ReBoot

If my weigh loss journey was a movie franchise, it would be The Matrix.  The first year equals the first movie.  It was endlessly fascinating and amazing to watch.  Losing one hundred pounds in twelve months is a great accomplishment, just like the first Matrix was a great accomplishment of cinema.  People left the experience happy and talking about what they just were witness to.  The second year equals the second movie.  There was a lot of hype and it was pretty passable.  There were some awesome moments.  (Like the interstate chase sequence - in the movie, not the weight loss.)  But it was disappointing.  The third year is the third movie.  The wheels completely came off.  It is hard to believe that this is the same franchise/journey.  It is a disaster.

To recap my personal journey, in the first year, I lost one hundred pounds.  I didn't exercise to speak of.  I merely cut out foods that I could not control - burgers, subs, pizza, pasta, breakfast sandwiches, bread, cheese, ice cream, baked goods, soda.  I was very strict with myself and establish a tight perimeter of food allowances.  The weight came off quickly and consistently.

In the second year, I maintained that loss for most of the time.  I would fluctuate between 255 and 265 most of the time, depending on a variety of factors.  I also started to loosen the restrictions a bit.  It didn't seem realistic to have such an unyielding set of guidelines forever.  I still kept the troubling foods away.  But I wasn't hyper-paranoid all the time.  Things seemed to go pretty well until November - 22 months into the process.

I have Rheumatoid Arthritis.  It is something I have dealt with for years.  A while back I had a bad go of it and had to start some treatments for it.  But it went into a kind of remission for several years.  During this weight loss process, the RA came roaring back.  It really made no sense.  Every time I saw a doctor about the RA, they would suggest I lose weight.  They thought the less stress on my joints, the better they would be.  Instead, the opposite happened.  I'm not going to lie about it - that was frustrating.  I thought that I would be hurting less, not more.  It finally got so bad that I had to start seeing a doctor to begin treatments.  After a year of that course of medication, things were not improving.  So I found a rheumatologist in Orlando and began aggressively dealing with the RA.  I went onto methotrexate and folic acid.  A side effect of that medication was a return of my acid reflux - which had gone away after I lost weight.  I also, for some bizarre reason, had to begin taking allergy medicine for the first time in my life.

I don't know if the cocktail of medicines caused it or not.  But instead of floating within that ten pound window like I had for almost a year, I rapidly gained another fifteen pounds.  By March of this year - 27 months into the process - I was consistently at 280.  Again, this caused massive frustration to me.  I hadn't changed my eating habits that drastically from the second year.  So why did I pack on the extra fifteen pounds so rapidly?  After a few months of that, I got quite irritated.

If you have never battled weight issues, let me tell you the most disheartening thing you can face.  It is when you are working hard, depriving yourself of foods, watching everyone else have fun, and things are not progressing.  Actually, that is the second most disheartening thing.  The WORST thing is when you are doing all of that and you GAIN weight.  At a certain point, it feels pointless to keep up the effort.  If you are going to gain weight doing things right, might as well do things wrong.  Right?

The summer rolled around and the kids were out of school.  This combined with a tough financial stretch for us.  It has always been tough financially with Heather in medical school.  But this summer felt tighter than ever before.  This is an undeniable truth: it costs a lot to eat healthy.  Vegetables, meat, fruit - those things are expensive.  It is much easier and cheaper to rely on less healthy foods.  It just became too difficult to make sure I always had lunches and leftovers that fit into my food plan.  So I kept backpedalling. I started eating sandwiches for lunch with the kids.  I still restricted myself to wheat bread, no cheese, and would add mustard and pickles to add flavor with few calories.

The monetary issues combined with my eroding willpower made for a disastrous situation.  Before I knew it, I was having a lot of the foods I had banned before.  In fact, there are very few things that I have not allowed myself to have - justifying it the whole way.  The fact of the matter, though, was that I just stopped caring.  The last time I weighed a little over a week ago, I was up to 292.  I have gained back 37 pounds.  Actually, it may be more - I don't know.  I am afraid I can't stop this train.  Even though I know I will absolutely hate myself if I can't control this, I still haven't gotten things under control.  The really sad thing is that I have watched two of my friends who weighed much more than me successfully drop a lot of weight.  One has lost 187 pounds in under a year.  The other is up near 100 pounds.  I know it is possible.  I've experienced it and watched it.  But I still have trouble believing that I can do it again.

