Half the Man I Used to Be

I don’t remember when my weight started to be an issue. I weighed just over 100 pounds by the time I was 10. I was proud of being triple digits and told a friend — he commented “wow, you’re fat.” I had thought I was “husky.” It was then that I realized the word my parents had used when discussing my size meant fat.

I don’t have a lot of photos from when I was little. At 3 years old, cruising in my battery-powered car (my uncle worked for a toy company), I look normal. Even at 6 years old (I’m the one with the over-lit face) I wouldn’t say I look fat. But four years later I’d tip the scale at 103 pounds and two years after that, even under the Confirmation robe I was wearing, you can see my belly is getting big.

Throughout my weight odyssey, I have never felt like a fat person — I never identified as being fat. Oh, there was no mistaking it — I was fat. But I never thought of myself that way. I felt like a normal-sized person trapped in a fat body. I’ve read stories by people who are or were fat and for some, it seems, being fat is part of their identity. This has never been true for me. If I saw myself in a mirror, of course I realized I was fat. I had the self-loathing that many grossly overweight people have, the feelings of being a failure for not being able to effectively eat less and move more, like my doctor told me to do. But being fat was never something I felt was part of me. Rather, it felt like being fat was something that was being done to me. It wouldn’t be until the age of 60 that I’d come to find out how true this feeling was.

In high school, I gained much more height than I did weight and by the time I graduated, I was what most people would have called “normal” or average weight for my height — at least in the US. I had friends in Germany who hinted — to the extent that Germans hint — that I was on the heavy side of normal. But through my university years and into graduate school, I was not what any American would call fat.

My weight started to increase in the early 1980s. I got married in 1983, at the age of 24, and weighed 208 pounds. Not too bad for my height of 6-feet, as I have a big frame, so I carry weight well. My weight inched up over the first years of being married. I don’t remember by exactly how much. We had our first child in November of 1989, and I remember we had each gained about 40 pounds over the pregnancy. My (now) ex-wife lost those 40 pounds within a couple months of our child’s birth — I did not.

I yo-yoed a bit between the birth of our two children, but again, with our second, we each gained 40 pounds. And again, she lost her pregnancy weight and I didn’t. It was incredibly frustrating because I was getting more exercise and eating a low-fat diet — no skin on the chicken, pretzels instead of chips for a snack. But I just kept getting bigger, fatter. It didn’t help that I had an incredibly stressful job with long hours and late nights, so less sleep than was healthy. But this was the early-to-mid 1990s, and the impact of stress and lack of sleep wasn’t so well known.

By the time I had started my own company, in 2001, I had topped 300 pounds. In the summer of 2002 we went on a long driving trip around the US. I was proud to have gained only 10 pounds over the five weeks of restaurants for at least two meals a day. My wife wasn’t as enthused about this news as I was. Of course, she hadn’t bargained for a husband who was now 50% bigger than when she married him. I’m sure she supposed I was cheating on my diet. And of course I was, although not enough to account for my ever-increasing size. Overall, I was eating less and trying to exercise as much as I could given my size. But at 300+ pounds, everything becomes harder.

Like in every story you’ve read by overweight authors, I suffered the subtle and not so subtle prejudices fat people experience. The looks of disgust when we eat, the faces on the people on a plane you can tell are praying that we keep walking past their row, the exaggerated groans of inconvenience when the person at the next table needs to shift their chair for a fat person to get by. And I get it (and got it at the time) — the belief was that I did this to myself, I just had no willpower, and now they had to suffer because of it.

Then there are all the other slings and arrows of being overweight that normal-weight people probably don’t know about: like barely being able to tie one’s own shoes (by the time I reached my peak weight the only shoes I had with laces were gym shoes, which I never wore), needing to stop and rest on a long stairway (I’d pretend to stop to look for something in my briefcase), needing to park away from other cars because you can’t squeeze yourself in or out of the car in a tight spot.

