Weight loss, food, and related topics. in Journal of life stuff

I spent my entire life obese. The first time I stepped on a scale I think I was 85 lbs, and that was before my 10th birthday. By the time I was a teenager I was over 300 lbs. By the time I graduated high school I was 335. Why? There were a lot of reasons:
- I had to eat whatever mom cooked, and mom wasn’t a very good cook. When you’re forced to eat shitty food, you overeat on food you love.
- Anytime I went to the doctor they always asked about what soda I drank or other common tropes. No doctor ever talked to me about tracking my calories, how many calories I needed, or anything at all about nutrition. Because I never drank calories from soda, or ate potato chips, and rarely had ice cream, it always baffled them how I was so fat. As an adult, I understand, but I wish those doctors had better training on dealing with obese patients.
- Food was a coping mechanism. Sad? Eat something. Frustrated? Eat something. Lonely? Eat something.
- I was born because my father wanted someone to take care of him when he got old and senile. No, literally, he told me that word for word. Mother was an afterthought.
- I never went to a sleepover. I never stayed at a friend’s house. I saw my friends, the few I had, maybe once a quarter, if that often.
- I was not allowed to participate in sports. At first it was because my dad didn’t want do spend money on the gear because “I might fall out of love with it.” Then it morphed to ‘we don’t have the time to drive you there and back’. Then it became “we don’t want you to get hurt.” We had the money, we had the means, we had the time. My father wanted a servant, and a servant with his own hobbies isn’t a servant. He’s independent!
- We never interacted with other families. Cookouts at a friend’s house? Never. Dinner with another family? Three times in 20 years. Evenings at <friends> or <friends> at our place for the night? Never. Not even once. I never got to see how other families worked until I was in college.
- I was an only child. By the time I was in high school I was the only kid my age in my neighborhood that hadn’t been to prison. Note: I’m white, 4 of my 40 neighbors (my age group) were also white. There were 3 drug dealers on my street. Drive by shootings happened to the houses around me. </friends></friends>

I could keep going, but I think you’re starting to see the pattern. My parents didn’t know anything about nutrition. My doctors knew it, but didn’t know how to talk about it. The friends I had were my age, and how many 10-17 year olds know anything about nutrition? The people who could have helped me didn’t, and there weren’t that many people who could help me to begin with.

College was the turning point in my life. I went to a college 1000 miles away from home. I went there for a few reasons.

1. It let me get so far from my parents that they wouldn’t ‘just drop by’ or expect me to swing by. It forced separation.
2. I had a friend from high school going there, so I wasn’t totally alone.
3. They had a good computer science program.

That was it. That was my criteria. My freshman year I said I was going to eat better and lose weight. I didn’t touch anything fried, I drank mostly water, I didn’t eat dessert. I tried exercising, but when you’re that obese, exercise is often counter-productive. To be clear: exercise can be incredibly helpful, even if you’re obese, but I would do curls until my arm physically stopped moving because I thought that was ‘failure’. That isn’t failure, that’s damage. That’s damage that takes weeks to recover from. If you are obese and you want to exercise, find a personal trainer or a friend who works out and has coached obese people. When they say stop, stop. When they say go, go. If it hurts, tell them what, specifically, hurts. Some kinds of pain are bad, others are ok. Learn the difference.

For me, what I called ‘hurting’ was 100% of the time bad pain. I didn’t know that until I was 25 and started doing P90X3. Tony Horton can’t tell you good from bad pain in a video, but in 30 minutes, it’s damn near impossible to injure yourself by overworking something when no single exercise lasts more than 2 minutes. Going through P90X3 is what made me realize why I’d always failed trying to exercise.

Right, but college. My freshman year I denied myself all the foods I knew I’d love, and ate what I thought were reasonable portion sizes of food. I lost 50 lbs in 9 months. I went from 335 to 285. I didn’t realize how amazing that was. But here’s the problem: I had to go home for the summer. Like most freshman, I didn’t get an internship or coop, I didn’t get a job near college. I had to come home for the summer. And during the 3 months I was at home, I regained ALL 50 LBS! I was heartbroken. 9 months of work gone in 3? What the fuck? Why bother?

On top of that, the friends I had during my freshman year had excommunicated me because I had exposed that friend from high school as a guy trying to two-time his girlfriends. They didn’t like me for digging into his business, and they didn’t like me because I showed them an ugly truth about a guy they liked. My world was dark that second year. I had no hope, no happiness, no friends…and that didn’t change for years.

