Shrinkage

It's not what you think.  This is about therapy.

I am nothing if not well-counseled.  What I have learned is that childhood is very important, that the injuries you suffer then are injuries you carry with you for life.  If you are self-aware enough, have some help, and do the work, you can get beyond them.  They still happened, but they don't have to continue to cause you anxiety or rule your behavior.

I take this on faith, because I'm not there yet.  My inner second-grader guide me more than I think.  I'm trying to be aware of these things.  I've been thinking about that kid lately.  As a kid, I felt pretty bad about who I was.  That hasn't changed.  As a kid, I ate to medicate.  Some people do drugs.  Some drink.  I ate, mostly.  My parents sent me to my first shrink when I was ten or eleven.  His goal was, I think, to make me thin.  I am pretty sure he was a Ph.D.  I'm sure he came highly recommended.  I went one time.  Here's what he did:  he hypnotized me.  I kid you not.

I had to look at a flickering light, then close my eyes and concentrate on whatever flickering I could see through my eyelids while he convinced me that I wanted to be thin enough to wear a new, blue bathing suit.  I think he suggested that I ride my bike for 30 minutes a day.  I remember being antsy.

The guy was not unkind.  But even then I thought it was bullshit.  I thought hypnosis was silly, and I didn't feel as though I was in whatever trance I was supposed to be in.  What I knew was that I was supposed to be serious about the process.  It was for my own good.  My folks were concerned.  I have always been a pleaser, a good do-bee, and I was there, too.

There are two things that strike me about this now, more than thirty years later.  First, I figure my parents thought it was bullshit, too, since I only went one time.  Second--and this is probably of primary importance--I wonder why the shrink didn't explore why I was overeating so much.  It seems so obvious.  I was eating as a kind of medications.  Think about the line in Mean Girls, when Tina Fey's voiceover is itemizing the various lunch groups in the school cafeteria.  One table is full of (fat) girls "who eat their feelings."  It's funny because it's true.  It's also heartbreaking.

My reading about depression tells me that the concept that kids can be depressed is a recent development.  The idea was that depression is rooted in childhood injury and that children cannot develop depression while still children.  Something like that.  That belief no longer carries the day.  I assume that's why the guy didn't ask about my eating.  I am appalled, though at what passed for therapy.  Mostly I ended up feeling like a disappointment.  I hope my parents didn't pay too much. 

Back in Fifth Grade

It started as a misunderstanding.  I know this.  It doesn't matter.

A friend wrote a funny post on his Facebook page.  I commented--it was an inside joke between us.  One of his friends (an idiot--I have no doubt), wrote a long rant, in which he called me "fat boy." 

I haven't been called fat or fat boy, not to my face, anyway, in a very long time.  I mean, I'm 44.  Don't get me wrong.  I know people make comments.  But still, calling me fat boy?  On Facebook?

What was weird was, I felt as though I were right back in fifth grade.  I really did.  Still do.  But I'm not.  I'm 44.  I'm a fat man, not a boy.  Here's how I feel.  The dude is lucky he's in New York and not in LA.  Because I seriously would kick his ass.  I mean it.  It wouldn't really be about him.  Right now he represents for me all the asshole bullies who ever called me names. 

It's surprising how fast I can go from middle-aged lawyer guy to fifth grade object of ridicule.

I'm doing my best.  I'm not a loser.  He's an asshole. 

So I had a healthy breakfast and went to work. I did not feed the emotion.  Food is for hunger, that's all.  But goddamn.  Seriously.

7 Pounds?

I lost 7 pounds Friday night.  Yes, in one night.  Thank goodness, too, because I was up a whopping 9 pounds from last Saturday morning.  It was apparently all retained water.  At least 7 pounds of it, maybe 8.  I was just a bit freaked out by it.  I really was.  I'm still not happy about the other two, but given my size, two pounds at the margin is probably not much to worry about.

I have noticed a slight increase in my total calories.  Nothing crazy, but nowhere near the 14,000 calories that four pounds (for example) would require.  Not even the 7000 calories that two pounds would require.  Not if the 2700 calories that Livestrong says I should be eating to lose weight is the right number.  So, why the plateau?  And what the hell is up with the water retention?

I recall having read somewhere that if you drastically cut calories to lose weight, you cut your metabolism by 10%, even if you regain the weight.  I don't know if I have that right, but I have done that twice in my life, and I was eating very little.  Up to 1500 calories each time, but no more.  The first time, my doctor gave me that number.  The second time I was really eating 1000 calories until I turned 21 and could drink beer legally.  So it's possible I damaged my metabolism.  I don't know if it comes back.

It's also possible that I didn't damage anything, but that my body just doesn't need 2700 calories.  So I cut back to 2600.  We'll see how that goes.  The danger in eating too little is that you will waste muscle instead of losing fat.  With less muscle, you compromise your metabolism, since muscle is the best furnace you have.

