A few minutes ago on Facebook, I came across a very interesting blog post about weight loss and the companies that profit from it.  It is called “An Open Apology to All of My Weight Loss Clients.”  The author, Iris Higgins, used to work for “a popular weight loss company.”  I don’t know for sure, but it seems that she dealt mostly, if not exclusively, with women.  She spent years teaching people that a 1200-calorie diet was the way to lose weight.  Then people would stop eating only 1200 calories, and they’d magically gain the weight back.  The whole thing is worth a read, but here’s a chunk to whet your appetite:

I owe you an apology, my former client and now friend, who I helped to lose too much weight. Who I watched gain the weight back, plus some. Because that’s what happens when you put someone on a 1,200 calorie diet. But I didn’t know. If you’re reading this, then I want you to know that you have always been beautiful. And that all these fad diets are crap meant to screw with your metabolism so that you have to keep buying into them. I think now that I was a really good weight loss consultant. Because I did exactly what the company wanted (but would never dare say). I helped you lose weight and then gain it back, so that you thought we were the solution and you were the failure. You became a repeat client and we kept you in the game. I guess I did my job really well.

…

So I’m sorry because when you walked in to get your meal plan, I should have told you that you were beautiful. I should have asked you how you FELT. Were you happy? Did you feel physically fit? Were you able to play with your kids? There were so many of you who never needed to lose a pound, and some of you who could have gained some. And maybe sometimes I told you that. But not enough. Not emphatically. Because it was my job to let you believe that making the scale go down was your top priority. And I did my job well.

This is heartbreaking because it’s real.  As I read that, I looked at what I am doing here, wondering if I was part of the problem, part of the solution, or just blah.  In looking at what I have written, I think/hope I have conveyed what is in my heart, which is that the number on the scale doesn’t matter.  For someone as big as I was, it is the easiest way to measure progress at first.  But I think the time will come when I will put my scale away, because …

I’ve been a 300-pounder since high school.  I was briefly a 400-pounder.  In eighth grade, people called me “191” because that’s what I weighed in at in some stupid P.E. class.  I wrestled as a “heavyweight.”  I proudly wore a custom jersey for my city-league softball teams with the name “The Fat Guy” on the back.  I had a very funny license plate frame that played on a classic scene from Tommy Boy, reading, “Fat guy in a little car.”

I could probably spend six or eight paragraphs listing more things.  The point is, my identity has been defined by the scale, by my body, for most of my life.  I don’t mind, really.  I had the softball jerseys made.  I came up with the idea for the license plate frame.  I didn’t have low self-esteem about it, I don’t think.

But I’m done with it.  I don’t want to be defined by my body, by my size or my shape or a number on a scale.  Right at this moment, I don’t mind being defined as a guy who is losing weight and getting healthy, but only because of the potential for helping other people.  Five years from now, when I’ve been perfectly healthy for four years and change, when my old unhealthy self is nothing but a distant memory, I don’t want to be known as “the guy who used to be fat.”

So anyway, as I was saying, the number on the scale doesn’t matter, doesn’t define you.  What matters is how you feel.  I couldn’t play with my kids the way I wanted to.  I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without feeling like I was going to die.  Those things matter, and those are the things that I am fixing.

Here’s what I’m trying to say, in a nutshell: If you are here reading my blog to try to figure out how to lose weight quickly, please go away.  I don’t want you to lose weight quickly — I want you to lose weight permanently.  And I only want you to lose the weight that is making you unhealthy.  If you are healthy, if you feel good, if your size isn’t keeping you from living a long, full, happy life, then please, please, please don’t lose weight.  And if it is keeping you from those things, then please stop losing weight as soon as it’s not anymore.

You are a lot more beautiful than you think, and you’re a lot closer to perfect than you think.  If someone else tells you you need to lose weight, if they are motivated by anything other than a sincere desire for you to be healthy and happy, tell them to shove it.

We’ve been defined by the number on the scale for too long.  We’ve told ourselves that it doesn’t matter.  We’ve tearfully told ourselves that if people would get to know the real us, they would see that who we really are has nothing to do with how much we weigh.  But the trap we fall into is thinking only the negative things don’t matter, but that it’s a good thing to be defined as “skinny” or “buff” or “smokin’ hot.”

Forget that.  Anyone who wants to define me as a person by how I look on the outside, whether it is “positive” or “negative,” is not worth my time or attention.  I want to be healthy — that’s a definition I can live with, because it is tied to the definitions I really want: “good dad,” “good husband,” “good friend,” etc.  Being healthy helps me be a better person; being skinny just makes people look.

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.