In the Spring of 2003 my father died. When seeing a friend of one of my brothers before the funeral — a guy I hadn’t seen for over 120 pounds — he commented that I was twice the size I was when he had seen me last. Ha ha, thanks Patrick, it’s good to see you, too.

That summer I took my family to Europe for five weeks. At the top of the Eiffel Tower a large Indian man asked if his friend could take a photo of us together. “Sure, I guess,” I said, a bit bewildered. After the impromptu photo shoot, he commented that we must be the two fattest people in France. Ha ha, yeah, thanks Indian man, the pleasure was all yours.

As if I needed reminding how big I was, given the stares I got on the streets of Paris, Blois, Rome, and, basically all over Europe, there was the ubiquitous, aluminum, café chair. Simple, stylish — but I literally did not fit in it. I couldn’t even squeeze myself into one. I was that fat. I had to look for this chair’s cousin — the stylish, aluminum café chair with no arms. And the little folding café chairs upon which the tiny French or Italians would take their latte or cappuccino — there was no way I was even going to try to sit on one of those.

By 2008 I had reached about 340 pounds. But I wasn’t done, yet. Two years and one divorce later, I had hit 365 pounds.

Shortly after my divorce, while working in my new apartment, I had left the TV on after watching Jeopardy! I don’t remember which show was on, but I remember Dr. Oz was talking about weight loss. He said something along the lines of, and I can only paraphrase here: ‘By the time a person reaches 400 pounds, they never lose weight again because exercise is just too painful. So they will just continue to gain.’ That got my attention. I was closer to 400 than I was to 300 — not that 300 was slim, by any stretch of the imagination. But that was my reference point — and that comparison scared me into doing something I’d never done before.

That scare made me realize I needed help — I couldn’t do this on my own. I had tried on my own for 30 years. I guess I had finally accepted the evidence that had been piling up like the weight on my body for decades. One day shortly after hearing Dr. Oz, I saw Charles Barkley on an ad for Weight Watchers and I joined. Weight Watchers for Men, to be more precise. It had an app for the iPhone, and no requirement to attend meetings. Perfect.

Starting weight: 365 pounds; 76 meal points + 49 weekly bonus points. I hadn’t realized it was a point-based system, but okay, I paid for six months, so I was going to play. And play I did. I eventually stopped using the app, and stopped paying, so I don’t have my weight history. But my memory tells me that within the first month I dropped to about 350 pounds — just by adjusting my diet. In fact I lost so much weight so quickly, I got an email from Weight Watchers telling me I was losing too much too quickly and that it might not be so healthy. They noticed I wasn’t using my weekly bonus points and encouraged me to use them. I took their suggestion under advisement and used some of the bonus points from week to week.

Within a few years, I had lost about 95 pounds — just by adjusting my diet. Again, as I don’t have the data from Weight Watchers I don’t know this for sure, but I think I had basically cut back on my carbohydrate intake. Carbs were “expensive” — they cost a lot of points. I could still eat a big steak if I didn’t have the garlic toast with it. I had definitely shifted my eating habits, because I remember finding it difficult to use all my daily points. A lot of times, I was just too full to “eat” all my points.

In February of 2015 I was diagnosed with cancer. I had surgery one week after my diagnosis and after 8 days in the hospital, I weighed in at 260 pounds (down 105 pounds). After a quick recovery from the surgery, I was ready for my chemo-radiation therapy — on my neck. Radiation therapy on one’s neck renders it, essentially, burned on the inside. This makes eating very, um, unpleasant. My doctors wanted me to eat 3000 calories a day to help with the healing process. Even with the combination of oxycodone and fentanyl I was on, I could barely manage 800–900 calories a day. If I hadn’t had so much body-fat to rely on, my team at the Mayo Clinic said they would have put in a feeding tube.

Afterward, I joked how with Weight Watchers I had lost about 100 pounds at a cost of about $7.20 per pound lost (based on the monthly fees I’d paid) over the years. With cancer, I lost weight much quicker — 40 pounds in 3 months, but at a cost of $6,700 a pound.

