Earlier today, when I was writing about “The Biggest Loser,” I got off onto a tangent that I decided to cut out and make its own post.  This is it.  If it seems like I’m starting mid-thought, I kind of am.

Because there’s a cash reward for losing the highest percentage of weight on “The Biggest Loser,” a lot of contestants lose too much weight.  Those of us who have struggled with weight have become conditioned to thinking of weight loss as the ultimate goal.  But weight loss is not the goal — health is the goal, and the key to health is fat loss.  Yes, fat weighs pounds, and the scale is the easiest way to measure success, but it’s not a direct correlation.

Let’s look at it this way.  Suppose you’re 20 pounds overweight.  Would you consider going to a surgeon and having your left leg removed?  That would get you to your target weight.  But you would clearly be less healthy than you were before, because not only are you still just as fat, you’re also missing a leg.  If no one in the world would consider amputation an effective and useful way to lose weight, why are so many people willing to accept muscle loss for the same reason?

Your body needs fuel.  When your body doesn’t think it’s getting enough fuel, it holds on to all its stockpiles — in the form of fat.  So when you drastically reduce your calories — or when you create a drastic caloric deficit through a combination of eating less and burning more — you will lose weight, but at the same time, your body will hold on to the stuff it can most easily convert to energy: fat.  But how can you lose weight and store fat at the same time?  By losing muscle mass.

The problem with our obsession with weight is that we tend to think all weight loss is the same.  But just as amputating a leg isn’t an acceptable or useful method of weight loss, we should avoid techniques that cause our bodies to lose weight by way of muscle depletion.  Just as with the absurd amputation example, you’re not addressing the actual problem, which is the fat in your body.

So getting back to my point about the contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” I think they often lose too much weight.  Because the show doesn’t distinguish between fat pounds and muscle pounds, contestants who are trying to win $250,000 have a lot of incentive to lose muscle mass, because it is a quicker and easier way to lose weight.  Just starve yourself, and you will lose weight.  Create a massive caloric deficit, and the numbers on the scale will go down.  But you will be less healthy, and your body will be less able to maintain its fitness level, which means you’re much more likely to rebound and put weight back on.

For me, $250K isn’t worth that sort of damage.

I used to occasionally get asked if I had ever considered trying to be on “The Biggest Loser.”  (I didn’t get asked that a lot, because it’s not the kind of thing you ask a person unless you are very comfortable with them.)  I always said I hadn’t, and there were always two reasons I gave:

1. “The people who win that show usually lose close to 50% of their weight, and I only need to lose about 35%, so I wouldn’t have a chance of winning.”
2. “I know I can lose the weight on my own, so I don’t need to go there to do it.”

Both of those were true, but neither of them was totally honest.  The fact is, I couldn’t care less about winning the $250,000, so “no chance of winning” shouldn’t have mattered to me.  And I was sure I could lose weight without the show, but that was based on the fact that I lost weight for wrestling in high school 15 years earlier, combined with the logical realization that people lose weight without TBL all the time so it must be possible.

The real reasons I didn’t want to be on “The Biggest Loser” were:

1. I don’t entirely agree with their approach to weight loss.
2. I didn’t want all the baggage that goes along with it.

First, let me explain the baggage thing.  I watch “The Biggest Loser,” and I enjoy it quite a bit.  But it is a TV show, created first and foremost to make money as good entertainment.  The idea of helping people lose weight is a means to an end, not the end itself.  When we watch, we end up with people we like and people we dislike, and most of that is probably because of the way the show is produced.  If my goal is to become healthy, why would I want to do it in an environment where my health isn’t the goal and where millions of people might end up rooting for me to fail (or, at least, to be less successful than someone else)?  And maybe even more importantly, I didn’t want to “owe” my health to Bob or Jillian, to be one of those people saying, “I couldn’t have done this without you.”  Where I am in my journey right now, having lost 103 pounds, I am grateful to Tim Ferriss who helped me find the plan and my wife and kids and friends who have been amazingly supportive, but I don’t owe my transformation to any of them.  I did this.  I am doing this.  Just as I owned my unhealthiness, I am happy to own my healthiness.

So let’s talk about TBL’s approach to weight loss.  As I’ve said before, the only way to maintain weight loss is to keep doing the things that helped you lose the weight in the first place.  And on TBL, the way they lose weight is by exercising nonstop and cutting out all their vices, in an atmosphere completely separated from the environment that got them fat to start with.  To me, that doesn’t seem like the best recipe for long-term success and healthy maintenance.  And the fact is, the vast majority of the people who go on the show gain at least some weight back, and many of them gain too much back.  (While you’re at that link, scroll down to Vicky Vilcan to see what I mean about the producers creating villains and underdogs.)

