How I Got TOO BIG

In high school I rowed crew and wrestled and my weight was fine. In collge I smoked and drank booze, my weight was less fine. Out on my own, I was always borderline obese at 275 (obese being 30% overweight). Then in 1989, at age 43, I quit smoking, and instantaneously became obese for real - in a matter of a few months my weight became unknowable because I was off the charts (all doctors' scales stop at 350). Once in awhile I would sneak on a feed scale and weigh myself; what also worked were those veterinarian scales made for both the dog and owner to get on. The memory is vague, but I recall that the last time I got on one of those, I thought I broke it - I weighed nearly 390 pounds. I told no one.

Redemption began in 1994 - my mother died, my wife quit my small business and went off to college, and somehow it came to my attention I needed to loose some weight. I had previously been on Akien's diet a couple of times, and while I lost weight, it always came right back when I just couldn't look at another steak. So I decided then and there - no more diets. I didn't know it at the time but what I began was the one and only, the dreaded, Life Style Change.

I got my first tip on how to actually loose weight from one of those little articles in Parade Magazine, the well know health magazine included in your Sunday paper. I remember clearly the author said "everyone eats too much of something, it could be bananas or whatever." The clear implication was: if you can just control that one thing, you can control your weight. Believe it or not, that one little idea became the corner stone of my diet for the next 10 years. I did not count calories, I did not follow diet plans, because everyone "knew" diets didn't work, and the weight would come right back. So "diet" for me became the gradual elimination of "bad foods" in my diet - in other words: Life Style Change.

The first thing to go was potato chips. At that in time, I did a lot of driving a couple of days a week. I couldn't get the car started without an open bag of potato chips (think "cell phone" in the current vernacular). When I didn't get thin without the chips, I let go of the chicken McNuggets (a "healthy" replacement for the chips). When I still didn't get thin, I decided that breakfast everyday at Burger King probably was the one thing I ate too much. And so it went month after month, year after year. Somehow, somewhere, my wife's vegetarianism rubbed off, and it got too messy to cook meat in the house. My weight stabilized at what I estimated to be 365 (from how hard the balance beam bounced off the restraint). The battle had been refined by 2004/2005, and I was fighting trans fats and high fructose corn syrup rather than McGriddles. But what I had undergone was the Life Style Change, in such a slow and unremarkable fashion that I didn't notice it and felt no pain.

Practically lost sight of in the course of the Life Style Change, was the fact I really wasn't loosing any weight. Disturbing messages began appearing the Wall Street Journal (another well known health journal) to the effect that "Americans spend too much time worrying about WHAT they eat and not enough about HOW MUCH they eat." The possibility that I was eating not just too much of one thing, but too much of everything, became an increasingly nagging thought.

It all came to a head in 2005. It became clear in the spring -when I began the usual yard work- that I had no endurance. By summer I couldn't get to the top of a hill without sucking air so hard I had to stop. And as noted in my profile, the cummulative effect of 16 years of obesity came crashing down between Dec 5, 2005 and March 14, 2006. But now begins the story of how I loose the weight.