At 225 pounds I enjoyed not recognizing myself when I saw my reflection in a store window. I remember shopping for shoes and realizing I could buy shoes with laces — which I did! I was down 10 inches in the circumference of my waist. There were people I hadn’t seen in 5 years who didn’t recognize me.

I almost got to waist minus 12 inches when the weight started to creep back on again. I didn’t know then what I know now, so I wasn’t consciously limiting my carbohydrate intake. I was still in the low-fat mentality, and that, typically means a relatively high amount of carbohydrate in the diet. By the summer of 2018, I was up to about 260 pounds — so still down 105 from my peak. But I had gained back all the weight I had lost due to the cancer treatment.

Then I met Silvia. It had been a long goal of mine to move to Italy and in the summer of 2018, I started in on that goal. I got an apartment in Torino — northwestern Italy — and planned to live there according to the tourist visa regulations of 3 months in Italy, 3 months in the US, rinse, repeat (the terms of a tourist visa for the EU are that you can live there for 90 out of every 180 days). I met Silvia on Facebook through a whim related to my attempts to learn Italian. We met the day after I arrived in Torino — although we had connected via video calls for about five weeks prior to meeting in person.

Silvia is amazing. One day, before we met in person we were texting — me in Minneapolis, she in a small town outside of Torino. I was trying to get dual citizenship since my great-grandfather was born in Italy. He was from a small town near Campobasso, but I didn’t know the name of the town. He was also born in 1875, and I needed his official birth record. Whether or not his birth record even still existed was an open question. Silvia asked me for his name and birthdate — and within five minutes, texted me a photo of my great-grandfather’s birth record. That’s Silvia. When she wants something she gets it. If it’s hard to do? She does it anyway. If she doesn’t understand something? She searches the internet, books, articles and/or talks to experts until she understands. And she does it all with style and grace.

Anyway, I had mentioned my weight struggles, so she started researching. Her job brings her into contact with lots of different types of information (we met through something related to her work, but that’s a story for another day) and she had read or heard about an Italian doctor with a new approach to weight loss. We both signed up and we both started losing weight on the plan. It was great that the plan was based entirely on food you buy at the store. There was food he sold, but success on the diet did not depend on buying any of it. In the end, it turned out the Italian doctor was kind of a dick, so we switched to another plan from a company called Losenjoy (.com). Both plans are billed as “biochemical” approaches to diet. They are, essentially low-carb/high-fat (LCHF) approaches to eating. And they are effective! I’ve since gone off “on my own” eating a LCHF diet along with intermittent and some extended fasting and am down to 192 pounds. I haven’t weight 192 pounds since starting graduate school 39 years ago.

So why had I gained so much weight over the years and why was the LCHF approach to eating so successful in getting me back to the size I always felt I was? The short answer is, It’s complicated. Complicated and complex.

There are a lot of factors that affect weight. Sleep quantity and quality, stress, alcohol and/or other drug use, among others. Surprisingly, how much you eat isn’t a big factor in general — what you eat has a bigger effect on weight. The caveat here is that you need to be able to hear your body when it tells you it’s full — and you need to listen to it.

Clearly, over the years, I had been living under a lot of stress and not getting enough sleep. But at least, according to the USDA, I was eating the right foods — lots of carbs, not much fat.

I started gaining weight as an adult when I was a grad student, living on $4,700 a year — in Chicago. With that kind of money, even with the added resources of the student loans I took out, there was not enough money left after rent and my monthly bus pass for me to be overeating. The USDA started telling us to eat a low-fat/high-carb when I was in college — when I had even less money, so I was definitely not overeating in the late ‘70s/early ’80s. Even after getting my first real job after grad school, I was married, my wife was still working on her degree, we had student loans and a car payment and a few years later, a mortgage. We weren’t starving, but again, we weren’t living high on the hog, either.

How did I gain weight without eating too much? We’ve all been told that you gain weight by eating too much or not getting enough exercise. Well, I certainly wasn’t eating too much. And parking in Chicago was a pain, so even when we finally bought a car, we still did a lot of walking — and my stress relief came in the form of biking along the lakefront.

