A Reality Reset and Tipping a Sacred Cow

May 12th, 2010 should have been a normal day. It was a Wednesday. Hump Day. Halfway through the week, and another day closer to Beer Friday. I had not slept well the night before and knew that was going to make my workday a little rough. I start running through my morning mental list—blue shirt, black pants, grab a lunch—when I detoured off and did something different from my usual routine.  I had a rough night sleeping, and I dreaded the fact that was going to work to do, once again, the daily trudge to get my 8 hours (if I was lucky) in so I could get what little pay they had decided my worth to be. Except this day was different.

I stepped on a scale.

The numbers flashed a couple of times, then settled, and looked in disbelief as the digital numbers flashed and landed on 303 pounds.

I rubbed my eyes. Looked again. That could not be right. Maybe I accidentally reset the scale to kilograms? 

So, I stepped off it, changed the batteries, stripped down to nothing, took a breath, let all the air out (because you never know if a few breaths weigh, oh, fifty pounds), and let it all out and stepped back on.

303 pounds.

What the actual fuck? When did that happen?

When you go through life you expect certain things to happen. You expect at some point to bury your grandparents. You expect to bury your parents. But as the oldest in my generation, I do not expect to bury sisters, brothers, cousins, or children. I should be the first to go. Now, I know life does not work that way. I am not naive. The older you get, though, no matter how you look or feel, the more you are faced with the reality of your own mortality. 

I was forty-six years old and weighed more than three hundred pounds. That was like Biggest Loser kind of weight. The kind of number that pushes a scale to its limit, means you are too big to ride that ride, and you are gonna need a seat extender to fly with American. 

Three. Hundred. Pounds. 

I stared at that number and something clicked in my head. I vowed then and there that I would never weigh that much again. I pinky swore with myself that this was going to change. 

And then I promptly undermined my every effort to lose weight for the next ten years.

It was not the pounds that were weighing me down—it was the weight in my thoughts. It was the nest of termites in my head, thank you KISS for that image, that was the whole problem. But I did not know that then, or maybe I just did not want to face it.

Reality is like a Honey-Do list for a guy—we avoid it until the roof is caving in and the in-laws are coming for supper.

Before you think I am simply crazy or lazy, there is a whole mess of psychological research on resistance to change. Resistance to change is normal, especially when confronted with a path that is not comfortable and one in which you have a low expectation of success. Any program, regardless of how many others report success, is going to be met with caution to those of us that have been trying to change for years and have always failed. You cannot be told to change. Your wife or girlfriend of partner telling you to lose weight may work at first, but it will eventually fail because it is not your decision. YOU must know your “why” before any change will happen. I will write more about this later in the book.

I stood there in my room, with a pair of pants larger than any I had ever owned before, and a shirt bigger than the ones that had been in my closet just five years earlier, and wondered where I went off track. When I started ignoring the numbers on the scale and the numbers on the waistband of my jeans.

And what the hell I was going to do about it? My younger brother, Michael, who has always been an active person, said it best to me once, that seemed so apropos at that moment when I was staring at my own mortality: 

“If I am going to die young,” he said. “It will not be because of something I could have prevented.”

Michael Harris, Prophet and Statesman, 2010

Because let us not kid ourselves—fat guys die faster than skinny guys. You cannot put one-sixth of a ton on a human heart and expect it to perform like a Rolls Royce. My brother got it right, and somewhere, I had gotten it horribly, SuperSize Me wrong. As I stood looking at myself in the mirror that day, I understood what he meant. 

At this point, Michael and I had both had our cancer scare (mine was thyroid, his testicular). The only difference was that mine caused weight gain. The wrong part was that I used that fact to explain my laziness and slothfulness and to dismiss it as an effect of cancer. There was some truth to all that, which allowed me to fool myself for a long time. Do not get me wrong. Anyone who has had thyroid cancer, or even hypothyroidism, will attest to the fact that it really screws you up. You feel tired all the time. You cannot focus. The last thing you want to do after working all day is to get on a bike or go out for a run. The “will” might be there, but it sure as hell is not strong enough to pummel that lethargy into get-up-and-go. But the result of doing nothing is a weight gain of 120 pounds. 