The reason I made the link to a movie franchise is because there is a new practice in Hollywood that I think can apply to my efforts.  It is the reboot.  When a movie franchise has run its course, or horribly derailed, it gets a reboot.  We have seen this with Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, The Hulk, Star Trek.  It is a successful business model.  You still are able to utilize the popular franchise but can just ignore the disaster that came out a few years earlier.  This is what I need to do.  I need to reboot my weight loss efforts.

As successful as my process was the first time, there were some major flaws.  First of all, I never really learned to not treat food as a coping mechanism.  As I have documented on this blog, food makes me happy.  When I am sad, I eat.  When I am stressed, I eat.  When I am celebrating, I eat.  For a plethora of reasons, food fills that role in my life.  I never learned to change that; I just changed WHAT foods I used for that.  Instead of pies and donuts, I would have frozen yogurt.  Instead of pizza, I would have 4Rivers BBQ.  I found "acceptable" foods within my parameters to use.  But I needed to stop that reliance on food for happiness.  That needs to change.  Second, I never learned to control portion sizes. If anything, I ate more than I used to.  Since I wasn't eating pasta, I would have extra meat.  If I couldn't have what everyone else was having, I would have a big pile of meat.  Again, I may not be having five slices of pizza.  But my portion sizes were still out of control.  My bowl of frozen yogurt was the same size as the bowl of ice cream I used to have.

Third, I never exercised.  People told me to do it.  I told them to shut it.  I hate exercise.  I hate sweating.  I hate manual labor or physical exertion.  But the weight loss cannot be maintained without some physical activity.  What I found is that I hit an equilibrium point where my stagnant lifestyle and my reduced caloric intake meet.  So, when I relaxed my restraints even a small amount, that added influx of calories was over what I burned sitting and using the remote.  As much as I detest the thought of it, I HAVE to add some kind of exercise.  Fourth, I danced too close to the flame, if you will.

When you combine all of that, it is time for a reboot.  I know it won't be easy.  I have gotten back into the habit of eating some stuff I shouldn't have.  And it still tastes good.  It is going to be a hard journey to break the habits a second time.  I know it can be done.  But there are a lot of doubts in my mind.  I just can't stand the thought that I will be back where I was.  Time to reboot.

Two Years: The Rise of Darth Fatso

It kind of snuck up on me, but today is two years since I started a process to change my life.  When I began, I weighed 355 pounds and had absolutely no self-control when it came to me approach to food.  I have tried to document my process on this blog.  For the first year, I was pretty faithful.  The second year, things became more spotty.  Part of the reason was that it was maintenance.  When I started, my goal was to lose 100 pounds in the first year - strictly by changing my food habits.  I accomplished that.  For my second year, I wanted to maintain that loss.  I wanted to learn how to live this new way.  I needed to explore what exactly I could and couldn't do.  I really just wanted to maintain my weight and resolve.  Year three I would move on to exercise.  In year two, while I was largely successful, to say that I accomplished my goal would be stretching it.

First of all, the cold hard facts.  I currently am 270.  That is down a net of 85 pounds from this weekend in 2010.  But, it is up 15 pounds from last year.  For much of this year, I was able to stay in the 260-265 range.  But the last few weeks, I found myself creeping up higher.  My clothes have started to feel a little tighter, although hard for others to really notice.  I have some shirts I don't like wearing.  The belt has gone back one hole.  I was hoping to rally right before I hit the second anniversary.  But my efforts fell short.  I know that lots of people would say encouraging things.  "Look how far you've come."  "You've still done a great job."  "That isn't so bad."  Those people mean well, but that is honestly what got me into trouble in the first place.  We can always find people who will tell us we aren't so bad.  And we can always compare ourselves to someone else and feel okay.  For me, I can compare myself to that fat load of goo from 2010.  Compared to HIM, I am fine.  But if I compare myself to 2011 David, I am not fine.

What happened?  I wouldn't go so far as to say I've relapsed.  I can point to countless examples of where I  am not even the same person I was then.  But I can definitely say that I am not as disciplined, diligent, careful as I was.  In some areas, I have gotten lazy.  The image that comes to mind is that of an ancient walled city.  There would be these walls all around their property.  The purpose was to keep OUT invaders.  There was a big deterrent there.  Massive energy had to be exerted to breach those walls.  You had to have equipment strong enough to take them down or enough manpower and resources to lay siege to the city.  It largely was a pointless endeavor.  Why would you go and attack some walled up, heavily defended city when there was some weak tailed undefended township up the road?  Those walled cities did have vulnerabilities, though.  If you eliminate the involvement of God and throngs of horn playing Israelites (Jericho), I would wager that the biggest threats to those cities came from within.  You could have someone betray the city and allow invaders in, someone incompetent who forgot to lock the doors, or people who failed to keep the walls strong.

