The Fat Guy Chronicles

So as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve had a long battle with my weight, pretty much my entire adult life.

I started gaining weight back during the summer between my 6th and 7th grade years – prior to that I was actually a scrawny kid.  Part of that was probably due to the fact that there were substantial periods of time when I was a kid when we were hungry.  Part of it was because we played outside all day all summer long, and we played hard.  I was more physically active back then than at any other time in my life.

I put on some weight, and for the rest of my middle/high school years, I was always the chunky kid.  Probably not technically obese, but certainly overweight.  My size didn’t really fluctuate that much in that time – yes, I grew taller, my shoulders broadened, but my weight kept track with it, so I looked about the same.

College was not good to my eating habits.  A combination of taking a full time course load for four years, alongside working nearly full time hours meant that I didn’t have tons of time to make good choices about food.  Many semesters, I was either on campus or at work from 8 AM to 10 PM at night, Monday through Friday, and then working Saturdays on top of it.  So I grabbed most of my food on the go.  I also developed a soda habit.

I don’t actually know what my weight really was from about probably 1993 until 2003.  We never really had insurance, or when we did, I was never taken to the doctor.  So I didn’t really weigh myself.  There was an old dusty scale outside my parent’s bathroom, but I never used it.  And then in college I didn’t have a scale.  So my weight continued to grow through all of college, until I finally weighed myself right around graduation.  In 2003, close to graduation, I was 360 pounds.

360 pounds is a weight that I have frequently and steadily gone back to, over and over.  Around the time I got my first job out of college, I also decided I needed to make some changes.  So I stopped drinking sugared soda entirely.  I dropped 30 pounds in a month, making NO other changes.  That tells you how much soda I was drinking back then *shudder*.

At the time, I lived and worked in downtown Indianapolis.  The second month, the shuttle I was taking to campus from my apartment was discontinued.  So instead of taking a shuttle to the far edge of campus and then walking the remaining mile to the office, I was walking about 3 miles to work, and 3 miles home, every single weekday.  Adding 4 miles to your daily walking, when you weren’t doing much at all makes a huge difference.  So I lost another 30 pounds, again, in a month.

I was excited – I’d lost 60 pounds in almost no time at all and was now feeling much better than I felt during most of college.  And then I bought a car.  And resumed drinking sugared soda.  And perhaps most unfortunate of all, I stopped weighing myself for about a year and a half.

Approximately mid-2005, I realized I was back to 360 pounds again.  Crap.

What follows is the most successful attempt to get my weight under control.  I happened to run into the book, “The Hacker’s Diet”, which was written by a software engineer.  His explanation of how the human body worked, along with his treatment of how to lose weight, struck a chord with me.  If you’re curious, the book is available for free online at https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

I switched to drinking only diet soda, and tons of water.  I started taking the backup tapes to the bank vault each day, to make sure I got at least somewhat of a walk.  I started bringing my lunch daily – a lean cuisine meal (typically a dinner entree of about 300 calories) plus a sugar free pudding cup and a sugar free jello cup.  My total lunch calories were about 400 a day.  I never ate breakfast.  I ate dinner, but typically only about 800-900 calories, which seemed like a luxury after eating essentially nothing all day.

(Side Note:  This was INCREDIBLY STUPID TO DO.  Eating 1200-1300 calories a day, when your body needs about 3600 to stay the same weight, as mine did at 360 pounds, is a very dangerous thing to do.  Especially when you have NO medical doctor monitoring your condition.  Which I did not.  Please do not attempt to replicate this.)

I would eat dill pickles as an afternoon snack (no calories).  I seriously drank water like it was being discontinued the next week. I weighed myself daily and wrote it on a chart in my bathroom, which I then entered, along with my calorie information, in a tracking spreadsheet.  I was working as a helpdesk tech, during a major move of cubes, where nearly everyone in the building moved to a new cube, which meant moving everyone’s PC, Monitor (and not flat screens either), and phone.  In short, all the stars were aligned for me to lose tons of weight.

And oh, did I.  I went from 360 pounds in the summer of 2005 to 239.5 in approximately the fall of 2006.  That’s 120.5 pounds lost in 15 months, or a rate of about 8 pounds a month.  The only time prior to that I was ever 239.5 pounds was on my way straight past that number on my way up to 360 pounds originally.

I have very few true regrets in my life.  This is definitely one of them.  I was not completely done losing weight, but I was VERY close.  According to the BMI formulas, I’m technically considered overweight at my height (6’3″) until I’m less than 200 pounds.  Having been 239.5 pounds, I can tell you, there’s no way I could have lost another 40 pounds and been a healthy weight – I would have been unpleasantly skinny.  But I probably still had another 20 pounds to lose.  I felt FANTASTIC.  I had energy, more than I’d ever had since I was a little kid.

Unfortunately, that’s right around when my life pretty much exploded.  My (first) marriage, which had been on life support for a very long time, finally self-destructed.  (Ok, to be fully honest – I chose to end it.  Things had become untenable.)  Now, this would have been an excellent time to buckle down and stick with my diet to try and continue losing weight, or at least maintain the same weight.  Instead, I put back 60 pounds on within less than a year, during the same period the divorce was going on.

The following spring – early 2008, I met Alice (now my wife of almost five years).  I immediately gained 30 pounds of happy weight, and then piled on another 30, putting me back at 360 again.  Yay me.

Since then, I’ve tried many things, including the HCG diet (which generally didn’t work for me), the Ketogenic diet (which actually works great for me but requires modifying what I eat to a degree that’s not very practical for how I live).  In all those cases, I lost up to about 40 pounds and then promptly put it back on.  So I’ve spent most of the last 8 years at 360 pounds or within a stone’s throw of it.

Then came the pregnancy.  My wife and I welcomed twins to the world nearly three years ago.  During the first year, I was incredibly sleep deprived, and I compensated for it by eating more, as that was the only way I felt functional.  But I managed to stay near 360 pounds, or get back to it relatively quickly.  I really never spent much time over 360, and quickly could get back to it.  Over the last year, particularly the winter, I managed to put on the last 40 pounds without realizing it, because I wasn’t weighing myself.  Unacceptable.  But rather than beat myself up over something that’s already done, I’m just moving forward and trying to do something about it.

I’ve lost substantial weight before, and I MUST do it again.  So here we are!