The Biggest LOOSER -- running weight loss thread

I'm trying to view eating like putting gas into my car. I ate to celebrate things. I ate to mourn things. I ate out of boredom. But I realized I didn't really enjoy it beyond the drug-like boost it gave me for about 20 seconds. I eat about 200-300 calories every two hours during the day. Cheat once a week with a thin-crust pizza.

I can really fixate on one thing. The focus of that fixation has been various things in my life through the years, some beneficial but often stuff not good for me like weed and video games and porn and 70 hour work weeks. Most of my family lineage became alcoholics. Instead, I'm hoping that addiction is exercise for the rest of my life.

I work out six days a week, often for four or five hours. I've been stunned by the results. Stunned. Genetically, I'm lucky in that most men in my family have been jacked. I just never put the work in to get the same result.

It's been a bizarre few months. I'm a person who would find the corner of any room at a party. I have the social skills of a six-year old. And suddenly I have people looking at me, women smiling at me. For about two weeks after my jawline emerged and my shoulders and arms bulked up, I thought I had snot emerging from my nose or something to garner those looks.

Unfortunately because I got so gung-ho at this thing, I lost the weight too fast. I'm having excess skin issues. So above the chest I look like an NFL middle linebacker and in the stomach I have a pouch of a 60 year old man. I'll take that over obesity, but I'm going to give it a couple years, make sure I can keep the weight off, give my body every chance for the elasticity to return by building the muscles as much as I can. But if all else fails, I'll probably have to go the surgery route to get it cut off. But, like I said, I'm going to really make sure this is something I can maintain before dipping into my savings for 10 grand to get it done.

Again, it's been weird. I'm 30 and feel like I'm 13 years old again. Every experience seems new, somewhat scary and sometimes overwhelming. But it's also been the most rewarding journey of my life. The world crackles with energy again when you do something like this. Your patience improves. You listen more to other people. Cynicism fades. The sarcasm and self-deprecation that you rely on as a really fat person to get through everything seems so stupid. It's transforming.

 

That sounds so good, and so familiar -- almost all of it. Congratulations, Brian.

You shouldn't be surprised at your success, though. If you're working out six days a week for four or five hours a day, you almost can't help but lose, especially if you're also eating right. You also will maintain that way.

I just fear that that's not something you, or anyone, is going to keep up forever, unless they really do have nothing else to do. And, well, life for most people just isn't like that. Not to mention that, just as you can eat out of boredom, you can also become bored with spending so much time exercising, especially if you're spending everyday in a gym.

My experience has been that people who didn't usually always exercise hard will work out that extensively for a year or two, maybe. But then, life intrudes, or people can't help but slack off. So, the key is to eventually find a realistic, happy medium, of, say, 1 1/2 to two hours a day four or five or even six days a week. I'd reach your goal, or even go a little under it, first, though.

It is a transforming journey, and everything does become good and exciting again. But, as I'm sure you know, it's not easy, and maintaining over the long term is even harder, especially if you want it to last forever.

 

Oh, and about the excess-skin issues: You have your relative youth in your favor, and your skin may still bounce back. But if it doesn't, it probably won't be because you lost a lot of weight quickly.

I've learned first-hand and through the experiences of others that loose-skin problems (or the relative lack thereof) are largely a factor of age, and, even more importantly, genetics. It's mostly all luck, although you can do a certain amount of tightening and firming up with exercise.

Be aware, too, that if you go the skin-removal surgery route, it can be not only expensive, but also very painful.

I got help with weight loss (146 pounds) through gastric-bypass surgery in August 2008 and have been successful in the process, thanks over the long term to an exercise regimen that was much like yours for the first three years afterward. I was fortunate in that my excess-skin issues weren't too bad, even though I'm older than you, so I just live with the little bit that I have. I'm self-conscious of a little bit of hanging skin on my upper arms, so you won't usually see me wearing tank-top Tee-shirts. But otherwise, I've been fine just living with it.

I bring this up just because I'm still active in my doctor's post-op monthly patients' meetings, even years afterward, and I've done some mentoring of people seeking or thinking about weight-loss surgery. So I've come across quite a few people who weren't as lucky as me when it came to loose-skin issues and they did opt for the plastic surgery.

And that's what the general consensus is -- the skin-removal is expensive and painful -- much more so than their original bypass surgery ever was.

 

Write, thanks for the encouraging but realistic advice.

 

First of all, congratulations! That's freaking amazing.

If you don't mind me asking, did you go from what weight to what weight? Obviously, it's an amazing accomplishment no matter what.

I saw one of my managers at a conference recently who I hadn't seen in almost six months and he had gone from 325 to 210. I had no idea he was dieting. He swears it's without surgery, but nobody believes him.

 

I started at 315. I'm at 193 right now.

The keys to my success are kind of depressing, if you look at them objectively. I've decided to try to turn them into a positive.

Very few people have the time to do what I've done in this short a period of time. One of the realizations I came to early was that having no social life actually presented me with an opportunity. If you have a spouse, friends, a social life, family...it'd be pretty damn tough to do this. I don't. I'm kind of lord of this tiny skull-sized kingdom, as David Foster Wallace once said. I don't have pressures from people to eat bad things, because I control every meal I eat. I control the grocery shopping. There are no real instances where I'm stressed out by relationships or other people that would send me into a spiral. It's very clean, antiseptic. It's kind of the perfect incubator for weight loss, like the movie Old Boy where the guy is imprisoned in a room so the only thing he has to do is lift phone books and get ripped.