(I just wrote quite a bit about the fact that a lot of TBL contestants lose too much weight, but then I decided to make it a post of its own, so keep an eye out for that.)

My goal has never been weight loss, and it has especially never been temporary weight loss.  My goal has been health, by way of fat loss.  I think “The Biggest Loser” is great for entertainment value, and it can even be inspiring to watch, but it’s not the path I’ve wanted to go down to reach my ultimate goals.

In fact, it was last year when I seriously considered trying out for the show that I realized I needed to fix myself.  So I did.

I want to tell a little story.  I promise it will eventually make sense in the context of this blog.

In early March of this year, my oldest son and I took a road trip down to Arizona to watch some Spring Training baseball games.  We drove from our home in Utah down to the Phoenix area.  There are two route options when driving from Utah to Phoenix — down I-15 to Las Vegas and then east, or down Highway 89 past Lake Powell.  The I-15 route is quite a bit further, but because it is freeway the whole way, it takes about the same amount of time and is a little bit safer.  But I’ve driven every inch of I-15 (literally), and that part of it dozens of times, so I decided to take the other route.

What I didn’t know, and neither did Google Maps, is that two days before our trip, a huge sinkhole opened on Highway 89 just south of Page, Arizona, making the road unusable.  It was about 10:00 p.m. when Logan and I got to Page and saw the detour signs.  When you’re in the city, a detour means you drive a block or two out of your way to get around the obstacle, follow the many signs pointing the way, and then you’re back on the right path.  When you’re in the middle of nowhere, like Page AZ, detours are a little bit different.  There weren’t a bunch of signs pointing the way — there was one sign, saying “Go left.”  And it wasn’t “Go left for a block or two,” it was just “Go left and hope it turns out okay.”

The other thing about being in the middle of nowhere is that there’s no cell phone reception, which means there’s no Internet access, which means you can’t just pull up Google Maps on your phone to see where you’re going.  So all I could do was trust the sign and go left.

So I went left.  It was pitch black (no streetlights in the middle of nowhere, either).  There were no signs reassuring me that I was going the right way.  No cell phone access to see where I was or where I was going.  All I had was the little compass on my rear-view mirror, and it just made things worse, because it kept telling me I was going southeast, or east, or occasionally even northeast — when all I really wanted to do was go south.

Then I started getting worried that I had missed a sign somewhere.  Was I supposed to turn off miles ago?  Was I about to see a sign that said “Welcome to New Mexico”?

No joke, it was one of the worst feelings of my life.  I’m with my 6-year-old son, in the middle of nowhere, in the pitch black, and I have no idea if the miles I’m going are getting us closer to or further from where we want to be.  It was a helpless feeling, and I hated it.

Take a look at this screenshot from Google Maps.  The highlighted route is the way we ended up going (it’s the only option on Google Maps now, because Highway 89 is still closed).  The little tan line that looks like a much more direct route is the way I wanted to go.  We ended up driving 64.2 miles southeast/east/northeast on Highway 98, then 50.1 miles on Highway 160, just to get back to Highway 89.

Here’s the interesting thing, though.  The whole time I was on Highway 98, heading southeast/east/northeast, I felt miserable and hopeless, a palpable depression that I couldn’t shake.  The minute I turned onto Highway 160, I felt great.  Elation.  Joy.  Peace.  Even though at that point in time, I was technically further from where I wanted to be than I had been almost the entire time I was on Highway 98.

What was the difference?  Direction.  Once I saw the sign saying I could take Highway 160 back down to Highway 89, once my mirror started saying southwest instead of something with “east” in it, I knew I was heading the right direction.  And that fact alone made all the difference.

Take a look at another picture.  I posted this one on Facebook a couple weeks ago:

When I put this together on an airplane, I wasn’t thinking a ton about it.  I picked pictures that showed my body in all its non-glory.  It was totally a subconscious thing that I picked two “before” pictures where I looked about the same.  Sure, I was technically nine pounds lighter in the second one, but you can’t really tell the difference.  But you know what?  I can tell the difference, and it has nothing to do with the way I look.  I lived through both of those photographs, and I remember how I felt inside.  In the picture on the left, I was living with the nagging thought that I was slowly killing myself.  It wasn’t at the forefront.  I was happy — I was in front of the temple with the love of my life, so how could I not be happy?  But I wasn’t totally happy, because I didn’t know how many more years I’d have to spend with the love of my life.  I was twelve days away from starting this Health Journey™, but I didn’t know it — for all I knew, nothing was ever going to change.

In the other “before” picture, I was also happy, getting ready to share the most special day of my daughter’s life with her.  But in this picture, I knew — or at least had real hope — that I would be around for all of her other special days.  Someday she will graduate high school and college and get married and have kids and have grandkids, and I was starting to think that I’d get to see all that.

