Darkness Visible

I stole the title from William Saroyan.

I have found, over the years, that I am prone to depression.  I have had, I think, three seriously depressive periods.  I'm just coming out of one (knock wood).  If you have ever suffered from this, you know how debilitating and freaking scary it is.  Forget about decent sleep.  One is hopeless and joyless.  Suicide seems like one of the few good resolutions.  It's not rational, and even if you recognize that, you don't care.  I could go on, but I won't.  I don't really want to think about the last month or so.

If  you have read my past entries, you know I've had a lot going on.  I reached my limit, and I was spun.  I'm doing much better now.  Meds and therapy help.  My wife is unbelievably kind and supportive. 

I didn't eat.  I couldn't.  (This is a first.  I'm ok with not wanting to eat, too.)  But I have not been tracking, and I have not limited what I've been eating.  Willingness to eat has been enough.  My appetite is back, and I don't feel much need to eat a lot.  It makes me thing that whatever my issues, I might have--for the moment--changed my relationship with food over the last year.  I hope so.

If you suffer, my heart goes out to you.  I have found a book called Undoing Depression pretty useful.  You can read about it here www.undoingdepression.com.

I'll be writing more here later.  But that's all for now.

Paying attention

This will sound like a complaint and it--well, it kind of is.  Mea culpa.  I have hit the wall.  A sick wife and sick dog finally took their toll, and I am sick.  I have a wicked sinus infection, and I am wiped out.  I didn't even go to work for two days.  That's how you know I'm sick.  I have a very strong guilt complex.

Anyway, here's something I've learned.  When I don't feel good, I tend not to take great care of myself.  You can't even imagine the bad stuff I ate yesterday.  It wasn't even very good.  And such small portions!  (Right.)

I figure yesterday was worth something like 3400 calories.  That's about 700 more than I'm supposed to have.  (I'm a big guy.).  I say "I figure" because I tracked nothing yesterday.  I just have not had the energy to do anything, and I couldn't bear the hassle of tracking.  Funny, because it's not particularly hard.

Still, I am, for the moment, the one who has to keep the house running.  (I don't resent it.  I mean, I have my moments, but they are truly only moments).  So I went to the grocery after I saw my doc (Z Pack!).  DiGiorno has a new thing--frozen pizza that comes with breadsticks.  Did I get it?  You betcha.  Did I know my wife wouldn't want it--of course.  She doesn't eat red meat.  The good news is, while I ate the whole pizza (1800 calories!), I didn't eat the breadsticks.  I'm ok eating the occasional giant meal, but for 1800 cals, I wish I'd ordered from my local place.  This one wasn't that good.

It's a new morning.  I am feeling marginally better.  Oatmeal for breakfast, and I am going to make sure I don't eat a bunch of crap out of boredom or self-pity.  I'm going to track this stuff, too.  We'll see how it goes.

Yay! Thanksgiving!

It is Thanksgiving.  I have some advice (this is really for myself, but if it helps you, great).  First, though, the non-advice.  Last night, on The Biggest Loser, a guy tried to sell everybody on whipping up cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes.  Bullshit.  I've tried that.  It's not the same, it's not that easy to do, and it's not going to help you if you're jonesing for potatoes made with some cream or milk and butter.  Eat the damn potatoes, and enjoy every bit.  Fuck the cauliflower.  (I might put that on a shirt.)

The advice:  It's a day, not a weekend.  Ideally, it's a meal.  Same for Christmas.  Here in America, the Holidays start with Halloween and end with New Year's Day (or even the Superbowl).  It's the wrong approach.  A feast is a historic rarity.  Keep it that way.

A friend has a situation.  First, a little about her.  She is from the south.  Her parents are heavy.  She grew up fat (we have traded stories about what that's like).  Then in high school she lost 130 pounds and started competing in beauty pageants.  She did well.  Later she went to law school, and she works in a big city.  Wow, right?

Her parents are still heavy.  Her mom has some health problems that mean she really can't walk.  Her dad, however, eats.  Thirty years ago, he was a normal-weight guy.  A couple of years ago, however, he was about 580 pounds, and he was having health problems.  He was going to have lapband surgery, but he had to lose weight first (100 pounds, maybe).  Talk about irony.  They told him to keep it below 4000 calories a day.  That's a lot.  Some days I struggle to get 2600.  I am rarely really hungry.

My friend told me yesterday her dad is up to 651.  He has apparently been eating more than 4000 calories a day.  He will not be able to walk her down the aisle next year.  He will not be able to dance with her at her wedding.  He and her mother are visiting her in right now, and they cannot leave her apartment without her help.  By the time they get to the front door of her building, he has to take a rest.

She is both heartbroken and angry.  He is 55.  I ran the numbers.  He could eat about 4900 calories a day and lose weight.  If he gets down to 550, he could have the surgery (though if you could lose 100 pounds without surgery, why do it?).

I've been pretty big (hell, I still am), but I don't know how you get that big without changing something.  If you've read much of this blog, you know that I think this has to do with emotional and addiction-type issues.  But how far does any addiction go before you say, hold on.  I guess I know the answer.  Sometimes people don't say hold on.  Sometimes addictions kill them.

I have no advice for my friend, either.  Enjoy him while he's here, I guess.  I'm losing because I want to, and every time someone tried to talk to me about it out of love, I'd get pissed off anyway.  I don't know how  you get someone to take care of himself if he doesn't want to.  And clearly, someone is helping him get bigger.  I wonder what will happen when he can't leave the house at all.