The only real adjustment I had to make was one I should've made years ago: I stopped working 70 hour weeks (and only getting paid for 40) and decided that I couldn't try to be Superman of the sports pages. Sometimes a round-up would have to do instead of a game story. I wasn't going to sacrifice my well-being for a 8K circulation newspaper in a town where everybody hates my guts. Fuck that.

The rest is just following the script, getting used to momentary pain for the long-term gain and a complete focus that dismisses any doubt about whether the plan is working. It's clinical.

So, yeah, this isn't a plan that I could write a book and sell a million copies with. It's just letting something take over your life because you have nothing else worthwhile.

 

Well, hopefully losing all that weight will change things for you socially and make your life better.

I think quite a few of us in the journalism have the "This just isn't worth it anymore" moment. Some do something about it, some don't and some, like me, aren't given a choice in the matter.

Congrats on your success. You should be very proud of yourself.

 

I know nobody cares, but it has changed and I feel like telling someone, even an anonymous message board. And quite quickly. I'm almost afraid to talk about it because I feel like I'm going to wake up. I've been on more dates in one month than I had ever in my whole life combined. A couple with women I'd been afraid to share an elevator with before. This is all very strange. I think they were confused by how happy I was just to be sitting next to them at a table. I probably came off really creepy, with a bemused look on my face. Oh well.

God, this entire post makes me sound like I'm 12 years old.

 

It's not that nobody cares, it's that they may not know.

Remember, anybody new that you meet now will only know you as you are in the present.

Also, even if someone did know you "before," weight issues and their reasons and their impact are personal, and can seldom be truly appreciated by someone who hasn't gone through the same process or a very similar journey.

Weight loss on that scale is a big deal -- to you. The real goal of it, though, is normalcy, and that's also what can make it seem as if people don't care. You know, you're now normal, not a big deal, etc.

Does that make sense?

But life is good and currently feels all new. I get it and I love it. In a very real sense, you are high right now. Enjoy it, appreciate it, and most of all, don't forget it, once you finally stop losing weight.

Because that will happen, and when the "reward" of lost pounds and watching the scale move in the direction you want is lost, it will, hopefully, be your new habits, including some activity that you like, that you hopefully will pick up and that you will hopefully do consistently over the long term, is what will carry your efforts at maintenance.

Weight maintenance isn't nearly as feel-good as the losing part from an emotional standpoint, but it's even more important over the long term to, you guessed it...normalcy.

With weight loss, it's not just the goal that matters, it's what happens after you've reached it.

 

Oh, absolutely.

I've trying a ritual where I remind myself every time I tie my shoes to remember where I came from and why I have to keep going. Because I was at a point that I could barely tie my shoes. It was one of my breaking points. It was fucking embarrassing.

So I take a second every time I do it to remember where I was, how hard it was to get here and how I never want to go back.

I also have David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" Speech set as my alarm clock on my IPad. I let that whole 22 minute speech play as I get ready every morning. It helps me keep my focus.

"Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness...But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious"

I've listened to it every morning for almost a year now and it helps me focus on the health aspect of it, not the social aspect.

 

That is so awesome, Brian.

Really, I've enjoyed following you through this, so thanks for sharing. It hasn't been my intent to be a kill-joy about any of this. Far from it, so don't take my realism for that. It's just that I'm a few years past where you're at, and there's just no getting around the fact that the maintenance is harder and not nearly as much fun as the new weight loss in the process.

I really do get it, though, as I think you'll see, and I'm celebrating and smiling to myself, remembering, as I read your posts because you're making me look back to five, six years ago, when I could easily compare "before" and "after" having lost 146 pounds. It's so familiar and so good as to be crazy.

The thing about tying your shoes? It's so true. Such a little, daily, every-day thing, and yet, it's so profound when you realize you, um, can't do it, or, afterwards, that, yes, you can. It really is the little things you'll notice most.

I can recall my family's surprise and pride and happiness for me. I heard it when my 11-year-old nephew watched me quickly and easily traverse a 14-step flight of stairs (with a landing in the middle) and said, "You're so fast!" Now, that was a word that never would have previously described me and my ability to navigate stairs. You're talking about somebody who used to climb stadium stairs to get to press boxes for a living -- and someone who had to stop about halfway up the steps, turn around, and pretend to be admiring the view while I took the chance to catch my breath before going the rest of the way up.

I can vividly remember going to a follow-up meeting at my weight-loss surgery doctor's office after I'd started losing a significant amount of weight. I stuck my arm up and out a little bit so the nurse could take my blood pressure when I suddenly started staring at my arm/wrist. The nurse noticed my intent focus and asked "What are you looking at?"

I had to explain: I'd suddenly noticed that the elastic wristband on my watch was loose, and I was looking, with intent awe, at the little space that now existed between it and the underside of my wrist. It was the weirdest thing to ever notice, but to me it felt wondrous, and I couldn't tear my eyes away. The nurse smiled and chuckled knowingly, and indulgently. Again, it was such a little, seemingly nondescript, unnoticeable thing, and yet, it marked a memorable step in a new direction for me.

Then, one week, I realized I was sitting up and stepping out of bed, instead of rolling out of bed. And, like you, I could tie my shoes, while standing up, no less, and I didn't even have to sit down, the better to reach or maneuver around myself to do it anymore.

Amazing, isn't it?