I was on the right path.  I had turned off of Highway 98 and onto Highway 160.  I still wasn’t back to Highway 89 yet — to the naked eye, you’d have no way of knowing if I was closer to it or further away.  But the compass on my mirror said I was heading there, and the joy and peace was perfect.

The funny thing is, in that collage, the two left pictures look like a set.  But when I look at it, the matching pair are the two on the right, because those are the two where I knew where I was going and was on my way to getting there.

A blog like this is a tricky thing — there are some general, all-purpose topics I want to cover, but then there are also some specific, practical aspects of what I am doing that I want to share.  As I’ve said, I don’t necessarily think everyone who wants to lose weight needs to do the Slow-Carb Diet, but for those who do want to try it, I want to have as much info here as possible to help.

So today, I want to talk about the specifics of what I eat.  I’ll try to tie it to general concepts, too, so hopefully it will be useful.  Here’s what an average day looks like for me:

Breakfast: Premier Protein chocolate shake with one tablespoon of Adams Organic peanut butter, blended up with a few ice cubes.

This is one area where I stray a bit from the book.  Tim Ferriss would like me to be eating a high-protein meal that includes meat or eggs, veggies, and beans/lentils for breakfast.  I tried that, and it just doesn’t work for me.  Tim stresses the importance of getting 30 grams of protein within 30-60 minutes of waking up, but to get 30 grams from eggs, veggies, and beans would take a huge breakfast, and I just don’t like that much food first thing in the morning.  So instead, I have the protein shake, which has 30 grams of protein.  The peanut butter adds a little more protein, but for me, there are two much more important things about it: 1) it adds some calories, so I don’t get hungry an hour or two later; and 2) drinking a chocolate protein shake blended up with ice and peanut butter does wonders for my sweet tooth.  It’s nothing I would ever mistake for a real milkshake, but it’s close enough that it does the trick.

Lunch: Salad from Costa Vida without the tortilla or rice, beans on the side (a mix of black, pinto, and refried), pico de gallo, extra guacamole, extra meat (both grilled chicken and pork), no dressing.

This has been my staple.  I’ve probably spent about $1500 at Costa Vida in the past nine months, and most of the time when I walk in the door, they don’t even have to ask me what I want.  I’ve had times when I went in, got my salad, paid, and walked out, without saying a single word other than a couple “Thank you”s.

Let me break this thing down for you.  Obviously, the tortilla and rice are no-nos, and once you don’t have those, it doesn’t make sense to put the beans in the salad itself.  So I get them on the side, and I mix all three kinds just for variety.  (To be honest, I’d probably get just refried beans, but they are the least healthy, so I try to healthy it up by mixing them with black and pinto.)

I have them put the meat on the top, because the juice from the meat combines with the pico and the guacamole to eliminate the need for dressing.  The reason I get both chicken and pork is pretty straightforward: more is better, pork tastes the best, chicken is a bit healthier.  So I split the difference and get both.  (The pork at Costa Vida and Cafe Rio is sweet, and I’m not totally sure what they use to sweeten it.  I’ve read that they use Coca-Cola as the sweetener, which means the pork probably breaks the rule about not drinking calories, but it seems to be working for me, so I am sticking with it for now.)

Dinner: Two organic hamburger patties (Smith’s new “Simple Truth” brand) grilled on my George Foreman grill, topped with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, jalapeños, and mustard, and a bowl of beans (usually a mix of a few different kinds of beans, some jalapeños, and other spices).

This meal is pretty self-explanatory.  Protein, veggies, and beans.  And it tastes great, too.  The thing that appeals to me most is that it is quick and easy to make.  Nothing fancy, you can get it done in about ten minutes.  It makes it easy for me to sit down and eat with my wife and kids even though we’re not having the same thing for dinner.

So anyway, that’s an average day for me.  Other foods I have on occasion:

• Unwich from Jimmy John’s (just a sandwich wrapped in lettuce instead of bread).  These are very good, and they get your veggies and your protein in for you.  When I am having this for lunch, I will usually bring a dish of my bean mixture from home to have with it.  The tricky part here is remembering to say “Unwich” and making sure to get it with no cheese.
• Carl’s Jr. hamburgers.  One really cool thing about Carl’s Jr. is they will make any burger on their menu as a lettuce wrap, so something like the guacamole bacon burger with no cheese as a lettuce wrap is a nice little treat sometimes.
• Fajitas, without the tortillas, sour cream, or cheese.  Basically, you end up with meat grilled with onions and peppers.  Most Mexican places bring you beans and rice with your fajitas, and if you have them substitute veggies for the rice, you have a great meal for this plan.