The problem with walls is that they don't only keep people out.  They also trap their citizens IN.  There were many times during this process where I felt like a prisoner.  I felt trapped in my restrictions.  And I hated it.  I could understand that feeling being necessary for the first stretch.  But twenty months in?  It gets old, quite frankly.  It sucks.  I hated being the only one not eating pizza.  It is a lousy feeling at a wedding watching everyone chug my favorite micro-brewed root beer while I have to be satisfied with water.  I don't like it.  I can see where a person in a walled city could be convinced their security isn't worth the trapped feeling.  I also don't like the constant vigilance.  It wears me out and it gets frustrating.  That is the maintenance end.  People in those cities had to constantly check the status of the walls.  Time and weather and wind and animals and moss and grass all work together to slowly compromise those stone security options.  If you don't keep a wary eye peeled, those walls can become useless as cracks and holes appear.  This was where I really started to fail.  Little decisions would lead to bigger issues.  I didn't stop a bad choice, and it led to something worse.

Let me explain with a food example.  One of the biggest food items I had to banish was bread.  Bread was something that I just couldn't control at all.  It was a part of some of my biggest problem foods.  By getting rid of bread, I also eliminated subs, burgers, melts, pizza, calzone.  It was an important and vital decision.  No bread.  For the most part, I have really stuck to that.  But, here is how an erosion  happens.

