Like pretty much everyone who has been overweight for a while, I have tried to lose weight many times. The earliest I can remember is when I was a young teenager, and I used to drink these chocolate diet shakes that you’d blend up with ice. They were called “Alba 77 Fit and Frosty,” and I remember liking them quite a bit. I don’t remember them being successful or useful at all.
When I was a junior in high school, I joined the wrestling team. It wasn’t really against my will, but it wasn’t my idea. The football coach had decided I was a football player, and when the wrestling coach heard how easy it was, he decided I was a wrestler too. The only problem was that I weighed 300 pounds, and the upper limit to be a heavyweight was 275. That’s right — I had to lose 25 pounds to be a heavyweight. 
So in the three weeks between football and wrestling seasons, I had to cut 25 pounds. In wrestling, they call it cutting weight, because you’re not really losing it. There are a lot of things I loved about wrestling, but the whole concept of cutting weight makes me very nervous to let my kids do it. The good news for me was, when you weigh 300 pounds, it’s easy to drop a few pounds pretty quickly. And I only needed to be 275 for five minutes a week (to weigh in), so I could actually sit around 278 and be fine. So I had three weeks to lose 22 pounds.
I did it the Biggest Loser way: work out like crazy and limit calories. My daily schedule looked like this:
5:15 am: Get up, run two miles
6:00 am: Quick breakfast (usually just a cup of Carnation Instant Breakfast)
6:10 am: Early-morning seminary at the church
7:30 am – 2:21 pm: School
2:30 pm – 5:30 pm: Wrestling practice (which started with a four-mile run)
6:00 pm: Dinner
7:00 pm: Run two miles
7:30 pm: Shower, homework, whatever else needed to be done
9:00 pm: Go to bed
Of course, this approach worked. I easily cut the 22-25 pounds I needed to. Running eight miles a day and not having much time to eat much food will do that. There were only two problems with the plan: 1) I never started eating well, just eating less; and 2) I was eventually going to stop running eight miles a day, if for no other reason than that I hated running.
So I weighed 275-278 for wrestling season. Then the season ended and I stopped running so much, and by “so much” I mean “at all.” And believe it or not, the weight came back!
From my junior year to my senior year, I grew two more inches (my last two!), so where I had been 6’1″ and 300 pounds during football season in 11th grade, I played my senior season at 6’3″ and 310 pounds. So this time, I had to cut 35 pounds instead of 25. I followed the same pattern, although it was a bit more difficult this time because I blew my knee out in my last football game. But I somehow figured out a way to run eight miles a day on a bad knee, and I cut the weight and had a successful wrestling season. (In fact, near the end of the season, I wrestled and beat the guy who had injured my knee to win the team league championship. I’ll embed the video of that match at the bottom of this post.)
Unfortunately, wrestling season eventually ended, and I stopped running, and I kept eating, and by the time I graduated, I was back up around 310 pounds. I never really made any lifestyle changes — heck, I never even considered the possibility of this weight loss being permanent. As you might recall from my backstory, at this point in my life, I was defiantly convinced that I didn’t need to lose weight, that it would be a bad thing for me to lose weight, because my old baseball coach thought I should and he was a dooty head.
When I look back, I wonder about what might have been. I was in excellent physical condition from all the exercising I was doing. If I had just coupled that with healthy eating habits, I might have been able to overcome my weight problem at age 16 or 17 instead of age 35 or 36.
I don’t believe in regrets. I believe in learning from mistakes and making better choices in the future, but I think dwelling on the past prevents you from really moving on, and I also think it does a huge disservice to the people and things in your life right now that are wonderful. So I don’t regret not overcoming my weight problem as a teenager, but I sure do feel like I’ve learned a lot since then. And that’s a good thing.
***
Okay, here’s the video of that wrestling match. This guy’s name was Matt Lance, and he was the heavyweight for our top rivals. We had wrestled each other twice during our juniors year, and he had pinned me very quickly both times. He was a significantly better wrestler than I was. Matt and I had become pretty good friends by the time this match happened, because we went to most of the same tournaments and hung out a lot. But because he was the one who had messed up my knee in football, I had some extra motivation going into this match. Add in the fact that it was for the league championship against our rivals, and it was pretty intense.
My four favorite parts of this video:
0:35 — Matt gets me on my back, but I can see the line under my lower back, which means my shoulders were out of the circle, which means I couldn’t be pinned. So I literally just lay there like a bump on a log while he tried to pull me back into the circle.
4:50 — I was tired and wanted a break, so I faked an ankle injury to get an injury timeout. In retrospect, it was literally the worst acting job anyone has ever done. Keanu Reeves watches that limp and says, “Dude, really?”
6:30 — I get the takedown and the nearfall, which puts me five points ahead with only 20 or 30 seconds left in the match. But that’s not what I like. I love the reaction of Robin Tait, my friend’s mom who was doing the video. You can hear in her voice that she really didn’t believe I was going to win this match, because she is shocked to discover that I was going to pull it out.
7:17 — Amidst the celebration, if you know what to look for, you can spot my mom doing a goofy little happy dance.
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