There and Back Again… Again
It’s time for me to come clean.
From 2019 to late 2022, I managed to lose 105 pounds. I had moved a mountain, one pound at a time, for the third time in my life. I had gotten my weight to a healthy level. I had kicked the bad habits. Soda was a distant memory. I worked out multiple times a week. My lunches and dinners would make any nutritionist tap-dance with glee.
I had done it. I had conquered the demon that has plagued me for all of my life. This time, for good.
Then I lost my father.
I would have avoided the emotional eating if this was the first immediate family member I’ve lost instead of the sixth. I could have kept the weight away with my workout routine if I hadn’t been hospitalized for COVID, twice, in the years prior to his death. I should have been more terrified of the scale hitting 250 instead of shrugging and packing (junk) food into my craw until everything stopped hurting so much.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda added up to didn’ta.
Starting late in 2022 and early 2023, the weight came back. It snuck on one bad meal at a time, moving with the mindless determination of a glandular system convinced 300 was the new 200. I could see and feel it happening. The excuses about having to go back to the bigger shirts. The embarrassed requests for new pants as the old ones no longer fit. Having to get a new vest at work because that didn’t fit either.
There were a million alarm bells going off directly over my head and I was too numb and dumb to heed them. I made up an equal number of excuses and false promises of workouts to come, telling myself over and over that the next pound to arrive would be the last one gained.
My body just doesn’t care if I’m sad. If I’m hurt. If my life is just pretty stressful and the last thing I can do is manage my weight right now. Instead, my body chugged along like the little weight gain that could until I was right back where it wanted me at 290.
You will notice, Dear Reader, that it is very much not the early months of 2023.
It is, in fact, the late months of 2024. I spent an entire year on half-assed attempts at structuring my sleeping and paying for a gym membership I never used and, and, and. I was relying upon my prior attempts and the energy and focus that comes from managing to lose a few pounds and turn that into losing many pounds. It never materialized. Any gains would be temporary, and I would immediately snap back to what my body wanted, which was (and is) 290.
This is also the year I turn 40.
My mother’s death in 2018 is what had spurred me into action for my third attempt at being fit. It was a bucket of ice water to the face, waking me to the reality that my health was a finite resource and I was spending it like a gambling addict blowing through their inheritance at the craps table.
It worked! My mother would have been proud! My dad very much was proud!
Then my father was dead, too. I could never have realized just how much I relied upon his approval of the things I have accomplished in this life. Losing him felt like trying to trust-fall backwards only to find a bottomless pit inside a dad-shaped hole.
I spiraled. Hard.
My mental health has always been an issue. My mother held me together when I wasn’t strong enough to do it as a child. My father, it turned out, was the one who kept me moving forward as a man. God it hurts to think I’ll never get to call him again. He always made time for me, like he was on a hike and I was a deer that just wandered up to him and started nibbling on his jacket. I miss him and his wit and his determination and his leadership insights so very much.
And, instead of his untimely passing being a source of fuel for my fire, it smothered the stuttering flames of my motivation. I nearly lost my job and my marriage. For a year and some change, I was left drifting. My wife, god bless her every cell, was a saint through all of it. She gave me the space and support I needed to pull myself together. Even though she was dealing with so much and yet she gave up what little time and mental space she had to hold me together. I can’t believe how lucky I truly was when she walked into my kitchen.
Little by little, I’ve managed to reconquer the territory devastated by despair. Yet the vitality and drive that once animated me about my weight was absent. I had found myself once again shackled to a body that refuses to be healthy no matter what I do, so I resigned myself to the untimely demise my body was dead-set on. Pun very much intended.
Yet life has a funny way of reminding you that all is never truly lost.
My wife and I, after nine years of trying, are going to be welcoming our second child this June. I’ll get to be the girl dad I’ve always wanted to be. Our little jelly bean is growing like a champion. Everything modern medicine can tell us about her (which is a lot) lets us know that she’ll come out happy and healthy and ready to be showered with affection.
This has put a severe dent in my plans to die a messy and early death. Kinda hard to look a baby in the eye and know that, unless you work up your courage to move the exact same mountain for a fourth time, she’s gonna have no father when she starts middle school.
At this point, Dear Reader, you will note it’s high-time for me to get my tuchus in gear.
What it is going to take at this late remove, given my age and the, uh, scale of my weight-loss needs, will be nothing short of total commitment. There is no pride, no dignity, no shame. Time to leave everything on the field. As it should have been last time, this time there will be no survivors. No surviving bad habits, I mean. So, to that end I have created a list of four things that will be imperative for me to actually make it to my baby girl’s graduation.
In no particular order, they are:
- GET. HELP.
No, not a psychiatrist. Okay, well, definitely that too. But! More immediately, I mean that I need to turn to science to make this last attempt something other than a flash in the pan or a well-intentioned-but-ultimately-useless action. No tilting at windmills for this Quixote, thank you. What I need is to actually admit that I am not capable of doing this successfully on my own and rope in the recent rapid advancements in weight-loss knowledge to get me over the finish line for keeps.
I have done that, and the results arrived in the mail just this last week. And yes, it will be exactly what you think it is. No, I will not be apologizing or making excuses. You know why? Because my body is broken, and even the American Medical Association is now acknowledging it.
I can’t help that, no matter what I do or how often I try to lose weight, my body immediately plays ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on repeat and does reverse exercise until I’m back to 300 (+/- 20). That’s what it wants to be at. That is what it’s always wanted to be at.