In the way of the universe sending you freaking billboards when you’re missing the road signs, on the drive home that day, shortly after this decision to end this spiral, I was driving home and caught the tail end of a radio show with a local doctor as a guest who was talking about thyroid issues and its effect on testosterone production. When your body is short on the hormones that make the man's engine run, everything slows down—energy, sex drive, and metabolism. 

I made an appointment and paid out of pocket for the test and consultation. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. Not only were my thyroid meds out of whack, but my T level was also 95. So, after adjusting the Thyroid and adding T Therapy, the pounds began coming off but this wasn’t a miracle cure that turned me into Jack Spratt. 

After a year, my weight leveled off and I started looking for answers. It’s not like anyone pulls you aside in Health class in high school and says, “Hey, when you’re in your forties, you’re going to get this Dad bod. Getting rid of it will not be as easy as you think. You’re going to need to move and quit eating crap.” 

And that’s where I discovered, through my Triathlon Coach, the Vinnie Tortorich podcasts. He recommended books like “Wheat Belly”, “Good Calorie Bad Calorie” and a few more. Eureka, I thought again. I will just quit eating sugar and grains, and all will be well. 

After changing my eating lifestyle to No Sugar and No Grains the weight started falling off again. In addition, my energy levels shot through the roof, and I found my body was recovering from workouts, even long strenuous workouts, much faster than I could a year earlier… 

But it would not last.

Because the long and short of it is this:

100% of diet plans fail 100% of the time

The truth is that losing weight is just a piece of the puzzle. It is the foundation, sure, but like a house that cannot stand without a foundation, it is a necessary component. But if you just pour a few tons of concrete, level it out, and walk away, you do not have a house. Hell, you do not even have a KOA campground. You have a lump of concrete. 

To find true health there also needs to be a healthy mindset, a commitment to surrounding yourself with healthy influences and people that will support you and not lead you astray, and who will reel you back in if you happen to go off on a tangent. You need a solid knowledge base on what is healthy and what is not. You must be willing to accept that things you were raised to believe may not be true and to have the strength and fortitude to put your SELF and your HEALTH first as a priority. 

Yeah, yeah, you know this. Anyone who watches five minutes of Jillian Michaels screaming at people knows this. But we are men. Men do not open up and cry in public and talk about how fucking hard it is to say no to that ribeye sizzling on the grill.

Face the pressure that we, as men, feel from society and open ourselves to the fact that it is OK to be what we are. 

But it takes honesty. Being honest with ourselves and where we are is the key. We cannot fix a problem if we are unable, or unwilling, to even admit that there is one. So, get up, right now, and look in the mirror. And be HONEST. What do you see?

Do you see someone who is dedicated to being healthy, to changing their life, to helping others, to be the best that they can possibly be?

Or do you see the same person that stared back at you ten years ago when you were over 300 pounds?

My honest moment. Even though I have accepted who I am and have righted my path, I still see the fat guy.

I know I am no longer that person. As of this writing, I weigh 225 pounds. I am stronger, I am fitter, and I am healthier (and gosh darn it people LIKE me!), but body image is a nasty thing isn’t it? We never see what others see. I finish a triathlon thinking, yes, I have accomplished something that I never thought I could, and then the race pictures are posted, and my immediate reaction is negative.

“Do I REALLY look like that??”

Yes. I do.

It just happened this morning. I am 70 pounds lighter than I was 2 years ago, but I saw a video posted that caught me from a side angle, and all the positive thoughts I have been having went out the window like cold air to the heat. 

But that is the point, I think. What I see and how I perceive it is much different from what others see, and to be honest, no one is looking at me and really giving a shit about what I look like. But all I can hear in my head while looking at the pictures is Pennywise grinning from ear to ear and saying, “mm Kiss Me, Fat Boy!!”