I say I'm in it for the clothes, and while part of that is shtick, it's also true.  Lots of people talk about losing weight for health, but I have no interest in health when I feel shitty about the way I look.  For me it's all of a piece.  And having a doctor tell me once a year that my cholesterol and triglycerides look great is not enough to get me to the gym.  The linen pants in my closet that I love and have not been able to wear in years will.

What will work for my friend's dad?  No idea.  I hope he will find the maximum of what he's comfortable weighing soon.  I found it a few years ago, and I started dropping weight.  I am now at the lowest I've been in ten years.  I am also at the highest I ever want to be again.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy the food today.  But today only!

Fear

I don't know about you, but I have made a commitment to change my life and to become a thin person for the years I have left.

I have done this at least twice before.

I really think I have it in me to lose the weight and to keep it off.

The possibility of failure scares me to death.

Like Drew Carey, I am sick of being fat.  When I lost about 80 pounds in high school, I went to a doctor who had me write down everything I ate and limited me to 1500 calories a day.  If you figure my BMR, that was really, really low.  (Doctors, as a rule, don't know much about nutrition, and the honest ones will admit it.)  I looked good,  but I was pretty sure that once I was thin, I would never have a problem again.  In fact, my dad told me I would always have to be careful, but I just thought he was being a dick.  I gained it back, no problem.  And then some, of course, because that is the refrain to this song.

When I lost about 120 pounds in college, I had no idea what i was doing.  I really didn't.  Back then (late 80s), it wasn't as easy as it is now to get information about how to lose weight safely or how to keep it off.  Here's what I did:  I ate one meal a day, anything I wanted.  This was lunch around 4pm, probably 1000 to 1500 calories.  I ate some more after I turned 21 and could drink beer whenever I wanted.  (Heh.)  But I didn't know anything about working out, and I didn't think I'd need to do that.  I didn't know about BMR, etc.  And I thought that once I was down, I would never be up again.  At 21, I was down to 220 to 225.  You can see a picture on this page.

From age 21-26, I put on 35 to 40 pounds.  Law school will do that to you, especially if you don't know how to eat and don't work out.  I weighed about 260 when I got married at 26. 

From 26 to 37, I put on about 140 pounds, up to 350.  When my wife and I split, I put on at least another 50.  I assume my high was 400, give or take.

So here I am now, doing it again.  I scares me.  It really does.  Eating more (see below) scared me.  What if I start gaining?  What if I eat something and binge?  What if I fall off the wagon completely?  And what if I lose all the weight, buy all new clothes, and then gain 100 pounds?

It could happen.  It has twice.  I think this time is different because I know now that I have to be careful every day from now on.  It's daunting to think of that, but I can do it today.  I can do it tomorrow.  I'm planning on going to meetings forever, too, just like any addict.

It's also easier because I'm actually learning about the mechanics of the body, how much to eat (especially to eat enough).  I work out, too.  When I started losing in 2007, I started going to the gym.  The first time I got on an elliptical machine, I lasted five minutes, and I thought I would die.  Now I go 45 or 50 minutes.  I could go longer, too, but I usually get bored or run out of time before I run out of steam.  I actually like being at the gym, and I LOVE having worked out.  But it's hard to get off the couch most of the time.  (I had a zen moment a few months ago.  I was bored at home on a weekend, so I went to work out.  Amazing!)  Working out is great because everything hangs better. 

I hope this time is different.  I'm trying not to make pronouncements about the rest of my life.  I'm trying to take it all a day at a time, to make the right choices.  A lot of this is about caring for myself instead of punishing myself.  I think I've decided I deserve to be healthy and happy.  I hope it sticks.

Schadenfreude

My high school reunion was a couple of weeks ago. I didn't go. I didn't even consider it. The last one I went to was the ten year, and that was enough. I realized then--and the point reiterates itself every time I start following links on Facebook--that I really didn't like most of the people I went to high school with. I am a little embarrassed to admit the degree of schadenfreude I experience when looking at pictures from the reunion. Most of the people I know are pretty fat. When they were kids, most of them wrote me off because I was fat. I fantasize about asking them about it. "Is it weird for you being fat?" "Remember when I was fat and you were thin?" That second question would have worked at the ten year. I was thin. People didn't know who I was.

I grew up a fat kid. By the time I was in first grade, I was a porker. I don't know why I started eating. At some point, my weight and eating habits have all the markings of a power struggle in the family. Kids teased me, of course, and I sometimes struck back. I remember hitting a bully named Todd so hard on the back that he cried. This was when I was in seventh grade. He was an eighth-grader. I was shocked that he cried. And glad.

I didn't really date. A little. I was a (bad) shotputter, so not a jock. But mostly I was the funny fat kid. A cliche, and you can read about the funny fat kid in countless blogs about weigh loss. I tried to please people so they would stay off my ass. But if you do that long enough, you find it hard to figure out what it is you want. At least, that's my story.

A lot of blogs talk about the health problems of being fat. I have had some problems, but nothing as dramatic as some people talk about. The guy at 344pounds.com seems to have had serious trouble. I have been on high blood pressure pills since I was 27. But I got into a bad marriage at 26, and when I got divorced, the doctor cut the dosage in half, even though I was up 90 pounds from when I married. (You'd think that would have been an issue in the marriage, but I don't think it was. My ex never said a word, though that was common, so I'll probably never know.) I had some back spasm problems when I was up around 400 pounds, but those mostly resolved when I started working out and lost some weight. I have a problem with my ankle that is due to my flat feet which I think are inherited. No doubt the weight exacerbated the problem, but I don't know if it caused it.

People lose weight for lots of reasons. To get laid (done that), for heath (that too), because they're sick of being fat (Drew Carey). I'm in it for the clothes.