I didn’t bother eating healthy because…why? If I ate whatever I wanted I stayed at 335 lbs, but if I denied myself what I loved I only lost 50 lbs, and it took 100% dedication for 9 months to do that. Then I’d go home for the summer and have to throw it all away because it was never an option to skip dinner because mom made it, or not eat out with my parents. I HAD to overeat. It was required.

So where do things get better? In 2012 I left a toxic job and moved cities. For the first time ever I was on my own AND away from my parents. That toxic job was in the same city my parents lived, so even though I was supposed to be an adult, it was no different from living at home. But now, in 2012, I was free for the first time. No more risk of them cutting off my money, because I had my own. No more risk of them…I was free. Totally free. I bought all my own food. I cooked all my own meals. I had complete control. If something didn’t go my way, it was my fault.

I had a panic attack that first night in the new city and called an old friend from college. That old friend ended up becoming my first ever girlfriend over the course of a few months. Between having control and finally having someone who loved me, I felt like I could conquer mountains, and I did just that. In 8 months I lost 60lbs, mostly using CICO and some exercise (mostly couch to 5k). But this time, I understood how impressive that rate of weight loss was.

After 8 months that girlfriend and I broke up. She cheated on me with an ex. I also had to move cities to keep a job; I was now living near Boston, a place I knew I would hate. But I kept focused on losing weight, and I got myself down from 335, where I stated trying to lose weight in 2011, to 185 lbs in 2015. I was no longer obese, for the first time in my life.

The problem is, when I looked in the mirror I still had the same shape as I always had. I didn’t look ‘overweight’. I looked obese. Yes, I took before and after photos. I could see I was smaller. I could see I had lost weight, but I didn’t look attractive. I wasn’t ‘done’. I needed to lose more. But I got my first kick in the balls in 2014 (as if the cheating girlfriend wasn’t a kick in the balls).

Like most guys, I have very little luck with online dating. Or dating in general. But in 2015 I had met a girl and I had taken a week off work to drive out to visit her for the first time. About 3 days before i was going to leave we had a fight which centered on the fact that she viewed pets as people and I didn’t. She decided we were incompatible and we shouldn’t meet. I was distraught, but I had no one to talk to. No more friends from college to call. No more internet strangers to reach out to (by 2015, reddit was toxic, not helpful). I had to deal with this 100% alone. So I dealt with it the only way I knew how to: “I’m going to eat whatever I want to keep myself from going back to being suicidal. Calories be damned.”

And I did just that. In the week I was supposed to spend with my new girlfriend, I gained 10 lbs. I went from 185 to 195. It both shocked me and broke my heart to see just how fast I could gain weight, and just how slowly I was able to lose it. I undid 10 weeks of work in just 1. That is one of the most heartbreaking things on the planet.

I stayed between 185 and 195 for the next year. It took me that long to recover from the sting of a failed relationship. And i started losing again. I got down to 185 and stayed there for a year. Then I got sick of being 185. I wanted to be done losing weight goddamnit! I got myself down to 175. Then plateaued again. Then down to 163.

Once I was under 185, I bought new clothes. For the first time ever I fit, comfortably, in medium shirts. I went from 2XL shirts to mediums. And I went from 42” waists to 32” waists. I could wear my pants at my hips, like you’re supposed to, instead of low. The crotch of my pants was no longer half way down my thighs. For my height, 150 is the exact middle of the ‘normal’ weight range. ~139lbs is considered ‘underweight’. Even at 163, I still had the same fat pouch I’d always had. I still looked like my old, fat, self in the mirror, just smaller. It made motivation hard. What was I doing all this work for? I still didn’t look sexy.

But then the real big kick in the balls happened. I got laid off due to my company merging with another company. I didn’t get laid off for being a bad employee, i got laid off because I wasn’t friends with my manager, and he chose his friends over good employees. That stung, but I held my weight. Then I went on a date with a girl and it went terribly. She was a Christian, and I was too. But she didn’t believe God was the only God. She had 0 sympathy for my struggles with the church. She was completely accepting of homosexuals and transgender individuals. She was of the opinion that anyone who didn’t like Hillary, or any other female candidate for the presidency was clearly a misogynist. She wouldn’t let me buy us lunch, but forced me to split the bill.

Why was all this so bad? Because I hadn’t learned that I don’t have to please everyone. My father, my managers, my friends, everyone had beaten into me that I ‘can’t/shouldn’t burn bridges’ and ‘will never know when I’ll need someone’. But I’d never realized that nobody ever was there for me, even when I didn’t burn the bridge. I was always alone. And so I saw all those difference between she and I as my own failures, not hers.