Feel free to shoot me any questions in the comments.  Like I said, I tried to tie everything to general principles and concepts, but I’m happy to help.

I don’t believe in dieting.  When someone is “on a diet,” they are temporarily restricting the amount and/or types of food they eat for the purpose of losing weight.  But if the restriction is temporary, the weight loss will be temporary.  Diets, almost by definition, are doomed to failure.

That’s why I wasn’t looking for a diet to go on — I was looking for a permanent lifestyle change I could make.  I had heard of Tim Ferriss — I even met him briefly at South by Southwest in Austin a few years ago — but I had never read any of his books.  To be honest, the titles (“The 4-Hour Work Week” and “The 4-Hour Body”) sounded scammy to me.  But every once in a while, I would hear a recommendation from someone I trusted.  Last October, after reading a recommendation from Ramit Sethi, I decided to give The 4-Hour Body a chance.

The bottom line: it’s amazing.  I don’t believe that there is only one way to lose weight successfully, and I don’t think there is any one way that will work for everyone.  But what I know for sure is that the Slow-Carb Diet, as laid out in The 4-Hour Body, is the only thing I’ve found that works for me.

You can read a summary of the plan here, or you can buy the book here.  (Note about the book: it is almost 600 pages, but I have only read the first 150 or so, because that is the part that talks about the things I care about.)

Basically, the Slow-Carb Diet has five rules.  I’ll list the rules, tell you what Tim says about each, and give you my take on them.  (I’ll have the most to say about #5, because it’s my favorite and it’s the one that makes it possible for me to follow the others.)

RULE 1: AVOID “WHITE” CARBOHYDRATES.

Avoid any carbohydrate that is, or can be, white. The following foods are prohibited, except for within 30 minutes of finishing a resistance-training workout like those described in the “From Geek to Freak” or “Occam’s Protocol” chapters: all bread, rice (including brown), cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, and fried food with breading. If you avoid eating the aforementioned foods and anything else white, you’ll be safe.

Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals used to bleach flour (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That’s right-it’s used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or “enriched.”

Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.

Here’s a partial list of my favorite foods: lasagna, mac and cheese, ice cream, burritos, pad thai, Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries … well, you get the picture.  A lot of the things I love are listed by Tim as foods that will make me fat.  Not coincidentally, I used to weigh 400 pounds.  Could the two be connected?

RULE 2: EAT THE SAME FEW MEALS OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat-loss, eat the same few meals over and over again. There are 47,000 products in the average U.S. grocery store, but only a handful of them won’t make you fat.

Mix and match from the following list, constructing each meal with one pick from each of the three groups. I’ve starred the choices that produce the fastest fat-loss for me:

Proteins
*Egg whites with 1–2 whole eggs for flavor (or, if organic, 2–5 whole eggs, including yolks)
*Chicken breast or thigh
*Black beans
*Beef (preferably grass-fed)
Pork
*Fish

Legumes
*Lentils (also called “dal” or “daal”)
Pinto beans
Red beans
Soybeans

Vegetables
*Spinach
*Mixed vegetables (including broccoli, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetables)
*Sauerkraut, kimchee (full explanation of these later in “Damage Control”)
Asparagus
Peas
Broccoli
Green beans

Eat as much as you like of the above food items, but keep it simple. Pick three or four meals and repeat them. Almost all restaurants can give you a salad or vegetables in place of french fries, potatoes, or rice.

Surprisingly, I have found Mexican food (after swapping out rice for vegetables) to be one of the cuisines most conducive to the Slow-Carb Diet. If you have to pay an extra $1–3 to substitute at a restaurant, consider it your six-pack tax, the nominal fee you pay to be lean. Most people who go on “low”-carbohydrate diets complain of low energy and quit because they consume insufficient calories. A half-cup of rice is 300 calories, whereas a half-cup of spinach is 15 calories! Vegetables are not calorically dense, so it is critical that you add legumes for caloric load.

Just remember: this diet is, first and foremost, intended to be effective, not fun. It can be fun with a few tweaks (the next chapter covers this), but that’s not the goal.

The theory behind this, as far as I can tell, is that it’s easy to get frustrated if you try to find too many meals that fit within these parameters.  So if you go in with the expectation of being bored, you won’t be disappointed or frustrated when it is boring.  (Don’t worry, the fun part is coming up.)  I plan on doing a whole post about the few meals I have repeatedly, so I won’t go into much detail here, but I will try to remember to come back here and link to that post once it is up. (Hey look, I remembered! Here is the link to the post about my repeat meals.)

RULE 3: DON’T DRINK CALORIES.

