"Death disqualifies you from every activity." -- John Walker
It happened one night about 6 months ago. I woke up with a pain in my chest. I had been sleeping on my left side, putting a lot of me on top of my heart. This was not, thankfully, unstable angina and a predictor of my pending heart attack; it was a muscle injury near my rib cage that I got earlier in the day helping someone move. It had me worried for a minute, though.
Back in the day, I wouldn't have woken up in pain after doing some moderate lifting the day before. I had endurance then, and quick recovery from injuries. But a lot has changed over the years, and besides being forced to sleep on my right side temporarily, I have also suffered under the ill dealings of revealed preference, being ignored and spurned by classes of people who treated me better when I was thin. Thin and young. Thin, young, energetic, and handsome. My own opinion of how I look now adds to the problem, so it's no wonder that the reactions of my fellow man are sometimes less than I'd like them to be. I'd been living in the "loving yourself is enough" world of self-pity and frustration for a few years, and now I had post-exertion pain to look forward to. Nightmare.
Let's go back in time a bit.
In 1988, I was 17 years old, and 175 pounds, 5 of them hair. I was in peak physical shape, riding my bike everywhere instead of driving, playing after-school soccer 3 or 4 days a week, and playing racquetball on the weekends, or lifting weights with a couple of my health-nut friends. At 6'5" and 175 pounds, I was pretty thin, and earned the nickname "Stork" in pickup soccer due to a stance I commonly took just before kicking the ball. I embraced the nickname. At school and home, or hanging out with friends, I was Curtis. On the field, I was Stork, the name the captains would call when pointing to me when we picked teams, the name that was hooted by my peers when I made a good play.
In 1991, I was 20, and had filled out into a little more adult shape. I weighed 185 pounds, and it suited me. I worked in a pizza store as an assistant manager, and was on my feet in a hot kitchen for hours at a time. After work a driver and I would sometimes go to a 24 hour gym and lift, and I would get together with some guys and play volleyball on the weekends. Before going to bed, I would do deep pushups with my feet on a chair or a bed and my hands on the floor, and over time developed a "cut" chest that my lady friends seemed to appreciate.
In 1995 I was 24, and left the food industry for more promising employment. And then things started to go bad.
When Windows 95 came out, and everyone and his mom wanted to get email on the computer, the Columbus Ohio based CompuServe online service was being bombarded with calls from new customers struggling with the online world. They were desperate to hire anyone who could tell a mouse from a modem. I had used computers since I was 10, ran a local BBS at 15, and had recently tackled modem init strings so that my buddies and I could connect to each other's computers to play Doom II in deathmatch mode. Considering CompuServe's current plight, I was a shoo-in for a tech support job, so a friend of mine who worked there suggested I apply. So I dropped off a resume, and the turnaround time between the first brief interview and day 1 of training was about 2 weeks. At that time, they apparently had a 90% customer service call loss rate (i.e., 90% of the people calling in for help were dropping off because they were waiting on hold too long).
So thus began my career in IT, sitting in a chair instead of being on my feet all day. In about a month, I was up to 190 pounds. A couple months after that I was at around 200, and stabilized there for a while. My usual diet of Hamburger Helper, Mac-n-Cheese with ground beef, and take-out Chinese and pizza was still what I craved, but my activity level had dropped substantially, and I was quickly ballooning up. A small adjustment to how much I scarfed down, and learning to cook a few healthier meals helped before things got ugly.
In January of 1996, my wife to be found out she was pregnant. Despite still getting together with the gang to play volleyball or go camping once in a while, and eating a little better, I found myself gaining sympathetic weight as my wife to be started to show. On top of that, I had lost the "jitters" at work and could sit still for long periods without going crazy. My metabolism slowed a little more, and the weight kept getting higher. I didn't weigh myself during that time, but I think I'd put myself at about 210 when Stacey was born.
After she was born, I was still within "striking distance" of getting back in shape if I hit the gym and ate less junk food, but I did neither of those. I struggled instead over the next few years with saving a marriage that had failure written all over it. I put on more weight, which caused my wife to look at me less amorously, which fed my self-pity, which led to me putting on more weight.
When my wife and I split up in 2000, I weighed 230 pounds. From my new apartment, I tried desperately to regain a good-looking body, and worked out incessantly at the company gym. In a few months I was back down to 215 pounds, and pleased as punch about it. Unfortunately, tragedy struck. I was plagued for the next 3 years with headaches, nausea, and insomnia. I was finally diagnosed correctly and treated in 2003, but by then the constant pain had kept me away from the gym for the most part, and I had climbed back up to 230.
