By next Monday I hope to weigh the same as I did twenty-nine years ago when I graduated from the University of Texas. Last summer at this time I was 18 pounds heavier than I am today; I have five more pounds to lose.
I know this is a modest lost in the era of a network show like “The Biggest Loser”. It does however account for 13% of my body weight. It’s also that certain kind of weight, that slow fall from youthful frame added in middle-age increment; the 2-3 pounds that slips on every year from bad habits, inconsistent exercise and holiday binges. Its a slow-motion metamorphous that’s blurs your self-image like Vaseline on a lens, your torso edges soft as you surrender not to stare too hard.
I’m close now to shedding fifteen years worth of that surrender, a task I actually judge easier than losing the habits that got me there. It is my hope and prayer that I now have the body I’ll have till I leave it, God willing somewhere between 40- 50 years from now.
Take a drive down any suburban main street and start counting the food establishments. This is something not necessarily noticed unless you are in constant starvation mode. When trying to avoid the sirens song of something fatty and salty, your eyes track the restaurants down the avenue like hands making their way down a set of never-ending monkey bars. We are a culture immersed in cheap, deadly food. It is obscene in fat, salt and sugar and has transmuted Americans into most overweight, least healthy people in the industrialized world.
We are a country struggling to find a more effective health care system, but it is a climb overwhelmed by an avalanche of bad food and quick indulgences. Political theatre has divided this country; united we could get healthy but divided we are getting fat. Of all the health care costs currently on track to bankrupt our government before we get to 2020, a full 85% of the care costs could be avoided with a healthier diet.
That’s right, 85% of the money we spend in this country on health care is because the majority of us have succumbed to the power of food mass-marketed with the sole purpose to please instead of sustain. We are a culture that glamorizes youth and athletics but transmuted it all into a spectator sport. A sport we watch with something fried.
This is what you turn your back to when try to return to your college weight. Its a new life full of vegetables and absent soda. Its a lifestyle where you realize you'll be surrounded for the rest of your life with people who eat the wrong food at the wrong times in the wrong amounts. You will always be outnumbered and outflanked.
For me the low point of my highest weight came at the end of a two-week vacation through the Great Lakes exactly one year ago. I weighed 188 pounds. I had become the Elvis of the later years.
It took me about four months to drop ten pounds. That I sat on the weight of 178 pounds for ten months, on occasion hitting 176 for a day but spending most the time struggling to keep under 180.
I have the great fortune of having a chiropractor (and Biology major) as a wife. She figured out the only way to get me to my target weight was to force my body into a state of ketosis. Basically this is when you fool your body into burning muscle and fat instead of glycogen (the sugar and water stored in your body); its what happens when you fast.
On a carefully crafted no-sugar, 1000-calorie-a-day diet it takes about four days to drop into ketosis. The discipline is to hold yourself in that state until you hit your target weight. For me it will take about three weeks. It is a very difficult thing to do but those three weeks peal away that last bit to reach back 23 years ago. The oldest fat is the hardest fat to lose.
To sustain this state you have develop absolute will to sustain from even the smallest cheats. Your body has the ability to switch back to burning sugar in just the smallest moment of weakness. It’s this absolute that will make you face every bad habit you’ve gotten in over the last decades. Habits you’ll have to fight for the rest of your life.
There comes a point of no return in your path to old age. It’s where either you accept the secondary state your body has become or you make a change. You’ll likely only give it a few tries (if you try at all) to become that other person. It’s not just the weight you lose but the lifetime spent afterwords keeping from making the same mistake twice.
And realize that as a nation we are a food tragedy; blessed in the land of plenty and cursed with eating too much. Not me. Not this life.
