How I lost 125 pounds insanely
Diet, exercise, obsession, and losing 40% of me
“You’re pre-diabetic.”
I was a 302 pound, 40 year old Caucasian-and-Cherokee staring at my Asian-American doctor whose sense of humor was even drier than mine.
“Your blood sugar is 117, and your A1C is 5.9. Now, you have some time to take action before full-blown diabetes sets in…” and she launched into her spiel was about glucose testing, glycemic index, and a conservative “be mindful” sense of things.
But I knew that I had to take more drastic action. I needed to get to a healthy weight. I’d been feeling miserable, anyway — my size 44 pants weren’t sitting on my waist (and somewhat ironically, I had to hold them up because while they were too narrow for my waist, they were also too narrow for my hips). And the 44s weren’t big enough anymore — I was popping buttons with regularity. My shirts were also getting tight — XXL t-shirts were riding up, button-down shirts looked to bursting when I sat down. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I felt like a beached whale lying in bed or on the couch.
I’d reached this point for a number of reasons. I wasn’t the most active kid. I couldn’t run a mile. Literally. I had never run a mile start-to-finish without stopping and getting winded and walking and asking why I even bothered.
In junior high I discovered the pool. The water is a great equalizer, and it meant my huge shoulders could drive me rather than my feet. So in junior high and high school I was in the pool five days a week during swim season. Even lettered twice (much to the excitement of my father, who had been an athlete but discovered smoking was more his forte.)
But then I went to college, and I stopped going to the pool. I graduated from high school weighing 180 lbs. I graduated from college weighing 225. My weight ebbed and flowed from there, rising steadily the longer I went in the working world.
The working world. I’m a natural perfectionist, working in a field (interaction design) where perfectionism gives way to the pragmatism of “just ship.” So I was always stressed out. And food provided an easy way to placate the stress.
Now, like everyone, I’d had my scares and come-to-Jesus moments with the weight issue. In 2000, I lost about 40 lbs. after a brutal series of panic attacks culminated with an ER trip. At the time, losing weight and getting healthy seemed like the best way to placate the anxiety. It worked, until I got laid off in the dotcom bust.
In 2003, in anticipation of my daughter’s birth, I tried to get right with my weight and lost about 35 lbs. That fell apart when her birth became far more complicated than expected. In 2007 and 2010, I lost roughly 30 and 25 lbs. It was all the same 40 pounds I was playing with, roughly.
By 2012, I’d gained the 25 lbs back I’d lost in 2010 — and then tacked about another 15.
302 pounds. And prediabetic.
Hit The Weight Down
So here’s the thing about diets: They’re all gimmicks.
Diets work under one principle: If you reduce your intake of calories below the total number of calories you burn, you will lose weight.
Weight Watchers has two gimmicks: Convert calories into “points,” then add in the meetings to build in accountability. Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig are similar, only they require you buy their food (the original “walled garden”). Atkins, it was about a protein-rich diet to trigger ketosis. Paleo, it’s Atkins plus… fervency, perhaps.
But every diet works under the same principle: If you eat fewer calories than your body needs to burn, you will lose weight.
Knowing that, I stuck with Weight Watchers, because it offered me three things:
- The simplicity of substituting points for calories, making it easier to track my intake;
- Accountability, which from past experience I’ve learned is a big motivator for me; and
- No bans on what I can or cannot eat. (I’ll give you my baguette when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.)
So off I went. And after the first ten pounds of water weight flew off, I just kept pushing on through.
The Problem Of Pain
A few months into the diet, I was starting to plateau. It was clear that dropping calories was working, but it wasn’t going to be enough.
I had to exercise.
Luckily, it was the start of the year, and every gym in town had a deal. So I plunked down my money and went for it.
On to the treadmill I went. The first couple times were very rough. Moving 280 lbs of person using muscles that had trouble moving a 50 lb first grader around a mile run in under 30 minutes… it was asking much. But one day, I ran a 12 minute mile and didn’t die. Holy crap. I ran a mile!
I kept pushing all summer. An 11 minute mile. A 10 minute mile. Meanwhile, I added in weights, went back into the pool, and started walking at lunch.
And then I signed up for a 5K in the fall. Put myself through the training. I was just hoping to finish, run the whole way, and not die. I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, I could crack 35 minutes.
I ran it in under 30 minutes. Mind you, my quads were totally thrashed the last mile, but I had managed to run 3.1 miles in the time it took me to run a single mile when I was 6. My speed was just ahead of the mean of my age group. A year earlier, I doubt I could have run the whole way.
On Anti-Fat Sentiment
“You look great,” she said. “Thanks.” “I mean, you look so much more handsome than you used to.”
And that’s when I got a little upset. Was I ugly before? Unattractive? Did I only need to lose 75 lbs. before I could be deemed “attractive?”
But it was more than that. I had an encounter at an event where a woman, near my age, spent a considerable amount of time flirting with me. Mind you, I’m a prickly introvert who doesn’t take a shine to flatterers, but this time was, well, different. This woman had known me from other places, known me when I weighed 300 lbs. Why, 75 lbs. later, was I suddenly worth flirting with?
