How I Got Here: A History of a Fat Guy

[This post is adapted from two posts I wrote on an old blog a few years ago, found here and here.  I am not taking that blog down even though parts of it are excruciating for me to read.  I’ll explain more when I write about being honest with yourself.  (Okay, I wrote about being honest with yourself here.)]

I have a great life. I grew up in a very happy home with awesome parents and five wonderful siblings with whom I got along just fine (still do, even!). When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and ten years later we love each other more and more every day. We have a beautiful daughter and two handsome sons, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I am very happy.

But until recently, I sure wasn’t very healthy, and while health in and of itself wouldn’t make me happier, it sure does feel better to think of spending the next 50 years with your family than it does to think of dying young and leaving your wife and kids to fend for themselves.

Like most overweight people, my life has been a series of attempts, generally half-hearted, to lose weight. Not an endless series, but regular nonetheless. I have great empathy — and with it, sympathy — for people who have struggled to lose weight. I know it can be embarrassing at times, partly because we are bombarded with people telling us “All you have to do is eat right and exercise,” and partly because deep down inside we believe — know? — those people are right. But most of all, I empathize with the mixed feelings and emotions that come with trying to lose weight, and while “all you have to do is eat right and exercise” may be true, that’s like telling a baseball team, “Just score more runs than the other guys every game and you’ll be fine!” The concept is simple, but the execution can be a challenge.

Is it harder for overweight people to eat right and exercise? Absolutely, but only for some of the reasons you might be thinking of. Obviously, it is easier for someone in great shape to go run a few miles. (How unfair is that? When I was looking to buy a treadmill a few years ago, I noticed that most of the inexpensive ones have a 250-pound weight limit. Come on, people! If I weighed 250, I wouldn’t need your stupid treadmill!) And sure, unhealthy eating habits can be a pain to overcome.

But for me, and I’m guessing for a lot of overweight people, there’s one more element, and it’s completely mental. It’s a little bit hard to explain, so it will be much easier for me to illustrate.

I love baseball. I started playing baseball when I was seven years old, and if it had been up to me, I would have played until I was 40 or so. By the time I got to high school, I had become a pretty good pitcher. My sophomore year, I was good enough to pitch on the varsity team, especially when about ten varsity players quit the team because of conflicts with the coach. Unfortunately, the coach and I were not the best of friends (he had been an assistant coach on my freshman team the year before), and he chose to promote a few of my junior varsity teammates instead of me. I was frustrated, and I probably handled it about as well as you would expect a 15-year-old kid to handle it, but I didn’t burn any bridges. Not yet.

(I guess I need to point out the obvious: I only know my side of the story. And more to the point, it’s been over 20 years, so I don’t even know how accurately I know my side of the story. But that’s at least part of the point, as this whole story has a lot more to do with my perceptions than with reality.)

So going into my junior year, I was optimistic about burying the hatchet with Coach X (not his real name, believe it or not) and playing on the varsity team. On the first day of school, still a good five months or so before baseball season, we had our first practice, and Coach X split us up between varsity and junior varsity — and he put me back with the JV team! After practice, I walked over to talk to Coach X to see what was going on. I said, “Why am I practicing with the JV team?” He said, “Because you’ll be playing on the JV team this year.” I said, “Even though I am the best pitcher in the school?” And he said, “Lose seventy pounds and then we’ll talk.” I said the rudest thing I could think of that didn’t involve anything that was technically a swear word, and I walked away. (In my mind, I like to think that I said something very clever, but I think it was basically something along the lines of “screw you, you big dumb dooty head.”)

Bridges burnt, baseball season over five months before it began. Coach X was the most evil man in the world, terrible human being, breathes fire, eats babies, cheats on his wife, voted for Hitler, you name it, Coach X was the villain. But something very strange happened that day — something both wonderful and awful. I was heartbroken at not being able to play baseball anymore, and I was furious at Coach X for doing that to me, and I was about a hundred other adjectives about the situation. But for a long time, I had been dealing with some feelings of depression — not too deep, really, but definitely there, and definitely related to my weight (and the unattractiveness that went with it, at least in my mind) — and those feelings were gone. I made a conscious decision, either that very day or soon thereafter, and it was this simple statement: If Coach X, who stands for everything I believe to be evil and wrong, thinks my being fat is a bad thing, then it must be okay.

It was simple, and it was naive in its own little way, but it was effective. And overall, it was a good thing for me. We live in a weird world, and America is a weird country. We ALL know that magazines and TV and movies are evil for suggesting that perfect physical specimens are the norm and what we all should be, but we also ALL know that America has a huge obesity problem and it’s a terrible thing and our kids are so unhealthy and all that stuff. I know those two ideas aren’t really diametrically opposed, and I know there’s a rational middle ground. But I also know that the people who need both messages the most — children and adolescents — aren’t exactly the most capable of rational analysis. The feeling overweight adolescents get from those messages — or at least what I felt as an overweight teenager — is either:

1) “Yeah, up yours, Big Bad Media! I don’t care if I’m not chiseled like Brad Pitt — I’m just fine the way I am!”; or…
2) “I know, you’re right, I’m way too fat. It’s probably because I’m so lazy. No one will ever find me attractive, which is the worst possible fate a teenager like me could ever have.”

Neither of those attitudes is healthy — the first discourages change, and the second causes tons of self-esteem issues.