A little less might help.  We'll see.  I've been within three pounds of my current weight since August.  Great, I'm in maintenance.  (It's not a bad thing.)  But I want to drop 100 pounds.  For real.  It's about more than the clothes, suddenly, too.  Twenty to start with would be great.  And then 80 more.  And then, maybe another 20.  We'll see.  But I'm tired of the plateau.  It's hard to keep in mind the fact that I have dropped just about 40 pounds this year.  That's a lot.  I've said it before--it doesn't feel like a lot, because I have so far to go.  But it's plenty.

Today was in the 80s here in SoCal.  Hard to believe.  I took the opportunity to take a long bike ride down the Santa Ana River (which is all concrete).  I went about 13 miles in an hour.  The first 40 minutes were pretty easy.  But I have to say, it wiped me out for the rest of the day.  I liked doing it.  I want to do more.  I want to be able to do physical things.

When I was making the transition from junior high school to high school, I decided not to try out for the marching band.  Make any jokes you wish, but I imagined the band would be fun.  I didn't do it because I honestly didn't think there would be a uniform in my size.  I couldn't deal with that.  So I bagged the instrument.  That history came into my head today.  Don't know why.  I guess I don't want to live my life that way--being unable to do things because I ate too much.  I don't need to be fat now.  I need to have options.

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.

On being a fat kid

When I was in high school, my dad's law firm merged with a smaller firm. The new firm was not big by today's standards. It had maybe 30 lawyers, max. I worked there the summer after the merger as a general bobo/gofer.

One of the new parters was an old guy, probably pushing 80 at the time. He was an old thin guy who wore bow ties. The strangest thing about his appearance was the coarse white hair growing out of his nose. I don't mean the nostrils. I mean out of the top of his nose.

I decided to introduce myself. After all, this was an experienced, fancy lawyer--a burgermeister in my hometown. I told him my name. Did he say hi? No. Did he say, pleasure to make your acquaintance? No. The first words out of his mouth were, "You're fat like your dad."

I was shocked, and I was amazed that he could insult both my dad and me in five words. Amazing.

Ok, so I figured out that he was a world-class asshole. But still. That happened at the beginning of the summer, and I don't think I ever felt comfortable working there again. I told my dad what he'd said, and my dad laughed and said the guy wasn't such a bad guy. But I think it hurt my dad, too. For both of us.

My dad was kind of thick as a kid. But he also played on his high school tennis team. Comparatively, I was a much fatter guy, even though I dropped some weight and eventually became a bad shotputter.

I know my dad didn't like it that I was fat. I didn't. Why should he? But I grew up feeling as though I hadn't met expectations, and I still feel it. I might even feel it now more than I ever have. Mid-life crisis? Who knows?

I might be having a kid, which is to say that my wife might be pregnant. We're both on the heavy side, and we both worry that the kid will be fat. I don't worry that it will reflect badly on me (which I think bothered my dad). I worry that the kid will take as much shit as I did--from family, from strangers, from well-meaning friends and acquaintances.

My wife's mother has been perpetually on my wife about her weight, and if you look at pictures of my wife as a kid, you can see that she's perfectly normal, maybe a little heavier than some of her friends, but not giant. She was a lovely kid. She's a lovely woman. She struggles. I struggle. We both worry that having a fat kid will be bad for the kid because of the shit people dish out.

We're living differently than we used to. We eat a lot better than we used to, especially portion-wise, which is where we have trouble. We go to the gym together, too. We want this to be a way we live so the kid will grow up without turning to food for comfort the way we did.

My eyes these days really are bigger than my stomach. Sometimes I over-order, especially sushi. I get uncomfortably full. It's a kick. When I'm preparing a meal, I sometimes want to eat a lot. Usually I realize I'm feeling agitated about something. I eat less than I want. If I'm still hungry, I'll eat more. It happens, but rarely.

I read a book about Buddhism years ago in which someone said, "I eat when I'm hungry. I sleep when I'm tired."

That's the goal. Keep food as fuel only. Finding comfort in other things is the goal. I don't really know how to do that yet. But I'm--so far--pretty successful at letting the feelings pass without having to eat.

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.

Cheating

Today I weighed in at a meeting. Down 1.4, which is not as much as I had hoped. It's also for two weeks. I have to remember that in my world, where staying the same is a win, losing is a big deal. I'm down almost 30 pounds since April. There are faster ways to do it, especially when you're as big as I am, but I want something I can live with long term. I want to change my life.

I was up for about an hour last night. When my brain starts working, I sometimes have a hard time getting it to stop. Last night was bad because I thought of something that happened when I was a kid. I was 13 or 14, and it was around a holiday, because my mother's parents were there, too. We'd had a roast beef instead of a turkey, so I'm not sure what the occasion was. Probably Christmas. Anyway, a couple hours after we ate, I was in the basement at our miniature pool table. I had cut off some pieces of the meat for a snack. At some point I was going up to cut off pieces of meat so often I was tired of it, and there was so little of the roast left, that I just took the whole thing down with me and at it while I shot pool. This was probably a six or seven pound roast, half of which had fed five of us plus two grandparents.

My dad looked for the roast later to make some sandwiches--you know, a light dinner. He couldn't find it, asked me where I was. "I ate it," I said. Very sheepish. That created a crisis, embarrassment (me because I was out of control, the folks because I was out of control and they didn't know what to do).

