Middle Age: Gaining Weight, Losing Time?
How I Used My Growing Sense of Mortality to Help Buck an Expansively Depressing Trend
I remember exactly where I was when I first learned that I was obese. Andria and I were visiting her uncle Jim and his husband Danny. We were outside lounging on the patio and I was openly feeling sorry for myself.
“I look pregnant,” I said, glumly. “I never thought I’d get fat like this.”
“You’re not fat,” Andria insisted. “Quit being mean to my husband or I’ll hit you.”
Jim, a retired carpenter who was one of the rare men I knew who maintained good health and worked out regularly, suggested we check out what he called “the BMI chart.”
His suggestion prompted Danny to reach for his phone.
“I don’t want to know, but now I’ve got to know,” he said with a chuckle. Danny was skinny everywhere except for his rather hefty midsection, having made being sedentary an art form, according to Jim. “What does BMI stand for, again?”
Andria and Jim answered at the same time: “Body Mass Index.”
To me, Andria said, “But it’s very inaccurate because it doesn’t take into account muscle versus fat and you do a lot of physical labor, so…” she trailed off as she rubbed my back to console me, probably guessing what the BMI chart was about to reveal.
Danny asked for my height and weight.
“Six feet, two-hundred-and-thirty pounds.”
Danny squinted at his screen and moved his finger across it, muttering the numbers I had given him.
“Oooo,” He said. “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you sir are just barely obese.”
“Obese!?” Andria and I said at the same time. “That can’t be right,” she added.
“Check it out for yourself,” Danny said and showed us his phone. It was true. According to the BMI chart, I was in the red.
“Hey,” Danny said with some enthusiasm. “At least you’re not morbidly obese.”
How did this happen? How could I, a one-time marathon runner who played city-league soccer and rec-league basketball well into his thirties, wake up one day to find himself obese?
When I put the question to my Facebook community, I received the kind of answers you’d expect from “experts” on social media. But the most common response could be paraphrased by two lazy words: middle age.
“Once you hit your forties, your metabolism collapses, just like your dreams,” someone wrote.
Although intended as a joke, it was hard for me to argue. The evidence was all around me. Men like my father and his peers, all who used to be fit and trim in their 20s and 30s, had somehow transformed into frumpy and bulgy, their bellies drooping over and smothering the belts that barely held up their pants.
It was so common, I began to assume that getting fat was a biological imperative. Especially when I considered the data. The National Institute of Health (NIH) cited a 2013–14 study showing that “More than 2 in 3 [American] adults (70.2 percent) were considered to be overweight or have obesity.”
Two out of three! No wonder COVID-19 hit this country so hard.
After three whole years of feeling sorry for myself, beating myself up, and constantly comparing myself to others, on my 46th birthday, I decided to get up off the couch and act.
I began power-walking twice a day, I rode my bicycle to work instead of using the car, I cut down on sweets, and I jumped on the intermittent fasting bandwagon.
Three months later, I had lost ten pounds. Three months after that, I lost another five. By the time my 47th birthday came around the following June, I was down to 210. Not bad!
And yet…I couldn’t seem to break the 210-barrier. Although no longer considered obese by BMI metrics, I was still 50 pounds heavier than I had been at age 39.
Then it happened. The movie “Zombieland” came to Netflix. Although I had seen it in theaters during its release in 2009, I was thin then, so it didn’t have the same impact it did later on when I watched it as an older, and much heavier man.
The part that hit me like a bag of lard was when the protagonist/narrator, played by Jesse Eisenberg, explains to the audience “The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio. When the zombie outbreak first hit, the first to go, for obvious reasons…were the fatties.”
“The first to go were the fatties,” I repeated to myself as I sat lazily on my recliner, brushing away the greasy popcorn crumbs from my belly. “Hey…I’m a fatty. I would be among the first to go!”
Zombie apocalypse aside, when it comes to mortality, the bigger one gets the lower one’s life expectancy. According to one such study, “extreme obesity can shorten lifespan by as much as 14 years.”
Furthermore, even if I were to buck the odds and not have my life expectancy shortened, by remaining this overweight, what quality of life would I be living? I already was suffering from high blood pressure, something that wasn’t a problem before my weight issues.
While most of the older men in my life lived well into their 70’s and 80’s, despite being obese, their last decade or so was not pretty.
My father, who became obese in his late 50’s, spent most of his 60’s and 70's in and out of the hospital. He survived two forms of cancer, major back surgery that left him more sedentary than usual and then ended up getting Alzheimer’s. He died in his sleep at the age of 83, his mind relatively wiped clean of all his most precious memories.
I don’t mean to suggest that Dad’s obesity directly led to his ill health later in life, but it certainly didn’t help. Obesity almost invariably leads to an inactive lifestyle, and an inactive lifestyle increases your chance of being obese. It’s a vicious cycle that’s challenging to break because who wants to go running when you have 50 extra pounds to lug around? My own insecurities led me to believe that running out in public while so out of shape, might inspire certain privileged in-shape people to point and laugh at me.
Thus, it was much easier for me to stay home and watch superhero movies than to risk being judged.
According to health professionals “Having a sedentary lifestyle can also raise your risk of premature death. And the more sedentary you are, the higher your health risks are.” (medlineplus.gov)
So it was clear that I wasn’t doing enough. I would have to swallow my pride and go to the gym. Which is what I did, focusing only on the treadmill. Three times a week, I ran about five miles at a shot, listening through my earbuds to an audiobook by Neville Goddard called Out of This World, Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally.
I wasn’t in a hurry, so I didn’t push myself any harder than that simple routine. Even though it seemed like I had ballooned to 230 pounds overnight, it had actually taken almost two years, so I accepted the fact that losing that weight wasn’t going to happen overnight, either.
With patience and a positive attitude and through Goddard’s methods of imagining myself to be the thin, fit person I wanted to be as if I already were that person, it happened.
I had told Andria over and over again, “I don’t want to go into my 50s being overweight and out of shape. I want to go into my 50s healthier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
I’ll turn 51 this coming June and in July I plan on running in my first distance race since I was a teenager. With the support of my doctor, I have weened myself from my blood pressure medication.
I now weigh the same I weighed in college-a trim 160 pounds and a nearly perfect number according to the BMI chart.
Who knows what crazy world events the future will bring. After COVID-19 it seems like anything is possible. Zombies? Aliens? World Peace?
Whatever comes, I might not be fast enough to outrun it, but I certainly won’t be sitting on my ass waiting for it to get me.
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor’s Handbook
Damian Sebouhian is a writer, teacher, life (soul) coach, astrologer, tarot reader, and creator of Soul Lantern Tarot. https://ranunculus-fennel-xp6n.squarespace.com/