So anyway, I had been bouncing between those two attitudes, until the day Coach X told me to lose weight. At that moment, #2 was gone from my life forever, but it was replaced with a big fat dose of #1. In retrospect, I think #1 is much better than #2, and if you HAVE to choose one extreme or the other (and with teenagers, maybe sometimes you do), it’s the better way to go. For me, the ramifications of that paradigm shift were wonderful, and they started immediately. By the end of that week, I was a member of both the football and wrestling teams, and by the end of my two years at each sport, I had become something between “good” and “pretty darn good” at both brand new endeavors. My writing, which I had been doing a lot of as editor of the high school newspaper, took on a new confidence that helped me hone my skills more quickly, even if it was a bit obnoxious at times. I quickly developed a lot of new friends at school, partly because I was playing two sports and partly because I was no longer shy and self-conscious.

Everything was great, except that I now had absolutely no desire to lose weight. I was just fine the way I was! I was a great athlete, people liked me, why did I need to change just because jerks like Coach X wanted me to?

I won’t lie. That defiant confidence helped make me who I am today, and I’m not afraid to say I think that’s a good thing. I think I’ve been a more compassionate person for having been on the other side of the fence. Overall, I think life has turned out great. But I’ve never been able to lose the weight and keep it off.

I’ve had a feeling for a long time that Coach X was part of my problem. It was several years before I reached the point where I thought, if I ran into him at the grocery store, I would be able to walk past him without punching him or spitting on him or flipping him off or something. I eventually got to the point where I thought I had overcome all of the negativity, but I still thought about him far more than I thought I should. So I knew I would eventually have to face that particular demon if I was ever going to get healthy.

And that’s how I ended up in therapy. As I consider myself one of the most mentally healthy people I know, it was a weird place for me to be, but there my lovely wife and I were a few years ago, sitting on an old couch in a room that was just a bit too warm. The lady we met with is a hypnotherapist, but it wasn’t what I expected (or what you probably think of when you think of hypnotherapy). I originally called her hoping she could make me magically not like ice cream and mac & cheese anymore, maybe trick my stomach into thinking it’s full after one helping instead of three. But what I got was much, much better.

When she hypnotized me … I don’t know how well I can explain it. I don’t know if there are different forms of hypnosis, like you see on TV where they make people quack like a duck, and they send them away with a subliminal urge to scratch their head every time they see Kim Kardashian in a magazine. This was not like that. It was like I was in two places at once. I was always aware of my actual presence on the couch, always aware that my wife was sitting right next to me. But I was also in these places the therapist put me, and it was an experience that, as I look back at it now, I believe has changed my life.

I won’t go into all the details, but here are a few things I learned from the experience:

1) My subconscious mind has never wanted me to lose weight, because that would be an admission that Coach X was right. Deep down inside, I didn’t want to live in a world where Coach X could be right about anything. I thought if I lost weight and THEN ran into him in a grocery store, I would have to deal with the look in his eyes telling me “I told you so.”

2) I had turned over control of my life to Coach X. Not even Coach X, really, but a memory of a vilified caricature of Coach X. I don’t even know if Coach X is still alive — he was in his 60s when I knew him — but I was allowing my hatred of him to run my life and ruin my health.

3) I am easily strong enough to make the changes necessary to lose weight. When I was 23, I quit biting my fingernails cold turkey, just because I had done it as long as I could remember and I knew it was gross. I gave up a swearing habit cold turkey the year before that, just because I knew it didn’t reflect well on who I was and who I wanted to be. I have made numerous immediate and permanent changes in my life, just because I wanted to. I can do this one too.

4) Perhaps most surprising, I learned that Coach X was not evil. He was just a guy who had no idea how to deal with teenagers and never should have been put in a position of leadership over them. By the end of my session, I actually felt sorry for him — not a condescending sympathy, but a real, genuine sorrow that I had spent so much hate on him for so many years. I believe that he was probably a nice enough guy, and I know I would hate to be judged solely on my weaknesses.

***

I remember the first time I realized I weighed over 300 pounds. I was a junior in high school, and the next-largest guy on the football team weighed about 250. I was a lot bigger than everyone I knew, but I wasn’t what I thought of when I thought “300 pounds”: grossly obese, smelly, all that stuff.

After a while, 300 didn’t seem so bad. I was still a very good athlete, and I took pride in the fact that I didn’t look like I weighed 300. I could tell people I weighed 260, and they had no problem believing me. When I went to renew my driver’s license just before I turned 19, the lady at the DMV recognized that I had grown taller since I turned 16 — 5’9″ to 6’3″ — but she didn’t mention the “235″ next to “Weight.” In retrospect, she was probably just being polite, but she didn’t seem to have a problem when I put “299,” even though at that point I was around 330.

Over the years, I accepted 300. My driver’s license still says 299 — 17 years later — but other than that, 300 became part of who I was.

In July 2008, I went to the doctor for a sinus infection. The nurse had me stand on the scale, and I had a bad feeling. I’d known things were getting out of control for a while, ever since our scale — the one we spent a lot of money on because it went up to 380 — started giving me an “E” instead of a number, but I wasn’t prepared for what popped up on the screen: 401.8.

And that was when reality hit me. I weighed 400 pounds. All those feelings I originally had about 300? Yeah, multiply them by a thousand, and that’s how I felt about 400. I weighed more than even the largest offensive linemen in the NFL. Pick any two of my siblings, put them together, and I had at least 50 pounds on them. I weighed more than twice as much as my wife weighed when she was nine months pregnant. There were no two ways around it: I was fat. Unattractively fat. Unhealthily fat. If-I-don’t-fix-it-I’m-gonna-die-way-too-young fat.

So I started fixing it. I wasn’t successful right away — it was over four years before I started really having success — but that was the beginning of my journey. That was when I decided that I needed to replace “The Fat Guy” as part of my identity with something more healthy.

And now, here we are, five years later and 113 pounds lighter.  I never accepted 400 for even a second, and as of a few weeks ago, I’m done with the 20 years I spent in the 300s.  I’m well on my way to building my new identity:

The Healthy Guy