“You are imperfect, permanently, and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”

Amy Bloom, Another Truth Moment

There is a deeply flawed male point of view at work here.

It is just not acceptable for men to be concerned about these things. As a man, I totally get the imbalance of expectations we have versus a female. It is still socially acceptable for a man to be fat … or “big”. Women have another whole issue. But at the core we all have the same issues, don’t we?

The “Barbie Syndrome” is not just a female issue. Much has been made about the unrealistic measurements of a Barbie compared to a real woman and if that representation is affecting the body image of young girls as they grow up. If expanded to real-life a Barbie doll would have a waist measuring 16”. Not achievable by any means, and estimates are that your chances of finding a woman built like Barbie are 1 in 4.3 billion (yes, there are actual studies on this. I used the Google Machine).

But is this just a female issue? Ever look at a boy’s action figure? When I was growing up a GI Joe was 12” high and was built like a “normal” man, without the genitalia of course. Sometime in the 80’s this changed, and GI Joe became a bodybuilder, with arms that would measure in the 30” range for a full-grown person.

Does this equally affect a boy’s self-image?

If it does, you would never find a man willing to admit it. Because men do not admit things like this. We are expected to be accepting of who we are, and how we are built, and if you do not like how we are then to hell with you, someone else will be.

“That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…”

Jess C. Scott, The Other Side of Life

But that is not really the case. Of course, there are some men that are like this … those Type A “He-Men” that are comfortable in their skin and walk around like you should feel blessed just to have them around, but most of us, whether you want to admit it or not, have the same insecurities as everyone else. When I am stretched over my bike racing and can feel my belly hitting the crossbar, I wonder how many people are seeing it and wondering what the hell I am doing out there.

Andrew Weaver and I discussed this with Anna Vocino on the Ironman: Year One podcast. They both offered insight from another perspective relating to their jobs, and Andrew, coming from a different background than I do, also had a different take on the “what it means to be a man” discussion. The conversation revolved heavily on expectations that have been put on us by family and society.

Fat Shaming does not work and can have the opposite effect that is intended. But we see it, hear it, and allow it. Chip Wilson, the CEO of Lululemon, instead of taking ownership of faulty yoga pants, blamed the large thighs of the women buying them … yet these women still shopped in his store and sent money to this man.

Style over values, I guess … 

This is “celebrity culture” to me. Our willingness to give up ourselves and even our own self-image to be “part of the group”. It does not even matter to us that someone is a bad person, and shows it at every turn, we want to be included. So, we buy the Lululemon pants even if the owner says something demeaning to us. We want to be associated with an author’s group even if we do not agree with what they write, or even some random local coach/athlete who happens to be popular even though their lifestyle is neither healthy nor helpful. We WANT to belong.

We play football in high school though we did not really like it, even though we were particularly good at it. We grow our hair long, teach ourselves to play guitar, and play in rock bands because our self-image was so destroyed by age 13 that it was the only way we thought girls would even look at us. We marry the girl we dated in high school because it was expected of us as a grown-up at the tender age of 19. When that crashes and burns we seek out the next one because being alone is uncomfortable and we do not want to appear like we are unable to find someone, and we hate being alone because the company sucks. We join the Navy and hate every minute of it because there were no other options. 

Then we grow up and become obsessed with earning money because we were so poor growing up, we see it as a weakness and refuse to be that way as adults. We go to college, get degrees we have zero interest in, and work at jobs that bore us but cannot leave because we make good money, have insurance, and want that retirement (even though we may not live long enough to collect one dime from it). 

We see people living perfect lives on Facebook and wonder why we cannot live the same life. Wondering where we went so wrong that THEY can have a perfect life, but we are still struggling. We see people go on weight loss plans and lose a hundred pounds immediately and wonder why we are struggling for 10 years even while completing Ironman triathlons, marathons, and assorted endurance events.