Until this diet, the fat acceptance movement felt, to me, like the smokers’ rights movement of the late 1980s — a way for people doing unhealthy things to gather like-minded individuals and rationalize their way through their unhealthiness. Now, while I don’t cotton the health denialism I hear from some in the fat acceptance movement, I think I now understand now the movement’s overall thrust.
Weight is an visceral societal marker. A fat person can easily be dismissed as sad, mental, or unable to control themselves. They choose to be unhealthy, we tell ourselves. We teach ourselves that the thin, hourglass women of the airbrushed magazine covers are our ideal while dismissing those who do not fit that stereotype.
My thinking has changed. If you are happy being fat, be fat. If you’re healthy being fat, be fat. You may not even be fat. But the point is to take a holistic view of yourself, change what should be changed, and leave the rest be.
I wasn’t happy being fat. And I wasn’t healthy being fat. So the fat had to go.
Riding The Bull
I’ve learned I have a touch of OCD. Not to the point that I’m exhibiting compulsive behaviors, but I’m certainly obsessive. It really came out during this diet.
My spreadsheet of weights gave me numbers I could obsess over. I’m averaging a 1.8 lb/week clip; could I stay on it? Could I crack 260 this week? 250? 240? Could I keep up the run of losing weight every single week?
Soon, I was at the gym on Friday nights chalking up obscene miles on the treadmill. My body was starting to break down. And my doctor was asking whether I was starting to tread into anorexia.
The struggle, though, was that my bit of OCD was keeping me on track. I was losing weight, after all. My clip was still safe — under 2 lbs a week. The gym was giving me muscles I never knew existed. Were it not for my obsession, I certainly would have given up months earlier.
So, you ride the bull. You ride the bull until it throws you. And this bull called OCD has nearly thrown me off several times. But every time I get close, I manage to find my center, back off a bit, and keep right on going.
But it’s a two-edged sword. And you worry about obsession becoming the thing that drives you.
The Changes
My clothes budget was obscene. I changed sizes once a month. When I started out I wore XXL shirts; now I wear mediums. My waist size was 44; now it's 33. I had to toss an extra two inches on my inseam to keep my pants from getting too high-water. Going to the thrift shop didn’t help, not when finding the right thing in the right size was such a crap shoot.
My alcohol tolerance plummeted. Two pints of beer used to be fine. Now two pints meant finding a cab. Meanwhile, my blood pressure dropped from prehypertension to hypotension — standing up became an adventure in “Am I going to have to grab the wall about five seconds from now?”
Being fat for so long left me with the infamous saggy skin problem, but I found that a bit overblown. Having some odd sags doesn’t look as bad as obesity. Plus, it doesn’t block my view of my feet, which I’d forgotten even existed.
My diet didn’t change that much, and yet it changed immensely. I’m still an omnivore, but I eat a lot less meat and dairy and more vegetables. (And I still hate tofu.) I still eat fried foods, but in extreme moderation. I still drink, but I go top shelf — if I’m only going to have a little alcohol, might as well be the best.
The End, And The Beginning
On April 12, 2014, I weighed 177 pounds, 125 less than I did 72 weeks earlier. 16 months of riding the bull got me to a weight I hadn’t been since high school.
A day earlier, I turned in my resignation at work. And the two were related.
During the diet, the job had transformed into its own obsession. A design project had turned into an understaffed, overworked death march. And at the end of that, bad leadership finished off what was left of me that wasn’t burned out.
So, in the midst of all this chaos, I did what any obsessive would do: Latched onto whatever I could control. And in this case, the diet is what I have extreme control over.
But, ultimately, the bull threw me. Not in the way I expected, though. I made my weight loss goal. I was healthier than I’d been, ever. But my job had gone to hell, and I was showing signs not just of burnout but of PTSD. The bull bucked me in a direction I hadn’t expected.
That said, I have my health, finally. My blood sugar is back in line; I have no signs of pre-diabetes. I slashed over 30 points off my cholesterol. My blood pressure and pulse look more like a 41 year old athlete’s, not like a 41 year old morbidly obese man.
It is the beginning, though. A 2007 review of weight loss studies showed that 1/3rds to 2/3rds of study dieters regained more weight than they lost on the study diet. The odds of me being able to maintain this loss are low. So now, vigilance. And vigilance is difficult when you’re out of a job routine. But I keep trying. I did an Ignite Seattle talk on it.
Losing 128 pounds taught me I could do anything if I was willing to obsess over it and push myself from small goal to small goal. I’ve never been better off or happier. But it didn’t solve all my problems. I still struggle with bad emotions, impostor syndrome, my itchiness to be better, and a susceptibility to bad work experiences. I don’t think I’m good looking, I feel dumb half the time, and, amazingly, I still feel fat.
But I never set out to fix those. I set out to fix my health. So I guess we see what’s next on my list.