• NO BREAD!
• A friend asks, "What constitutes 'bread'?"  A fair question.  At first, the answer is everything that uses flour to make it.  For the first stretch, I was draconian in my application of this rule.
• What about cornbread?  Well, it is more corn based.  I never have liked cornbread very much.  So maybe that will work.  I found myself eating it too often, so I kicked it back out.  But then I allowed it again.  
• Cornbread is okay.  That means that whenever I go to 4 Rivers, I can get cornbread instead of their biscuits.  At Jason's Deli, I can use their corn muffins on the chili.  At Cracker Barrel, I can have the corn muffins.  At Boston Market, I can have the cornbread.  When I make chili for everyone and buy cornbread, I can have that too.  It is amazing how often cornbread presents itself once you decide you can eat it.
• What about battered objects?  NO!  They violate two major banned foods - bread and fried foods.
• What about battered veggies?  Like pickles or onions or zucchini?  Would those be okay?  Hmmmm.  Okay, as a cheat fried pickles will be fine.  Plus they are really hard to find.  (Not really.  I find them all over the place.)  And onion rings will be okay, but not all the time.  (Yes, all the time.)  But no french fries.  That is the line.  Unless they are sweet potato fries.  No white potato fries.  That is the real line.
• How about egg rolls?  They are friend, but they are stuffed with cabbage and stuff.  Plus they go great with your chicken and rice.  No.  Are you sure?  Okay, fine.  Especially when they are avocado egg rolls.  
• How about hush puppies?  We already established that corn bread is okay.  And fried stuff is sometimes okay.  What about hush puppies?  Are those okay?  We'll allow them.  No reason to be too legalistic, right?  
• Corn based products seem to have some more validity.  As a correlation to this rule, it begin to affect my approach to chips.  Whereas I had restricted myself to rice based chips, now I wonder if I can have corn chips.  This especially applies to chips at Mexican restaurants.  See, salsa and guacamole are great and things I can eat.  But I need a delivery system.  So I begin to allow myself to have those chips at Mexican places.  
• Have you ever been able to control yourself eating chips and salsa at a restaurant?  Yeah, me neither.  This now allows me to get chips, salsa, guac at any Mexican place.  I still will almost always pick rice chips when they are available.  But they are never around at a restaurant.  
• Since we are on the topic of chips, what about pita chips?  That is the option when hummus is involved - another great allowable dip without a good delivery system.  Well, how often are you really going to find pita chips?  So those are okay.
• Of course, some places give you just plain pitas with your hummus.  Or flatbread.  Those are okay too, since they are in the delivery of hummus.  Which is healthy.
• Since flatbread is okay, and gyro meat is also allowable.  (I discovered how awesome Greek food is.  It fit my diet perfectly until this bullet point.)  So is hummus and tzatziki sauce (yogurt based).  So, then are gyros okay when there aren't that many other great options?  Sure.  Why not.  
• So, let's take stock here.  No bread, no chips.  Except for cornbread, fried veggie products (except fries), egg rolls, hush puppies, corn chips, pita bread, pita chips, flatbread.  (ummmmm)  
• So what about hard shell tacos?  I mean, isn't it kind of ridiculous and hypocritical to allow chips with salsa and guac, but not the corn taco shells for tacos?  It would make things so much easier to be able to order tacos than always to have to get fajitas and mix it all up on the plate.  Okay, fine.  Tacos are okay.  But only hard shell!
• What about pumpkin bread?  That is not really around much of the year.  Maybe this could be a cheat item?  I'll allow it.  But very warily so.  [Note: this particular though process came up three times and all three times ended up with me with the equivalent of waking up in a storm grate with a pumpkin bread hangover.  NOT smart.]  Okay, so maybe not pumpkin bread.  
• Banana bread?  See the above point.
• What about crackers?  I mean, crackers are so innocent.  People recovering from vomit fits have crackers.  Plus, they are a part of communion at church.  How bad can they be?  Hmmmm.  Good point.  We'll allow them for communion.  (Yes, I actually had a conflict about taking the cracker at communion in that first year.  I was hardcore.)  And I guess they can be used once in a while.  
• Breaded and fried veggies are okay.  What about fried and breaded chicken?  Awww, heck no.  That is a big no no in these parts.  But it is so freaking annoying to only eat grilled chicken.  And it is so hard to get that everywhere.  Plus, it costs more.  And it has smaller portion sizes.  It would make things so much easier to allow it.  Slowly, I allowed it.  But I tried to limit it to only when there was not a legitimate other option.  (Funny how loose that standard becomes.)
• Keep in mind, that through all of this process, my weight has stayed around 260.  So, since the weight hasn't gone up, I felt that my choices may have been okay.  
• Does that cracker clearance include Ritz Chips?  They are just like Ritz crackers, but crispier.  Plus they go great with that peanut butter yogurt dip.  The judge will allow it.  Now, go scarf a whole bag down on New Year's Eve.
• How about tortillas?  Absolutely not.  Under no circumstance will tortillas be allowed.  Whole wheat?  Nope.  Spinach?  Nope.  Ezekiel 23 mulit-grain high protein?  Nope.  No tortillas.  Please? NO!  
• Okay, let's say all of you are at a burger place and they have a very limited menu and one thing you can have is a grillen chicken wrap.  And they have loads of topping you can have (salsa, guac, roasted peppers), but they need to wrap it up.  And they have a whole wheat option?  How about then.  We'll allow it . . . once.  
• Next day - What about burritos at Moe's?  You can have everything inside of it.  And they have whole wheat ones.
• SCREEEEECH!!!  

The car came to a major halt.  Here was a major problem and I knew it.  See where that process went?  See where it ended up?  I had allowed so much stuff that it was hard to keep any standards.  And if I couldn't keep up with my rules by myself, how could I expect anyone else to?  People already had a hard time following my logic from the outset.  ("Wait, hot dogs are okay but not burgers?  You can have BBQ but not whole wheat pasta?")  Now when I was scrambling my own standards, when I would ask someone else what they thought, they had no idea what to say.

I ended up allowing myself cheats here and there.  But no cheat ever stays a cheat.  I know this.  I can look at that list now and realize how insane the process was.  But I never really examined it like that before.  It was a gradual erosion.  It took two years.  But there I was, yesterday, trying to convince myself not to get a burrito - one of my clearly banned foods.  (I didn't get it, if you were worried.)  Once a cheat is allowed, my mind would revisit that to see if it really was a "one time deal" or if it could be incorporated again.  My largest determining factor was the scale.  As long as I kept things around 260, I was okay.  I would have stayed at a net loss of 95 pounds.  Who wouldn't be happy with that?

