On June 28^th I had an epiphany. Maybe a lot of people do when they find themselves laying on a gurney in their local emergency department waiting for tests to reveal if they’ve had a heart attack. The tests, fortunately, didn’t reveal anything immediately catastrophic, but that didn’t do much to change the simple fact that I felt awful and it was categorically impossible to keep plodding along as usual with all the warning lights that were being flashed for me. 

So, I did what any reasonable person would do… I slashed salt, downloaded apps, poured over internet discussion boards, and scheduled appointments with any doctor I could think of that might help get to the root cause of why I was feeling so badly… and more importantly why my heart occasionally decided to make a big show of trying to thunder out of my chest. Months of tests, scans, consultations still haven’t definitively what was going on with me through the summer of 2023. They keep poking at it, though, so maybe we’ll find out at some point… though as my symptoms have diminished, I’m less optimistic that will happen unless they reemerge and can be captured on one of their fancy tests or scans. If I’m honest, the part of me that things better out of sight and out of mind is winning out over the part of me that wants conclusive answers.

One of the deals I made with myself laying in the ED back in June was that I would finally head the medical advice I’d been getting for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t control the test results or the lack of official diagnosis of what was happening, but I could, in theory, control my weight. It had to come off and it had to happen in a significant way. As someone who’s life is almost defined by being a dedicated creature of habit, it would be arguably one of the hardest goals I’ve ever set for myself… and one I was being drug too unwillingly by my own traitorous body. 

July 1^st I weighed in at 330 pounds. Not knowing a damned thing about weigh loss, I set an arbitrary goal of making it down to 250 by the end of the year. Eighty pounds. Six months. I had no idea if it was doable, or even if my own brain would let me stick with something I hated with a passion for that long. 

I downloaded the LoseIt app, plugged in my vital statistics, and told it I wanted to lose 1.5 pounds a week. It spit out how many calories I should be eating each day… and that’s when I realized I had no idea how to effectively measure food. After that it’s been all weights and measures before anything gets on my plate. If you ever want to take the romance out of food, definitely weigh it all up first.

If June 28^th was my epiphany, buying that damned kitchen scale was a light bulb moment. I’d been protesting for years that I wasn’t eating absurd amounts of food. That’s objectively true. What I was eating, however, was incredibly calorically dense. A proper 400 calorie “serving” of lasagna is preposterously small. Same with anything involving cheese, really. Once I accepted the scale, though, things started happening. Yes, I was ravenously hungry all day every day, but the weight came off at a rate closer to 2.5 pounds a week than my planned 1.5. Chalk that up to the limited additional exercise I was willing to program into the day’s limited hours. 

Two months along, I discovered I wasn’t ravenous anymore. I was hungry for sure, but felt decidedly less likely to chew my own hand off. That’s about the time the anxiety I mentioned in last week’s post started to make its presence known. After that it was pretty much a war between my own stubborn determination to lose weight and my brain screaming that something was wrong. We seem, for the moment at least, to have concluded that particular war. I’m particularly grateful to that particulate respite.

What have I learned? Well, for me, losing the first tranche of weight was simple – radically decrease the number of calories going in while moderately increasing the number of calories burned. Calories in, Calories out as the people in the forums are fond of saying. The catch is, although the theory is simple, not a single part of it is easy. Learning about calories, how to measure them, abandoning long cherished menu items, learning to cook new recipes in an entirely different style, and sometimes being hungry all day no matter how well planned your meals are is hard. It’s damned hard. Every step of it is a goddamned fist fight with yourself. 

This how I sum up my experience so far… it’s an incredibly simple concept, but wildly challenging in execution.

I don’t think this process have given me any special insight. I still don’t know dick about losing weight. I don’t know much about macros or the fancy concepts of nutrition. I’m just a guy over here using an app and a scale to try to keep everything the experts say you need in between the lower and upper limits. Some days that works better than others. 

Anyway, I hit my mark of losing 80 pounds two weeks early. I’m still losing – down to 248.6 as of this morning. All the charts say at my height, I should “ideally” weigh in at 185 pounds. Frankly that sounds unreasonable. The chance of me hitting a weight I haven’t seen since high school at the latest doesn’t feel like something that’s achievable. Now 220 or 225, something that puts me in the range of being merely overweight instead of obese, does seem that could be within reach.

I’m plugging in my next goal as hitting 225 before June.

We’ll see how it goes.