My favorite thing about my Health Journey™ is the change in my mindset. At various points in the past, I have been hopeful for future weight loss and health, resigned to a future of fatness and an early death, and pretty much everywhere in between. I had been to the far negative end of the spectrum, but I’d never been to the far positive side — I’d never gotten past “hope.” Until now. Now my mindset is simple: it is inevitable that I will end up at a healthy weight and live a healthy life, because math is real, and I’m living the equation that results in a healthy weight and a healthy life. I don’t get too high or too low about the week-to-week weight numbers, because the overall direction is perfect and I’m in no hurry to get to my “ideal weight.” I will get there, and I don’t really care if it’s two months from now or a year from now or whatever. I plan on living another 50 or 60 years, and the big picture doesn’t lend itself well to stressing about the first few months.

We had a neighborhood party tonight, to say goodbye to some good friends who are moving to St. George tomorrow.  There were a lot of people there, all neighbors who I know well, but with everyone’s busy schedules and lives, we often only see each other on Sundays at church.  Between not seeing each other often and the fact that I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt instead of a suit and tie, almost everyone I talked to tonight wanted to talk about my weight loss.

The crazy thing is, I was fine with that.

Over the past nine months, I have gotten a lot of compliments from people on the improvements I’ve been making, and I’ve learned that I suck at accepting compliments.  I make jokes, I deflect, I do anything other than what I should do, which is give a sincere “thank you.”  But as time has gone by, I’ve gotten a little bit better at it, not because I’m more used to it, but because I’ve started to believe that I deserve the compliments.

When someone tells you you’re looking good, but you’re still 100+ pounds overweight, that’s a hard compliment to accept, even if you know the person means it.  When someone says, “You’re looking skinny,” but you’re still wearing a 3XL shirt, you don’t really believe it.

Tonight, though, I was pleased to fine myself giving honest, heartfelt “thank yous” in response to people’s honest, heartfelt compliments.  I was wearing size 42 jeans that are already loose on me three weeks after I bought them, and a t-shirt I’ve owned for several months but have only recently started wearing because it was too small.  Yeah, I still have a way to go — probably another 40 or 50 pounds — but I’ve realized that losing 103 pounds (maybe more, we’ll see tomorrow morning!) is a big deal, something to be proud of, so when good friends paid honest compliments, I had no problem accepting them.

I guess maybe getting healthy is turning me into a more mature adult.

“I can’t lose weight unless I start eating right and exercising.  But I can’t exercise because I’m so heavy that everything hurts when I do anything.  But if I can’t exercise, what’s the point of eating right?”

That’s the cycle I used to be in.  On some level I knew that eating healthy was even more important if I couldn’t exercise, but I got caught up in the all-or-nothing mentality that is so pervasive these days.  If I can’t limit myself to 1200 calories a day and get a good 45-minute workout in every morning, I’m never going to successfully lose weight and keep it off.  And since the exercise thing ain’t gonna happen, I’m not even gonna try on the eating right.

Here’s something I want everyone reading this to know about my journey so far: I lost the first 45 pounds with zero exercise.  None.  Never once did my shadow darken the doorway of our exercise room.  And yet I lost 45 pounds in less than three months.

Here are two key points that you absolutely need to understand, especially if you’re in the same boat I was when it comes to exercise:

1. For weight loss, 90% of your success will be the result of what you eat.
2. It gets a lot easier to exercise as you lose weight.  Your joints feel better, your lungs feel better, everything feels better.

Don’t get me wrong — exercise is important.  Diet controls weight loss, but exercise is crucial to overall health.  But which approach is more effective, the guy who never does anything because he can’t do everything, or the guy who successfully loses weight until he gets to the point that his body can handle exercise?  Spoiler alert: I’ve been both guys, and the first one sucks.

On Thanksgiving morning of last year, I went and played a game of flag football (the annual Turkey Bowl).  We played for about 90 minutes.  This was 24 days after I started the Slow-Carb Diet, and I had lost about 24 pounds.  In 90 minutes of playing flag football, I was never once as out of breath as I had been a month earlier walking up one flight of stairs at work.  That’s after only three weeks and 24 pounds!

Does exercise hurt?  Are you discouraged because you will never be a marathon runner?  Do you think it’s entirely overwhelming to have to eat right and exercise?  I’ve been there, and the answer is baby steps.  Don’t try to do everything.  Just do something.  And as luck would have it, the something that is easiest to do — eat better — also has the greatest results.

Later on, once you’ve lost some weight and your body is ready, you can start working some exercise in.  And who knows?  Maybe we’ll make a marathon runner out of you yet.

I realized today that I hadn’t mention this here on the blog yet, and I wanted to make sure it’s here for anyone who is thinking about giving it a shot.

The first couple weeks I was doing Slow-Carb, I suffered from some mild depression.  From what I can tell, my body was basically in a bit of shock from the drastic change in diet, and it caused my brain to be unhappy.  I’ve never been too predisposed to depression, but I was aware enough to recognize it and suspect the diet as the culprit.  So I Googled and found other people who had experienced the same thing, and they all said it was very temporary.  Knowing the cause and that it was temporary, I was able to battle through it.

For someone who has depressive tendencies, I assume it would be more severe than it was for me, but I think it would be just as temporary.  Just be aware of it, know what is causing it, and know that it will go away.  (And that it’s worth battling through.)