I said to myself “I lost all this weight, I’m objectively attractive now because I’m now at a normal weight, and no longer even overweight, medically speaking. And this is the type of woman I get? What the fuck did I do all this work for?!”

Two days later an employer I was sure was going to hire me called me and said they weren’t going to hire me. And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I went out and started eating everything I could to keep my mood up. So that when I answered the phone, I’d sound happy and not as sad, hopeless, and angry as I felt. I gained 20 lbs in the span of 1 month. I was back to 185 lbs, a weight I’d not been at since 2015 (it was now 2017). It’s heartbreaking to lose 2 years of weight loss in a single month. But something even more fundamental had changed.

1. I had always used the idea that I’d become physically attractive and thereby be able to date people and eventually find someone who liked me as motivation for losing weight. But with that horrible date, I understood this wouldn’t happen. I didn’t get that date because I was normal size. I got it because of chance. And if that was the quality of human I’d get, why fucking bother?
2. I lost my religion. Christianity is supposed to give me a community, but I can’t walk into a church and listen to a sermon without reliving the PTSD of trauma I suffered in church as a teenager. The only time I managed to go to church without a PTSD relapse was when I had that first girlfriend, and that was because I knew, 100%, that she loved me. That made the demons of the PTSD non-viable, it proved their lies wrong, and I could go on with my life.
3. I realized that I had spent the past 5 years permanently ‘hangry’. I could be a nicer person if I just ate a bit more. But in order to be a nicer person, I couldn’t eat at maintenance calorie level, I had to eat at a level where I’d slowly gain weight.

With the fact of 1 really hitting me, 3 didn’t seem that bad if it would better my career. Over the next two years, to present, I gained 20 more lbs, for a total of +40 from my all time low of 163, to my most-recent-high of 205. I finally managed to stop gaining weight around 3 months ago, and I’ve floated in the 198-202 range for that time.

I do want to get back down to the 180s, at least, because fitting into medium clothes and wearing my pants at my hips is just plain more comfortable and less shameful. It also means my lower back doesn’t hurt in the mornings and I can walk first thing, instead of needing to wait until the evenings for the muscles to have relaxed enough.

In the past 2 years, a lot has changed, but I’m getting tired of talking. I’ve been writing this journal entry for nearly an hour now, and covered almost 3 miles walking while I write. This was needed because it burns off about 300 calories, and that’s how I’ve been slowly chipping away at the fat. Going back to a diet that works (diet meaning calorie count comprised of foods I like, rather than something like atkins, keto, or weight watchers), and walking to burn off the few extra calories that diet puts me past my goal calorie target. The walking also helps me calm down. It removes stress. In the winter it helps me stay warm because I keep my apartment cold. Now that it’s spring, I have to use the air conditioning and a fan, but whatever.

Now here’s the real question I want to ask you, the read, having read all this. Did you learn the most important lesson of all about weight loss? If not, here it is.

Being overweight is a mental disorder. It’s root causes are many, but the process of losing weight is the same process as quitting an addictive drug. You need a good social network, hope, opportunities, and faith that life can be better without the thing you’re addicted to. The way Switzerland treats heroine addicts can be used as a template for treating obesity by people smarter than I am.

The knowledge of how to lose weight, CICO, macro nutrients, sites like loseit.com and myfitnesspal, these are all good, and help with the technical side of ‘how’ to lose weight. But the actual process, the day to day, that’s down to willpower, hope, and other mental issues. Someone really may need to feel loved, have friends, or some feeling of family before they can make significant progress on their weight loss journey, but if they ever tell you that they can’t do anything alone, then that person is just plain lazy and not ready to commit. Trying and failing is the state of someone able to improve but unable to sustain. Failing to even try is the sign of someone lying to themselves.

I’ve been on both sides of that fence. It’s why I can’t date another obese person. I know the lies, I know the mental disorders. I can’t bear to be reminded of my past shame, pain, and everything else. I’m not far enough away from it to help them yet. I may never be. But I write this because knowledge is often hard won, and maybe you won’t have the same inability to look at an obese person and hear their lies to themselves that I do. Maybe you won’t relive the same pain that I do, and maybe you’ll get to see an obese person beat their obesity.

This is why I’ve always written. Because in helping myself, I can help others. I love other people. They are the most important resource on the planet. In that capacity, I truly understand why Elon Musk does what he does. He too, truly loves people. That piece of him I understand as well as I understand myself. He exceeds me in all categories, but I still understand.

Thanks for reading.