What I'm Currently Doing with My Eating

I'm not an eating expert, and I'm not even sure if what I'm doing is the right thing for me, let alone you, but I'll share with you what I'm currently doing.

Since I started a year ago, I haven't weighed myself (outside of a Tanita scale weigh in every couple of months at my clinic.) There have been a whack of scientific studies reported on in newspapers over the last few years that say regular "weigh-inners" are better at losing weight. However, I know how to lose weight. I've done it massively at different times in my life. That's not the problem.

The problem is changing my lifestyle permanently. So I'm trying to eat the least I can and still not be hungry. Because I weigh so much, I have a high caloric need (relatively speaking) and regular exercise helps too.

I'm trying to change what I eat and how much I eat. I'm attempting to do so organically and naturally. If I focus on the scale, I'll set myself up for eventual failure.

Permanent changes are a must.

More on this soon.

What does the "Ideal You" Look Like and How does S/he Live?

Is the "ideal you" like celebrities or supermodels?
Or is the "ideal you" who you are now?

I write this blog for the benefit of myself and for people like me: the very overweight. I know a lot of you are sick of me going on about how exercise "saved my life" and are wondering when I'm going to talk more about eating. I've got lots to say about my eating issues and I promise to open up about them as I discover and think about new revelations.

The fact is, though, I feel pretty good these days. I rarely feel like I have anything wrong with me. My only annoyance is going to stores and trying to buy clothes that fit. I'm still too big for even oversizes available at department stores.

Honesty is a central part of my blogging. I like to spill my guts and not hold back. So I have to tell you that it bugs me to hear people talk about that next pound they're trying so hard to lose.

My question to you is: Why are you trying to lose weight?

It's a legitimate question and I'll give you my honest answer at the end. Is it because you want to be more healthy? If that's the only answer, then my response is, based on what happened to me, you'd get more healthy by going for a walk every day than starving yourself and worrying about every calorie.

Let me make a list of reasons of why I suspect people want to lose weight. I compiled this list from discussions with people struggling with their weight and from reading I've done recently (about what people struggling with their weight say.)

• I want to fit in.
• I want to be attractive.
• I want to be loved.
• I feel like a failure being fat and it's embarrassing.
• People think I'm a joke.
• My doctor says it's not healthy.
• Society says being fat is wrong.

If you've been overweight all your life like I have, then you've probably had some of these things ingrained in you. It's hard to change your own attitude after so many years of believing something. It's like being told up is down and down is up. It simply can't be true that being fat is okay.

I lost most of my excess weight once (295 to 170 pounds.) I felt great but I was disappointed in the skinny me. Contrary to my life-long expectation, being skinny didn't solve all my problems. It didn't give me happiness and it didn't give me all the babes I thought I deserved because I was now a stud! Being fat, it turned out, wasn't my problem. So as you can guess, the weight started to come back on.

What does the ideal you look like? Have you envisioned him or her? Is s/he the same person as you are now or a different person? Is s/he just a skinny version of yourself who also sits on the couch all day but is somehow happier? Does the world somehow change if you're thin? Is the sky the same colour if you're thin?

Are you more loved? Are you a better person? Are you more respected? Consider these questions and think about your true feelings on the ideal you.

I'll share with you some thoughts I've had over the years on the ideal me. The ideal James is the happy man in TV commercials. He rock climbs, kayaks and he hosts social gatherings (possibly with ice-cold beer.) He has sexy barbecues. He travels. He may even skydive, because the ideal James lives every moment to the fullest. He has many friends and is the perfect father. He is loved by all. All women want to have his babies.

The latter, of course, is not a very realistic goal for anyone. Is Brad Pitt any happier because most women find him hot? Confidence in one's sexuality does not equal happiness. I think of all the horrible women over the years I might have ended up with if I looked like Brad Pitt. Fortunately, my wife (the best woman in the world) has modest standards (or gets drunk far too easily, you decide.)

Does the perfect you exercise? Is the perfect you a fitness freak? The best looking people in the world, as well as the most powerful tend to be fitness enthusiasts. They tackle life by doing things--fun, exciting things that go far beyond sitting on the couch. 

So if I may presume that the ideal you is a person who moves her or his body a great deal, why can't you do it now? Why do you have to obsess about weight when right now you could be going for a walk and building on basic fitness that can improve a little every day? Right now, you could be doing what the ideal, thin you would be doing. You could be living your life, even if that means a short walk to the light post down the street and back is all you can do. At least you're getting some fresh air and doing something huge for yourself. There might be a dozen reasons why you ate poorly today but, if you're at all able-bodied, you probably don't have any valid reasons why you didn't do something physical for yourself.