Drink massive quantities of water and as much unsweetened tea, coffee (with no more than two tablespoons of cream; I suggest using cinnamon instead), or other no-calorie/low-calorie beverages as you like. Do not drink milk (including soy milk), normal soft drinks, or fruit juice. Limit diet soft drinks to no more than 16 ounces per day if you can, as the aspartame can stimulate weight gain.

I’m a wine fanatic and have one to two glasses of red wine almost every evening. It doesn’t appear to have any negative impact on my rate of fat-loss. Red wine is by no means required for this diet to work, but it’s 100% allowed (unlike white wines and beer, both of which should be avoided). Up to two glasses of red per night, no more.

If you’re a Mormon like me, your best bet on this plan is water.  Lucky for me, water has always been my beverage of choice anyway.  Tim says diet soda is allowed in small amounts, but I generally avoid that for other reasons.  (Short version: I think it will kill you, and I feel gross when I drink it.)  The concept here is not new — I’ve heard of people losing massive amounts of weight just by cutting out soda.

(One interesting thing that is only implied here but is stated explicitly in the book is that dairy is off-limits, with the exception of occasional cottage cheese.)

RULE 4: DON’T EAT FRUIT.

Humans don’t need fruit six days a week, and they certainly don’t need it year-round. If your ancestors were from Europe, for example, how much fruit did they eat in the winter 500 years ago? Think they had Florida oranges in December? Not a chance. But you’re still here, so the lineage somehow survived.

The only exceptions to the no-fruit rule are tomatoes and avocadoes, and the latter should be eaten in moderation (no more than one cup or one meal per day). Otherwise, just say no to fruit and its principal sugar, fructose, which is converted to glycerol phosphate more efficiently than almost all other carbohydrates. Glycerol phosphate p triglycerides (via the liver) p fat storage. There are a few biochemical exceptions to this, but avoiding fruit six days per week is the most reliable policy.

This is the part that can be confusing or counterintuitive.  When it comes to nutrition, fruits and vegetables are usually used interchangeably.  “Eat five servings of fruits or veggies every day.”  It had literally never crossed my mind that fruit might be part of the problem.  But as I’ve researched it, I think the science behind it is solid.  Simply put, your body turns sugar into fat, and the sugar in fruit — fructose — is the most easily converted form of sugar.  Fruit has a ton of good stuff in it, too, but nothing that you can’t get by eating lots of veggies.

RULE 5: TAKE ONE DAY OFF PER WEEK.

I recommend Saturdays as your Dieters Gone Wild (DGW) day. I am allowed to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, and I go out of my way to eat ice cream, Snickers, Take 5, and all of my other vices in excess. If I drank beer, I’d have a few pints of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen.

I make myself a little sick each Saturday and don’t want to look at any junk for the rest of the week. Paradoxically, dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat-loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function and conversion of T4 to T3, etc.) doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction.

That’s right: eating pure crap can help you lose fat. Welcome to Utopia. There are no limits or boundaries during this day of gluttonous enjoyment. There is absolutely no calorie counting on this diet, on this day or any other.

Start the diet at least five days before your designated cheat day. If you choose Saturday, for example, I would suggest starting your diet on a Monday.

In case you’re doubting what he said, here it is: you can eat anything you want on cheat day (or Cheaturday, as my brother calls it), as much as you want.  If you want to start eating ice cream the moment you wake up and not stop until you go to bed, you can do that.  There are literally no restrictions.

There are physical benefits to cheat day.  As a lifelong yo-yo dieter, I am used to the mindset of “If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less.”  Even on this diet, that mindset has crept in, and I’ve found myself thinking, “You know, if I am losing weight even with a huge cheat day, imagine how much I’d lose if I didn’t eat as much on cheat day!”  And guess what?  It doesn’t work.  Not for me, anyway.  I don’t know exactly why, but I know that when I have a weak cheat day, my weight loss is less.  When I have a killer cheat day, the numbers are better.

Tim talks about metabolic rate downshifts and stuff like that, but I think what he’s really saying is this: cheat day lets your body know it’s not starving.  When your body thinks it is starving, it holds on to everything it can get.  When you reassure it every week, “Don’t worry, we still get to eat plenty of junk,” it doesn’t feel the need to hold on.

So yeah, there are physical benefits.  But for me, the psychological benefits are so much bigger.

I used to think the only way to lose weight and keep it off was to never eat ice cream again.  And you know what?  That thought generally made me think, “Forget that, I’ll stay fat.”  But not being able to eat ice cream until Saturday?  Sure, I can do that — I’m not an animal!  I spend the week eating the things I am supposed to eat, and I keep mental notes of the cravings I have.  I’ve actually written them down a few times.  And then, when Saturday rolls around, I let loose.  Corn dogs and ice cream for breakfast?  Sure!  More ice cream later?  Of course!  Mac and cheese for lunch?  Why not?

