should be able to do this. I plan on updating on the first of each month to say how things are going. Maybe at the end of the year I’ll post before and after photos - but only if I don’t shower or shave in the before photos and can airbrush the after photos and wear my most slimming clothes and have über-stylish hair.
With any luck, maybe I can lose more. This isn’t just a cliché New Year’s resolution weight loss thing, either. This is one of several big goals I have this year, which include getting evaluated by a medical professional for my ADD/Anxiety issues and seeing my own writing in print in a real publication of some kind.
I’m terrible about goal-setting and goal-accomplishing, but I’m going to give it an honest-to-goodness try.
Let the fat jokes begin.
Ditto on the weight problems. But when I fast more often, things seem to get better. Exercise hardly seems to help me with the weight loss, but it does help me get to sleep.
I was at my best fighting weight when I worked out two hours every day: swimming, running, and weightlifting; but it took a tremendous amount of physical activity to burn off those calories that my body craves (which is why faster works better for me).
I won’t do any fat jokes. I recall in grade school giving one of my classmates the nickname “Tubby”, which I thought was really funny. As it so happens, this classmate blossomed into a beautiful young woman, upon whom I had a big crush: and of course, she never forgot the nickname!
Make this goal an act of your will! Good luck.
Steve,
Look at this: http://www.bodyflex.com/?gclid=CN3QsoqV95ACFRuhFQodwB4d1w
It sounds ridiculous at first, but I’ve been doing it since the summer along with my wife and some of our relatives. It works. Be sure to read about the scientific foundations of the program. In a nutshell, oxygen burns fat. This program has found the most effective way to deliver oxygen to fat cells.
P.S. You don’t need the all the extras, just the book.
God Bless you in your goals!!
We have been watching our waistlines…expand and now we need to do something.
I guess I am the .7 of the readers…ha ha ha
Fatty …
I’ve got the perfect diet.
Have someone really important and close to you die. Get involved in an experimental religious community closely associated with a religious order upon whom you have come to depend for all your social, spiritual and much of your economic life and have it flop. Have someone else really important to you die. Move to another country.
You’re guaranteed to lose 30 pounds.
Oh yeah. And stop eating carbohydrates. No toast. No potatoes. No rice, pasta, or noodles. Nothing but meat, fish, veg and fruit.
Steve,
As I have probably mentioned before, for several years I shared a home with a family very interested in natural health, slow food, organic farming, etc. Growing up, I thought my family was extraordinarily healthy because we never bought Fruit Loops or Twinkies and we only used whole wheat bread. Imagine my chagrin when I began to take a serious interest in health, and discovered we had some really terrible eating habits and hadn’t scratched the surface of understanding proper diet and nutrition. It really didn’t take too long to change habits. Especially formative was a radical detoxification diet(The Fat Flush) my roommate and I undertook one Lent. My aunt recently tried this and lost 30lbs, though she was not anywhere near obese. For my part, besides being an extreme mortification, it restored my body’s natural sensitivities, worn away and immobilized by years of abuse. I distinctly remember the day when I went shopping and put the diet on hold, purchasing a Raspberry Italian soda with whipped cream. Wow…I drank about 1/3 of it before I started feeling so gross I had to go home. My body punished me with a headache and abdominal discomfort for about 4 ounces of corn syrup and a little red dye. Two years later those sharpened sensitivities still help me. I never touch soda. Much as I love coffee, wine and ales I usually avoid having all of them on one day. Coffee has become a weekend treat. It depletes the body of magnesium - which is necessary for the absorption of calcium - and it is also pretty dehydrating. Homogenized milk gives me indigestion - I only use it for baking. Foods made from refined sugars and flours have no appeal for me. I prefer sprouted grain breads or sourdoughs(Alicia makes wonderful sourdough) made from spelt flour. Rappadura, honey and pure maple syrup have become my regular sweeteners and I still limit their use as much as possible. Another really enlightening book was Nourishing Traditions, published by the Weston Price Foundation for Wise Traditions. Who knew that our scientifically advanced aged could be so silly as to feed orange peels and soy beans to creatures with four-chambered stomaches clearly designed for grazing?
Anyways, the great thing is that I have been able to maintain a healthy weight without feeling it a hardship. My family has a tendency to put on weight and we have a very Italian appreciation for food, but I am at the lower end of the healthy weight range for my height. Sure, it wouldn’t hurt me to lose ten pounds, but I have no anxiety about my weight and I feel very healthy and energetic even though I have become much less active physically in the past couple of years. A more simple diet, also very helpful is the The Maker’s Diet. These sort of diets help you change your lifestyle by developing your taste for healthy foods and restoring your natural defenses against crap.
300 pounds!
Matt,
I was 295 when I got married five years ago. This is primarily earth shattering for me - it’s a psychological barrier I finally crossed.
I made it as low as 265 before I went back to Phoenix, but then we wound up poor and eating lots of carbs and it shot back up.
I hate low carb diets. They work, but I hate them. I don’t want to live longer if I can’t have carbs. The whole foods thing that Lorraine is talking about I think is on the right path. Low carb can only be an intro phase…
I suppose what I’m saying Matt is that the Fat Steve™ you’ve known for some time now was always a dozen dougnuts away from 300. He has simply finally arrived.
six foot four!?
Hell boy, you’ve got at least another centime’s worth before you have to worry. Crikey! That’s really not short at all. I had no idea. You would not even fit in my little house.
It could be the Irish blood. Or the Slavic. Or the Welsh.
All I know is that my mom has four brothers, the shortest of whom is my height. The tallest is 6′8″. And with one exception, none are petite.
(We all, of course, married tiny women.)
Steve,
I second the writer who said that eating less helps more with the weight than exercise. That’s my experience anyway. I was able to loose weight by doing SOME exercise (like jogging for 20 minutes a day, 3 or 4 days a week), but that’s all I did for exercise. I really cut down on the food, which helped me a lot. I need to lose some too. I’m with you . . . it’s time to start eating better!
And by the way, if you cut potatoes out of your diet, you are no longer my cousin. Cut down on carbs, fine, good. Cut down on potatoes . . . you might as well turn Protestant. =)
Dia duit,
John