If you love yourself, set yourself free and get moving! If you don't love yourself, see a counsellor and begin working on what's really wrong with you, because it's not your waist.

If your excuse is that it's too much work, I ask you how is it that you are willing to diet? Dieting is one of most difficult and complicated things people embark upon. Losing weight and keeping it off is complicated. It's a giant pain in the ass to obsess about it night and day. Improving your fitness is simple and fool-proof. It's easy by comparison.


Unlike dieting, the less you think about it, the better.

Why not start being the ideal you today and re-examine why you want to lose weight in the first place? I'm not saying you shouldn't lose weight. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat the best you can. But one part of what you need to do is complicated and one part is easy. One thing is prone to failure, one thing is fool-proof.

Having said all that, in full disclosure, I do want to be smaller. Here are the reasons I currently want to lose body fat: I feel if I have less excess fat on me I can move around even more and therefore do even more in my recreational life. In other words, I can have even more fun. Secondly, I want to buy clothes that fit more easily. Shopping for clothes is the only time I feel abnormal nowadays.

In every other way, I'm ideal.

Dieting is Not the Way to Address Obesity: A Manifesto from James

Hey you! You're probably overweight if you're reading this. You've probably lost dozens, if not hundreds of pounds in your lifetime. You're an expert on losing weight. You may, however, be less of an expert on maintaining it.

I have a particular point of view at this moment in my life, you're probably aware of it if you've read this blog before. I concede that my point of view may change, it often does, but here is what I firmly believe in now, based on what has happened to me in the past months.

A lot of people tackling their weight read things on the Internet that tell them weight loss is 80% diet, 20% exercise. This only relates to calorie-reduction and expenditure since exercise doesn't really burn that many calories. In other words, if the problem of obesity is being too large, then you want to get smaller and that's mostly diet with a little exercise. But what if you focus less on the aesthetics and look solely at the ill effects of obesity. Recent studies say you can be healthy and still be fat, as long as you're fit.

I believe that I'm living proof exercise can cure most of the ill effects obesity. It did so relatively quickly. Do I look good in a Speedo? No. Am I healthy? Yes!

A lot of people think you can go to the gym for an hour, get all sweaty and then hit a buffet and everything will be fine. It won't. I'm never comfortable with the notion of exercising to burn calories. There are much better reasons for doing it.

The 80-20 formula is very common on the dieting/lifestyle web sites, but I'd like to turn that around. In my view, curing the symptoms of obesity, that is to say eradicating the health problems of obesity, could well be 80% exercise and 20% diet.

Society is hell-bent on reducing of the number on the bathroom scale. It shouldn't be your measure of success. This is nonsense because it doesn't mean much in the improvement of your health. Many doctors and scientists are now talking about this. I'm living proof. I'm a huge man, 100 pounds of body fat more than the threshold of BMI-measured obesity. Yet I've turned my health drastically around. From an achy, sore, tired, bed-ridden sedentary lifestyle to being a man with near-normal health and abilities who is past the prime in his life. (I've also cured the problem of aging, to a degree. You can thank me later.)

Do you know what a fit person looks like? You probably do. But can you tell a fit thin person from an unfit thin person? You've been led to believe all your life that thin is fit. It's not. Do some people-watching sometime and try and tell a fit thin person from an unfit thin person. The unfit thin person is pear-shaped to varying degrees, is tired all the time and, in  my opinion, usually grumpy. They look weak when they move around and their lives are quite obviously boring, frankly. You can see it in their soft, pale, pudgy faces. They sit at home picking at vegetables and watch what I presume to be really bad television shows on the couch. It's possible they see playing Checkers as a sport.

Fitness isn't for fat people. It's what makes us healthy, regardless of our BMI. You probably think you'd be healthy and happy thin. But you'd be much healthier and much happier if you embraced fitness throughout your life until your dying day, regardless of your waist size.

The older you get, the more important fitness is to maintain a healthy body. Kids find their own fitness. They're constantly wiggling and moving. Adults are always telling them to sit still. Children build up lean muscle mass from all that moving and playing. When they become grownups, they stop moving and sit behind screens all day. Over time those muscles soften and become marbleized. They need fewer calories and their cardiovascular system wastes away while their arteries slowly clog. Perhaps they have more emotional control and don't over-eat like we do but they too have become unhealthy.

Stop using the scale or your clothing size to judge your health. I'm considered huge by most standards, yet I can do more than a surprising number of thin people my age, and I'm only getting started.