Let me talk a little bit about ice cream.  Here’s how my cycle used to go: I’d be good for a while.  Then I’d decide to only have frozen yogurt instead of ice cream because it’s healthier.  After a while, I’d see that Dreyer’s has a ton of different flavors of frozen yogurt, so I’d get a few to have at the house.  I’d start with just one scoop a couple times a week.  Then I’d be unable to decide which flavor I want, so I’d have two half-scoops, which soon turned into two scoops.  A couple times a week would become every day.  Then I’d notice that Dreyer’s slow-churned ice cream doesn’t have many more calories than the yogurt, and there are more flavors and it tastes better, so I’d get that.  And because there are more flavors, it’s harder to decide, and next thing you know I’m having a big bowl of ice cream every single night.

You see, moderation is not my strong suit.  If I try to eat something I love in moderation, I will be successful in the short term, but I will eventually fall off the wagon.  Part of being honest with myself was admitting that and figuring out a solution.  Cheat day is that solution.  I never have to eat anything in moderation — I either don’t have it at all (Sunday through Friday), or I have as much of it as I want (Cheaturday).

The magical part is, I never have to tell myself “no.”  The answer is always either “yes” or “not today, but soon.”  If I have a good cheat day, Sunday is easy, because I never want to see food again.  Monday, I’m still satisfied.  It’s not until Tuesday that I start having any cravings at all, and nothing too bad until Thursday or Friday, by which point IT’S ALMOST CHEAT DAY AGAIN!!!

Here’s something else that has happened, something I didn’t expect: my relationship with food has gotten better.  In the past, I ate a ton of junk, but I never really enjoyed it, because it was always accompanied by guilt.  Every bowl of ice cream came with the nagging knowledge that I was killing myself.  I would wait until after my wife and kids went to bed, then I’d make a pan of “secret mac and cheese” to eat while I watched TV.  It tasted good, but I never really enjoyed it.  But now, every bowl of ice cream or plate of mac and cheese is part of my healthy new lifestyle!  I can eat whatever I want and lose weight and be healthy!  It’s a fat person’s dream!

Dr. Phil has said that willpower is a myth, and I pretty much agree.  I think it’s possible to have periods of willpower, but if you try to lose weight just by using willpower to stop eating junk, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.  The people who successfully stop eating the junk do it because they replace it with something else — they start doing triathlons or marathons or (on the more negative end of the spectrum) harmful drugs.  The person who can just stop eating foods they love cold-turkey, without replacing them with anything else, is a very rare person indeed, and statistically speaking, it’s probably not you.

That’s what I love about this plan: you never need more than six days of willpower, and really it’s more like two or three days if you have a good cheat day.  And in a way, it hardly even qualifies as willpower to say, “I’m gonna have a huge bowl of ice cream in 37 hours,” ya know?

So that’s the Slow-Carb Diet.  That’s what I have been doing for the past nine months.  I’ve been able to stick to it completely, because everything I need is built right into the plan.  There are challenges, and I know I undersell and downplay how hard it can be at times, but it is totally doable.  And the best part, for me, is that I can do it forever.  That thought doesn’t scare me or make me sad or anything negative.  In fact, knowing that I can have ice cream and mac and cheese every Saturday for the rest of my life without feeling guilty or getting unhealthy is pretty much the most wonderful thing in the world.

When you hear stories about people changing their lives, there’s usually some Ah-ha! moment where they knew something had to change.  I don’t know if I believe most of those things.  The media’s job is to tell a story, and an Ah-ha! moment (AHM) is a pretty critical part of a good life-changing story.  But something would have to be pretty darn dramatic to actually permanently change your life in an instant.  Every time I think I have an AHM, I wake up the next morning and nothing has changed.

I used to think you had to have an AHM in order to successfully lose weight.  It’s one of those silver bullets I talked about earlier — “If I could just have that life-altering experience, I’d all of a sudden have the willpower to withstand the temptation of ice cream and mac and cheese.”  Instead, we go along not having life-changing experiences, and we keep getting fatter.

Well, as someone who has now lost 103 pounds in the last nine months without an AHM, I am here to tell you it’s not necessary.  Stop waiting for it and make something happen.  I used to think, “If there’s no AHM, what will make this latest attempt any different from my previous attempts?”  What I finally figured out is this: an AHM is an external force — “My dad had a stroke at age 52 and I realized I was on that same path,” “I went shopping for a dress for my daughter’s wedding and had to buy a size 18,” etc. — but what will make you successful comes from inside of you.