Does it care about the number of push-ups I do? Not even remotely. Even at times when I’ve lost weight, I’ve struggled with the immediate uptick after slipping up by even a tiny margin. It is impossible to maintain that kind of vigilance indefinitely. I am proof of that.
So, when the GLP-1 my physician prescribed to me arrived in the mail, I let loose a sigh of relief. Why? Because at long last, I don’t have to fight the silent war against my body alone. I will have help, something to help regulate my damaged hunger signals and ceaseless cries for more fat. I finally have something that will tell my body that no, in point of fact, I am actually full right now and maybe I don’t need to eat half my body weight in sugar and fat.
This dovetails nicely into point number the next.
- GOTTA WORK LIKE IT’S ALL UP TO ME.
Yes, having medication is going to be life-changing when it comes to my weight loss. HOWEVER, it also cannot be the sum-total of my weight loss plan. No amount of shots will make up for a steady diet of donut sticks and Sunkist Zero. When you look at a mound of empty wrappers and all you see is sugar and fat, that’s not something a shot alone can fix.
It’s something I used to have, and thanks to my jelly bean and a very supportive wife, it’s something that I have begun having again.
The first, most critical hurdle I have successfully vaulted is divorcing soda for the umpteenth time. We’ve always been together, ever since we were kids. Heck, my dad used to have a fridge in the basement that held nothing but soda! I could kill a 24 pack in a single day, then and now, and not bat an eye. It was a problem.
You’ll note, Dear Reader, my use of past tense on that one.
For the past month, I’ve been soda free. I haven’t even allowed myself a cheat day or to have one during the last really low moment I had. It’s been hard, true, but with much in these recent days I keep telling myself the same thing: Yes, I have to die just as my parents and grandparents did, just as my sister is doing now, but I need to control the things that are within my grasp while I’m alive. Yes, not having four or five 20 oz. sodas during work is hard, but imagining the pain and grief of a young woman barely out of her adolescence as she mourns a father she barely got to know is one hell of a lot harder.
So, tea, coffee, water, and super diluted apple juice it is.
This, alas, means I have to talk about the next thing.
- “You lookin cut!” — A friend at work
What feels like forever ago, in the year of our lord 2020, a co-worker shouted this at me as a form of greeting. At the time, I was at the apex of my latest weight loss attempt. I was doing a hundred push-ups a day, drinking enough water to drown a fish, and eating roughly two metric tons of fresh spinach each day. Oh, and I ate only fish and eggs for meat, too.
Yeah, I was doing it, and doing it well.
Nowadays I can barely even hold a plank for 20 seconds, let alone do 100 push-ups. It’s always been a secret dream of mine to become a very buff individual. As someone who was bullied relentlessly for my looks, it meant the world for me to hear such a compliment. It’s why it sticks with me all these years later. I thought the strength of it would be enough to sustain me.
Well, it wasn’t.
So, I’m going to have to settle for whatever ‘cut’ will be now. Gone are dreams of social media fame for my rocking post-Shamu bod. Who was Shamu? She was a whale. I’m old and so are my references. And, incidentally, so is my body. No amount of crunches will change the fact that my time for physical beauty has come and it has gone.
That doesn’t mean my time for physical well being is gone, however! Quite the opposite, in fact; removed from the constant dreams / torments of physical perfection that require insane amounts of physical and dietary manipulation and a butt-load of good genetic inheritance, I can pursue being healthy for the sole purpose of not giving my daughter a funeral for her graduation present.
Honestly I’m not sure this new motivation is any healthier than losing my mom was, but it sure is helping me get a lot of stuff accomplished!
To assist with revitalizing that which is vital no longer, I’m exercising again. Planks, pushups, going to the gym to do biking and doing upper body work to prep for pull-ups. I’m also going to work on my lung function with some specific exercises used by Air Force pilots to combat the effect of G-Force on blood flow to the brain. There’s even a medical study published on it!
Once I’ve managed to get enough weight off (thinking like 250’s or so), I’d like to take up jogging. Walking has been tremendous exercise but I do so much of it at work that my body no longer even sees it as anything out of the ordinary. Biking at the gym will help my joint health and give me a bit more aerobic exercise that isn’t my usual 12–24k steps, but jogging is a hobby that will keep you healthy and active a lifetime. Even if I end up switching careers or moving onward to a job that is a lot less exercise, having jogging in my back pocket will allow me to retain whatever losses I manage to string together before jelly bean’s birth.
Most of all, I am writing this post (And the posts which will follow) to remind myself that even though I have found myself once again on the heavy side of my life’s swinging pendulum, I have been here before. I have endured these times and overcome them. They are not permanent. I am not helpless. There are answers this time, science which has finally caught up to the lived reality so many of us have spent a lifetime dealing with.
And more than anything, more than science, more than exercise, I have my family. I have my wife and the strength in each other we’ve found. I have my son and the incredible efforts he’s putting into his education to learn two languages at once. And I have my jelly bean here to give me a chance to prove, once and for all, that I am a good father. The last thing on earth I want to do is leave her without a father. The pain from my father’s loss has sent me reeling. Were I to leave as early as I currently fear, I would be giving her that burden far too early. I want to see her grow up. I want to see her get married. I want to meet her children, which is something that my own parents cannot do with her.
So I sit, and I drink my coffee (sweetened with some liquid stevia), and I write. Join me, all of you who long for a life of health, trapped within a body that refuses to get with the program. You are not alone. Together, we can overcome our inner demons.
Weightlossfully,
Justin