I couldn't possibly have been hungry. I don't know what was going on. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I was agitated about something. I don't even remember what happened after that. But I'm still mortified about it, and I try to think what I would do if I were that kid's parent. In a way, today I am.

Today in the meeting, someone mentioned how weigh-in day functions as a cheat day. I get the concept. I have a lovely, skinny friend who really works at staying thin, and she and her mother have shared the concept of the cheat day since D was little. (D thinks a 600 calorie breakfast is ENORMOUS. Not for me it's not.) Anyway, I understand the concept of a cheat day, but who would I be cheating? Me, right? So why do that? My concept, though, is based on the theory that it's not about the food. It's about need. I have some ideas about the need, but it could be food or anything else that's the object of the need. Mine's food. For other people it's Sailor Jerry's rum. I don't want to cheat myself. I've been doing that my whole life.

A Little History

I remember the things that made me drop weight. I also remember that until now, I didn't really focus on the mental. In high school and college, I didn't realize that I would have to be careful my whole life. In fact, my father once told me that I'd have to worry about my weight my whole life. That pissed me off. He was right. That still pisses me off. (I could go on about parental issues, but I won't. My parents are nice people, and whatever mistakes they made with me are what they are. I'm 44. I'm responsible for myself.)

When I was in high school, I wanted to be able to wear clothing. Come to think of it, that's probably what happened in college. (Clothes=looking good=meeting up with the opposite sex.) This time, though, I was rated for life insurance. That wouldn't matter that much to me, except my lovely new wife and I are planning to have a kid. The insurance company wants me down to 300 for at least three months before they will cover me for more then $50k.

But I'm not doing it for the insurance. I don't want my kid to have a fat dad. I don't want my kid to suffer by being a fat kid. Growing up fat sucked. I would do anything to avoid that, and the kid will already have bad genes to deal with.

I'm an emotional eater. That part is easy. In Mean Girls, one of the leads is giving another character the rundown on the various cliques at the lunchroom tables. One is the table for girls who eat their feelings. I get it. I'm the same way.

Since April, I've been on the program. I have noticed that since I'm not eating to mute my feelings, I'm pretty agitated generally. I want to figure out what to do with all that emotion, which is primarily anxiety. I feel as though I'm in trouble a lot--like I'm an eleven-year-old with someone mad at me (it may or may not be reality, and it's usually not). I'm not going to eat to feed the monster. I want to find something else to do for that. Working out helps, if I can remain stress-free about it. When I start thinking I'm not working out hard enough or long enough, exercise contributes to my stress.

Fat Man Gone

There are a lot of weight loss blogs. Most of the ones I've found have good stories of people who have lost a lot of weight. Some have good stories of people who have actually kept the weight off for a long time. I'm not sure the net needs another one. I'm not sure I'll keep it up. But I'm here anyway. Today, at least.

I don't plan on listing my weigh-ins, and I don't know how much of this blog will deal with recipes or food. While I'm learning to cook and learning what goes with what, none of that is really interesting to me vis a vis weight loss and maintenance.

It's not about the food. At least not for me. I want to think and learn about what mentally makes and keeps people fat. That includes me.

I have a theory that fat people are not much different than drug addicts or alcoholics. They self-medicate with drugs and booze. We're self-medicating with food. Every time I see someone really huge, I think that person must have real problems dealing with his or her emotions. They eat to compensate. Historically, so have I.

Here's some history. I grew up fat (starting at about five years old). I went to Weight Watchers summer camp in Wisconsin the summer I turned 12. (Yes, they used to have camps.) I lost 33 pounds there, and I stayed with the program for a while and then forgot all about it.

I got bigger, and then in high school I lost 70 pounds by counting calories and writing everything down. That lasted until I had a group of friends who liked to party and eat pizza and burritos late-night.

In my junior year of college, I was about 340 pounds, and I lost about 120. I looked pretty good at 220 or 225. But over the ensuing 17 years or so, I put it all back on and then some. By the time I was 37, I was about 350 pounds. I got divorced and spent the next six months or so eating ice cream with Tony Soprano (on disc). I got to about 400 pounds.

I went to Weight Watchers and dropped about 55 pounds, keeping most of it off (but not staying with the program) until last fall, when I started to creep up. I was not happy, felt out of control, desperate. I went back in April 2010.

As of today, I'm down about 27 pounds. I understand that this is going to have to be like AA for me. I'm going to write down what I eat for the rest of my life. The enormity of that hit me hard a couple of weeks ago, but I realize that I only have to write it down today. Just today, whenever that day is. I can do that.

In the past, I didn't listen to my body well. I found it easy to slip into mindless eating fueled by emotions. I'm trying to listen now. I'm rarely hungry. I'm with the program. I'm learning.

I started at 358. Now I'm at 331. I'm shooting for 230. Well, I'm shooting for less, really. But for now, 230 sounds ok.

Why start yet another weightloss blog? Because I'm curious about other people. How do you do it? What messes you up? Do you agree with the concept of emotional causation?

One last thought. Sure I want to be healthy. But I'm also in it for the clothes.

Thanks for reading. Talk to me. Call me Skip.