I know that last sentence is the cheesiest thing you’ve ever read, and I’m sorry.  But as I learned from Brad Wilcox when I was a teenager, “There’s a reason people like cheese.”  I’m not here to preach some hippy philosophy about getting in touch with your spirit animal or whatever.  I’m just saying that no external force is going to help you be successful in losing weight (or meeting any important goals).

(Sidenote: A good example of how AHMs don’t work is what I wrote about yesterday, when I went to the doctor and stood on the scale and saw that I weighed over 400 pounds.  That is pretty much the definition of an Ah-Ha! moment, and guess what?  It was more than four years later when I was finally successful.  It was an important moment in my life, it had a profound effect … but it didn’t get me where I needed to be.)

So no, I don’t believe in AHMs (external forces), but I do believe in flipping switches internally.  I’ve had two switches that flipped for me that finally put me in a position to be successful.

The first one actually started from an external AHM.  On May 18, 2012, I got an email from my sweet wife.  I had noticed that she was in a bad mood when I left for work, so I had sent her a quick “I love you” email.  This was her reply:

You tell me everyday that you would do anything for me, yet the one thing that I want most for you, is the one thing you can’t seem to do.  I feel like I’m a big reason for you not accomplishing it because I think I ask too much of you and you can’t say no to me. So I’m trying to need you less, trying to ask less of you, so that when you decide it’s time it won’t come as such a shock that you can’t come home when I think you should be home because you’re at the gym.  I think there was a part of me that expected to be able to change you when we got married. But I’ve realized that it’s really hard to try to change a lifetime of habits.

I don’t want to change who you are, Jeffy, I just want to change the part of you that makes me so scared. I often think about what the kids and I will do if you die. I know financially we’ll be fine, but emotionally we will never recover. I will never find anyone that makes me as happy as you do.

I love you, Jeffy, but our kids deserve to have a daddy who can really play with them. Someone who has enough energy to play with them when he gets home from work.

I know you’re scared and I am, too. I really do love you.  You treat me so wonderfully, and I don’t deserve it because I don’t treat you very well and I’m sorry. I already feel awful for telling you all this, please don’t hate me.

Love you. Bethy

Holy crap, right?  Talk about an Ah-Ha! moment that The Biggest Loser would just love.  “I realized that if something didn’t change, my wife would be a young widow and my kids would grow up without their dad.”  If AHMs really worked, that email would have done the trick, right?  Well, it was another five months and eleven days before I started.  I probably gained another 15 pounds between when I got that email and when I started.

Why?  How?  Don’t I love my wife?  Didn’t I care what I was doing to her?  Of course I love her, and of course I cared.  Even now, reading that email again, it breaks my heart that I was doing that to her and our kids.  And while that AHM didn’t immediately change my life, it did flip one little switch inside of me.  The switch that said, “It’s not just about you, buddy.”  It didn’t make me stop loving ice cream.  It didn’t make me all of a sudden be able to resist the frozen burritos in the kitchen at work.  But it did get me looking for the right answer, because I realized that even if I on my own am not worth fixing, my wife and kids deserve a healthy me.  (Of course, we all know that I, on my own, am worth fixing, but believe it or not, obese people don’t always have the strongest self-esteem.)

The other switch was later.  In fact, I didn’t realize it had been switched until I was two months into my Health Journey™.  Beth and I were out on a date one Saturday night, and as we were driving home, I found myself calculating what day of the week my birthday would be on, so I’d know if we’d need to celebrate it on a different day so birthday cake could line up with Cheat Day.  Just a random thought, except … my birthday is in June.  This was December.  Two months into my new lifestyle, I knew that I would still be doing it more than five months later.

I literally almost cried when I had that realization.  After decades of trying to lose weight but always knowing I couldn’t stick with what I was doing for very long, I had found something that I believed I would be doing for at least seven months.  And let me tell you, for me, once I knew I could do seven months, I knew I could do forever.

I don’t know when the flip switched, but I think it was pretty early on.  I have always known that weight loss will only be permanent if the changes that cause it are permanent.  That’s why I could never get fully on board with a plan that didn’t let me eat ice cream, because that’s a permanent change I wasn’t prepared to make.  When I first read The 4-Hour Body*, I thought, “Hey, I might be able to do that forever.”  But it wasn’t until a couple months into it that I realized I was doing it forever.

*Interestingly enough, I almost didn’t read The 4-Hour Body, because the title makes it sound like one of those elusive silver bullets.  I’m sure glad I did.

As I mentioned in last night’s post, it was adapted from two posts I wrote about five years ago.  The adaptations mostly fell into three categories: fixing typos, changing timelines (saying “five years ago” instead of “last week,” etc.), and … making it a bit more honest.