It turns out that many people (estimates are as high as 75% of Americans) can’t handle a diet high in carbohydrate. For them (us!) the high levels of carbohydrate in the diet results in the desensitization of their cells to the hormone insulin, which in turn leads to increased storage of fat and an inability to access that fat for energy.

Here’s a quick look at how our bodies evolved to work — I’ll speak in generalities here for simplicity, but you can check out my book (BE LEAN! Revealing the Long-Lost Secrets of Weight Management), which is available on Amazon, if you want more details.

When we eat, some of the energy we take in gets converted to fat. The fat is then stored in our adipose tissue (fat cells). This happens for everyone. You eat and store some fat. Not all the energy you eat gets stored as fat. Some is converted to glucose, which is used as fuel for your body as you are eating, while some is stored (in the form of glycogen) in your liver and muscles. It is this combination of glucose, glycogen and fat that allows people to space out meals. It’s like we have batteries — we charge them up and use the stored energy throughout the day. Animals like chimpanzees have almost no body-fat — and they need to eat almost constantly. We have the ability to move beyond our food source(s) because we can carry around our own fuel. Insulin is the hormone in our bodies that directs the weight management process.

So while and shortly after we eat, the pancreas secretes insulin into our blood which manages the glucose, glycogen and fat derived from the food we eat. As the glucose and glycogen get used up, insulin levels in the blood go down and another hormone produced by the pancreas (glucagon) is able to direct the process of using stored fat for energy. So insulin “charges” our body-battery and glucagon allows us to use the stored power. But glucagon can only direct the fat-usage process when insulin levels in the blood are low.

For many people, however, as I mentioned above, the high carb load in the diet recommended by the USDA, AMA, ADA, AHA, etc., causes the slow desensitization of cells to insulin — and this is a problem. It sets up a vicious cycle — desensitized cells need more insulin to utilize the glucose in our blood after we eat, which further desensitizes the cells, which then require even more insulin to utilize glucose.

This systematic desensitization of our cells to insulin leads to a high level of insulin in the blood long after we eat — possibly until our next meal, where the whole cycle starts again.

At this point we stop using our stored fat for energy. When this happens, you will start to feel the need for a snack between meals. If you had a lower fasting insulin level, your body would just use your stored fat for energy — because you don’t have access to the body fat that would have kept you going until your next meal. If it can’t access this energy source your body will make you hungry, so you’ll eat more carbohydrate (candy, chips, sugary drinks, energy drinks are all high-carb snacks). And this makes the problem worse because now you have more insulin in your system to deal with the snack.

The result? For people like me, when we eat a diet high in carbohydrate, we store fat but don’t use it — so we just get bigger and bigger, little by little, day by day, month by month, year by year. It doesn’t need to start with overeating — the high amount of carbohydrate in the Standard American Diet (think The Food Pyramid) is more than enough to start this devastating chain reaction with respect to insulin desensitization.

If the insulin desensitization gets bad enough, the person can’t make enough insulin on their own to handle all the glucose in their blood and they become Type 2 diabetic and need to inject extra insulin. It should be noted that coronary heart disease is often the next step in a person’s medical life after becoming diabetic. So, the diet designed by the USDA to fight heart disease is likely leading nearly three out of four Americans to have heart disease (if the complications from diabetes don’t kill them first).

And this isn’t just my hypothesis. The science behind this has been known for decades — some of it for over a century — hence the sarcasm of “long-lost secrets” in the title of my book. I wrote the book because I wanted to share this information with others who are overweight — for those of us who followed the worthless advice of “eat less/move more” and still grew overweight. And I have purposefully set a low price for the book to make buying it more affordable.

So, I’m not quite half the man I used to be. But I’m back to surprising myself when I see my reflection and I get “looks” on the street now instead of circus-freak stares! I’m not so sure my wife likes that aspect of my weight loss!