We buy into it because we are always ready to see the weakness in ourselves and overlook the same thing in others, and social media pushes it at us. Take the popular weight loss and food tracking app MyFitnessPal (MFP) for example.

I am a big proponent of using tracking while gaining health. It keeps you accountable. In MFP when you enter your weight it will post on the public feed that you have lost X number of pounds for a Total of XX pounds. Outstanding. Where this goes off the rails is that it only shows when you have lost weight, not when you have gained. So, let us say you are like me and weigh every day because you are an anal nutbar. On day 1 you weigh 220 pounds. On Day 2 you weigh 219 (Yay! John has lost 1 pound since the last weigh-in for a total of 1 pound). On Day 3 you weigh 217 (Yay! John has lost 2 pounds since the last weigh-in for a total of 3 pounds). But, alas, on Day 4 you weigh 218 pounds. Nothing gets posted to the wall. On Day 5 you weigh 217 pounds (Yay!! John has lost 1 pound since the last weigh-in for a total of 2 pounds).

See the issue? It appears that John is losing weight every time he weighs in, but he has not. He gained some weight in the middle there, but anyone seeing the wall doesn’t see that at all, so if you are weighing each day and not losing like John appears to be, you think you are doing something wrong. When you might be doing better.

By focusing on these social media posts, you are creating a negative world where you are always going to be on the dark side. So, we dive back into food, or other bad habits. We get a bad case of the “fuckets”. We tell ourselves that no matter how hard we try we will never look like John. No matter how much money we make we cannot go to Europe for a month. Because what you DON’T see is the plastic surgery, the gastric bypass, and the credit card bills, that go along with these things.

I Have Trouble with Men.

We are not a genuinely nice bunch, are we? I was pondering on this recently while going through the Facebook pages I belong to. Now I know that Facebook is hardly an example of society’s best and brightest, it’s amazing how many philosophers and political scientists we have in this country, but it is still a representative sample so I am using it.

The groups and pages I belong to are usually seen as “support groups”. Not specifically that, but they revolve around triathlon, running, biking, weight loss, etc. so one would think that someone having trouble in any of these areas could post the issue in these groups and get some serious insight. For the most part, this is true, but inevitably there is someone that will not be supportive, be sarcastic (because they think your issue is “funny”) or be outright hostile.

This manifested most notably with the “fat-shaming mom” issue a few years ago. There will always be debate about whether or not it is fat-shaming what she did (Google “fat-shaming mom” if you don’t know the story), but none of us are her, so we don’t really know her intention. Personally, I think she wanted publicity in order to sell something (and seems this is true since a “No Excuses Mom” calendar started being sold shortly afterward), but we should be able to have an intelligent debate over the shaming issue. But no, someone always makes an idiotic statement, and often, that person is a man. In this instance, the man stated that, and I quote, “obesity is not sexy, and that fact cannot be argued”.

Just makes me shake my head …

The lack of empathy my gender shows for others astounds me at times. This in NO way implies that all men are like this … only that when something comes out often it is a guy saying it. Even celebrities (or pseudo-celebrities) do not escape it. In a blog string, an author and self-professed health expert was tagged to get his opinion on thyroid issues. He did respond (as he always does) with some answers and a string of podcast episodes where he addressed inactive thyroid issues and other things along that line. So, after reading this I took the opportunity to post something about my own issue. I stated: 

“The problem with these articles, and with most thyroid articles, is that they center around inactive thyroid. I had thyroid cancer. I have NO thyroid.”

His response?

“Well, you’re good then!”

Seriously? “I’m good”? What kind of dumb-ass answer was that?? I had cancer and have no thyroid gland anymore, so that means I am good to go. Silly me.

Of course, because of his perceived status, I cannot call him out on that response (though I did, as well as others too). People have a hard time disagreeing with Sacred Cows, the perceived “untouchables”. 

I personally love tipping a Sacred Cow now and then.