Here’s an example.  In 2008, I wrote this:

I’ve got 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. When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and five years later she inexplicably still loves me like crazy. We have a beautiful daughter and an adorable son, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I can’t imagine being happier.

In last night’s version, it looked like this:

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.

You can see a few tweaks there, but the one I want to talk about is that last line.  When I wrote “I can’t imagine being happier” in 2008, it was a filthy lie and I knew it.  I was happy, but when a smart guy like me weighs 400 pounds and has health problems and has no idea if he’ll get to see his kids grow up, he can probably imagine being at least a little happier.

Does it matter?  Maybe not in the grand scheme of things.  But as I was reading through that old blog last week, I was struck again and again by how dishonest I was being with myself.  I’d say things like “I will lose the weight” and “when I get to my target weight” and “I can’t imagine being happier,” but I never really believed it.  I hoped I would lose the weight and get to my target weight, but most of all I just wanted outsiders to believe that I believed it.

I’ve lost weight before.  Thirty pounds here, sixty pounds there.  But every time, my mindset was the same: “I need to lose as much as possible as fast as possible, because there’s no way I’m going to keep this up.”  The fact that I had that approach was a surefire sign that I would not ultimately be successful, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself at the time.

You want to know what I was thinking in the back of my mind back then?  “If I portray enough confidence in my eventual success, maybe someone will read it and give me the top secret info that will make it happen.”

I shouldn’t speak for all overweight people, but I’ve been one long enough and talked to enough of them that I am going to anyway: fat people want a silver bullet or a magic pill.  We’re told all our lives that the key to weight loss is diet and exercise.  Well guess what?  I’m fat because I really like food, and how am I supposed to exercise when I weigh 400 pounds?  So we go along, losing the same 20 pounds over and over again, hoping deep down inside (but never admitting it) that some new breakthrough diet or medicine will come along and allow us to lose weight without having to do anything impossible like diet and exercise.

And that’s why I always knew it wasn’t going to last, because I knew I wasn’t actually going to stop eating ice cream for the rest of my life.  And when you’re in all-or-nothing mode, there’s not much difference between “I will someday eat ice cream again” and “I will someday eat too much ice cream every day again.”  And once you’ve accepted that you will someday eat too much ice cream every day again, there’s not much to keep you from deciding, “Might as well be today.”

If we’re honest with ourselves, we won’t even start an approach that is doomed to failure.  That might seem like a negative — some progress is better than nothing, right?  Maybe, maybe not.  If you spend all your time bouncing from one fad diet to the next, you’re not spending time figuring out a successful long-term strategy.  Couple that with the illusion of success — “Hey, I lost 20 pounds!” — and you have a recipe for the yo-yo dieting that overweight people are so prone to.

It wasn’t until I started being honest with myself — specifically, I found a lifestyle change that I could stick with forever — that I really believed I could be successful.

[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

Welcome to my new blog.  Here, I will focus on what I cheesily like to call me “health journey.”  For me, there are two distinct aspects to this journey: the PHYSICAL (including specifics on how I have lost the weight, etc.) and the PSYCHOLOGICAL (including how I decided to do it and how I’ve dealt with challenges).  While I will address both aspects, I think it’s important to point out up front that I don’t believe there is one approach that is right for everyone.  My brother is a film critic, and he and I often have much different tastes in movies.  So when I read his reviews, I never pay much attention to whether or not he liked the movie.  Instead, when he has done his job well as a critic, he gives me enough information to take a good guess as to whether I will like it.  I hope it is the same with me here — as I tell you what I did and what has worked for me, I hope to convey the deeper principles that will help any readers develop an approach that will work for them.

As a quick bit of “who is this guy?” info, my name is Jeff Snider, and I’ve lost 103 pounds in the past nine months, with another 40-50 to go.  As I’ve had more and more success, I’ve had a lot of discussions with friends, neighbors, and co-workers about how and why I’ve done it.  My goal is to at least cover most of those topics here.  After that, either I will have run out of things to say, or I will keep writing.  Time will tell.

Topics that I plan to address soon (I’ll come back and turn these into links as the posts go up):

• How I ended up fat
• Previous efforts to lose weight
• The two switches that flipped and made this time successful
• The specifics of the Slow-Carb Diet that I’ve been following, as prescribed by Tim Ferriss
• The meal I eat almost every day
• The one thing about this diet that made all the difference for me
• Protein shakes and how they fit into my routine
• The importance of being honest with yourself
• Those jerks who say “If I can do it, anyone can”

There will probably be a lot more, too.  I don’t claim to know everything, but I have developed a passion for the things I do know, and my second-favorite thing about all this has been watching other people be inspired by my success.  I hope I can inspire a few more people this way.