I swore, like I have dozens of times since I left the food industry, that I wouldn't put on another pound. I swore I wouldn't ever go up in pant size again, that I'd be happy looking at myself in the mirror, that I'd go swimming with my daughter and not be embarrassed. Swearing without taking any action, though, doesn't change anything. In 2006, I topped the scales at 260 pounds.
260 pounds is less about being embarrassed and more about being worried about your long-term health. When Stacey was 4, and just learning about death, we had a conversation that went something like this.
"People live for a long time, and then their bodies start to wear down, and eventually they die."
"When?"
"Different times for different people. Dieing at 70 is normal, healthier people can live longer, like 80 or 90."
"When will you die?"
"I don't know, honey."
"But you'll die before me?"
"Yes, but I won't die until I'm sure you don't need me any more."
After a long pause where concern passed her face, she said, "But, I'll still need you."
Right now I'm 35 and she's 10. She still needs me. The scary chest pain was a nice wake-up call to the infarction it could have been, my eating and exercise habits being what they were. I began to really comprehend that I was in trouble. Even though I'm not obese, I found that climbing a couple flights of stairs winded me, and running a short distance made it difficult for me to speak for a couple minutes. And then there were the knees. 6'5" is no picnic on your legs under normal load, and the extra weight was causing me more problems. Recently after doing some heavy lifting, I found that walking down a flight of stairs caused a sharp pain in my left knee. This lasted for about 2 weeks. Enough. Instead of hoping and feeling the problem away, I took some action, using my brain to approach the problem, instead of my emotions.
During the worst cold of the winter, I began by simply taking my dog (a husky who loves the cold) for walks in the evening. When it's 7 degrees outside (-13 and 8/9 for you Celsius fans), you burn energy staying warm. I walked a little over a mile every night for a few weeks in the bitter cold, and got my heart used to moderate exertion again. The first couple of times had me exhausted and collapsing when I got back home. The next few times had me fatigued. By the time the bitter cold left, I was whistling when I got back, with enough energy to do some chores around the house before going to bed.
Next, by complete chance, I happened upon a Slashdot post referring to The Hacker's Diet, so I looked it up. John Walker, the author, had this to say:
I studied the human body the way I’d tackle a misbehaving electronic circuit or computer program: develop a model of how it works, identify the controls that affect it, and finally adjust those controls to set things aright.
It worked. In less than a year, totally under my own direction and without any drugs or gimmicks, I went from 215 pounds to 145 and achieved physical fitness.
"No kidding?", I said to myself, and read through the plan in detail. A rough outline is as follows:
1. 3500 Calories are in a pound of fat.
3500 Calories, or thereabouts, are in a pound of butter, a pound of olive oil, a pound of mayonnaise, and a pound of what's hanging over your belt, human fat.
2. Find out how many Calories you use.
3. Find out how many Calories are in the foods you eat.
4. Eat (3500 * pounds to lose) / (days to lose it) less Calories than you need a day until you reach your goal.
5. When you've achieved your goal weight, match your Calorie intake to your Calorie needs.
6. Excercise moderately every day
7. Examine all the numbers along the way with fancy spreadsheets and daily measurements.
8. Buy air freshener and breath mints when the ketosis kicks in.
It all seemed so straightforward, so I gave it a try. When I jumped on the scales for the first time since my winter dog-walking, I found that I had lost 5 pounds. I was down to 255 before I started the new plan, a nice way to start off. It took some time to gather intel on my favorite foods for their Calorie content. It took some willpower to give up habitual snacking. It took some effort to do the first few pushups and running in place (part of the plan's recommended daily exercise).
After week 1, I'm thrilled. I decided on a roughly 800 Calorie/day deficit. I measured and calculated daily. I planned my meals. I learned to love salad again (I make a great low-cal salad with Romaine, cucumbers, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts, with no croutons or cheese, and just a taste of Ranch dressing -- good eats). And I lost weight.
Today I'm at 249.8/252.8. The 249.8 is my actual scale reading this morning. The 252.8 is the "trend" number, obtained by a data smoothing algorithm in the spreadsheet so people don't get upset with wild daily fluctuations.
For years my inner-stork has been away. It left gradually, a little every day while I wasn't looking. Every day I ate a bunch of donuts before going to bed, every day I stayed inside and played on the computer while the sun was shining, every day I sat on a bench and watched my kid play, the stork wandered a little further away. I want him back. This blog will chronical my quest to find the stork again. My goal weight is 194, and according to the forecast, I can hit that sometime between Halloween and Christmas. Time will tell if I can lose weight and get fit, and keep my promise to my daughter.
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