But then I started to question this logic.  Was this really just a five pound fluctuation?  Or was it the first year of a process of gaining five pounds every year?  Would I sit there at the end of year three at 265?  Then 270?  Was I going to gain five pounds each year until I was back where I was?  Isn't that how I got to 355 in the first place?  It's the same thing that happened with my credit cards in the past.  I had a student card I got my first week in college.  It was one of those $500 limit cards.  By the time I hit the wall with it years later - after virtually living off it for years - it was, let's say, NOT a $500 limit.  I paid it off at one point.  But a few years later, it was back up to the former limit again.  I started to worry that I all I had done was reboot my weight so I could go back up.  Of course, I punched myself in the brain and said shut up.  I didn't want to have to get really strict again with myself.  I had already done that.  And I could look at all the victories and still believe I was fine.

There are many victories.  I still have not had any pizza, pasta, lasagna, pie, subs, sandwiches, burgers.  I can mostly say I haven't had any soda, ice cream, or cheese - although cheese has snuck into a very small number of items, I had one small cup of sugar free ice cream in December, and I have had a total of five sips of soda.  I can honestly say I have held those two food at bay and kept them on the banned list.  But I had cookies this Christmas.  I had some cupcakes.  You have seen my bread experience.  I have chocolate and frozen yogurt all the time.  So, while I have kept the spirit of my restrictions list alive, I have definitely had a field day violating the spirit of it.  Honestly, if I evaluated myself today, I would have to say that my struggle is not a raging victory.  Instead, I kind of feel like I'm playing Risk.  And even though I still have small armies all over the place, I don't have strong reinforcements anywhere.  I don't really control any complete continents.  And a strong attack may just completely collapse my army.

Two major things brought me to that conclusion.  The first was the fact that I was back up to 270 and it wasn't just a blip after a trip.  It was there for a few days.  That showed me there was trouble.  The second thing was that I saw a good number of my friends doing something called a Daniel Fast on Facebook.  From what I can gather, it is a thirty day fast where people try to follow Daniel's example with food.  They aren't eating any processed food.  They pretty much are banishing meats and rich foods.  The goal is to teach self control and to focus on living a pure lifestyle.  It is a noble thing to do.  In the past two years, I have seen numerous friends go through efforts to lose weight and/or change their eating.  I always  have been very supportive, as the friend on the other side.  Lately, though, I have felt some jealousy for them.  I started to go with the whole "well they had more to lose" defense.  And when I saw all these people doing the Daniel Fast, I started to hear that same mocking voice that used to reside in my head.  I had largely banished that voice.  But there it was, ridiculing what they were doing - trying to make me feel better about where I was.  I found reasons to diminish their efforts.  A lot of these people are at a church in Arkansas where a friend of mine is the Pastor.  The church is going through this process as a whole.  The thing is, we are doing a conference at that church in February.  Instead of thinking of how to join with them in their work, I began to count on the calendar to make sure they were "over their stupid little food thing" by the time I got there.

What the heck is wrong with me?  It hit me this morning full blast that I am in trouble.  Sure, I can keep up the half-hearted efforts I am making.  I could go through a little intense phase of a week or two to get myself back down to 260.  Then I would feel better about myself and go back to what I was doing.  I could just be more careful with the allowances.  The thing I realized two years ago was that this wasn't about food.  It was about my heart and my mind.  I needed to change my life.  Honestly, I don't want to do this again.  I don't want to go back through this garbage.  It sucks.  It is a lousy situation.  It is restricting and painful and uncomfortable.  But, if I am really being honest, I am not happy where I am.  I posted last week about how I felt that God was telling me that this year was the year for me to wake up.  I think that applies to this effort.  I've been sleepwalking through this.  There is very little thought involved. When it comes to a questionable food choice, I used to err on the side of strictness.  Now I err on the side of ease.  How else can I explain eating a cupcake - let alone three cupcakes - at a Christmas party?  How can I explain even considering ordering a burrito?

So, I guess that means that I need to go to Publix and get the things necessary for me to actually accomplish this.  I need to fix the walls and pull the guides back in.  There needs to be a strictness applied again.  Some of those questionable food choices need to be revoked.  Maybe some of those foods that got allowed in because they weren't seen as problems actually are.  Maybe corn products are more of problem than I thought.  I also do still want to add in exercise this year.  I think it is time, as much as it terrifies me. In short, I need to realize that Darth Fatso is not dead.  Just like George Lucas is going to resurrect Darth Maul this Spring in The Clone Wars show, I need to realize Darth Fatso was merely biding his time.  And I must fight again.  I've seen enough movies.  I should have realized that villains never disappear after the first loss.  That why sequels exist.