I'm probably 150 pounds over being perfectly ("normally") thin. I defy you to find me a marathon runner who could run on a treadmill for 20 minutes like I do with a 150 pound weight on their back. What we do with our heavy bodies is remarkable. Just walking down the street to your car is athleticism. There's an athlete in all of us yet we choose to keep her or him locked up, shackled and gagged.

(Yesterday I jogged at 4.0 MPH on the treadmill for 12 minutes at a reasonable 87% heart rate. Six months ago, jogging at 3.0 MPH for more than 30 seconds could have easily caused me to have a heart attack because my heart rate would have quickly maxed out at 100% in mere seconds. I can't tell you what this achievement does for my confidence and my feeling of well-being. Your body is just waiting for you to do something so it can adapt and become stronger.)

So what does dieting do for you? I'm no expert but it seems to me there are lots of benefits in eating better. Have you seen the entertaining documentary Supersize Me? The film about eating only McDonald's food for a month showed how crappy the subject eating a high-calorie, high fat diet felt all day. He was tired, sickly, and irritable. I imagine that all severely obese people eat like that to some extent, or have at some time in their lives to get to that level of weight. You'll probably feel better by eating well. Your joints will thank you for putting less weight on them. But is there anything else? Better eating helps, but will it really cure many of the effects of obesity?

I do know there there is no end in the ways exercising has helped me while losing only a small percentage of my excess fat. Although I am still technically obese, I don't feel that way. I don't go out into public ashamed of myself. I'm not afraid to exercise in public any more because I know I'm strong and in control of myself.

Severely obese people often have other chronic health issues along side their excess weight. Let's break down that viral video 23 1/2 Hours and see what science has found in the benefits of moderate exercise. In a  nutshell:

Knee arthritis down 47%
Dementia and Altheimers down 50%
Diabetes down 58%
Post-menopausal women 41% reduction in hip fractures
Reduced anxiety by 48%
People suffering from depression, symptoms were relieved by 30% with a "low dose" of exercise and 47% with more exercise.
23% lower risk of death in one study
And fatigue, of course, was highly cured with exercise.
Overall quality of life improves (who wouldn't want that?)

People seem so ready to starve their bodies to lose weight. The body goes into stress mode as it consumes itself and then does whatever it can to regain that weight. Your body thinks it's not healthy when it's below its maximum weight and tries to help you out by doing what it can to gain it back, so we're in famine mode. Yet exercise seems like so much work that we avoid it at any length. The truth is, once we're out there, once our bodies start to adapt, it's fun. Going for a walk is fun. It's the way we should be living our lives anyway, regardless of our weight or age. Let the skinny out-of-shape people sit on their couches and hate the world. Don't be one of them. Live your life to the fullest and don't worry so much about your weight.

I Find that a Lot of People Are Nuts

And now a post that some people will find offensive. Good! (Please come back and read my blog again in a few days after you calm down.)

Dieting Pet Peeve: People who go on fad diets.

I know people who are very smart people in every other aspect of their life who think it's a good idea to go on a fad diet and have the expectation it will change their life. From what I've read, success happens very seldom. Sure, you probably could find people who have been on Atkins diets, for example, for many years and are sticking to it. But are the majority of people who tried it still doing it after a year or two?

A dietary change is something you have to stick to your whole life. I'm guessing that those few Aitkin's success people found something that restricts their calories and is something that they can live with forever. I'm  no expert on the solution for me and I won't be until I find something that works for me for five years or even ten years before I declare success.

When I lost 125 pounds in the 90s I started by using Slim Fast dark chocolate shakes. But then I started reading a little bit and educating myself. I'm a person who puts his trust in science, even if science is imperfect and evolves. People thought, because I was using Slim Fast that I was on a fad diet. I wasn't. I ate the same crap I always did, just less.

I had a chocolate Slim Fast double shake in the mornings. One shake didn't do anything for me, it didn't shut down the hunger so I combined my breakfast and lunch shakes together. I essentially starved all day. I could have replaced the shakes with a couple bowls of high fibre cereal and a multivitim and had the same result.  In fact, I started doing that after I tired of the same shake every day. But I still enjoyed getting my chocolate fix so I always returned to shakes.

Nowadays I eat higher fibre toast or cereal to start my day and try not to let myself get too hungry. You slow down when you're hungry and burn less calories. My goal is to strive for five smaller meals throughout the day and not go overboard on the portion sizes.

If you start a fad diet, ask yourself if you can do this every day until you die. If you can't then the diet won't be successful.

In spite of this blog, friends still ask me if I'm allowed to eat this or that. The people at my clinic, my doctor included, aren't asking me to stop eating anything, even pizza. They're just asking me to eat less of the bad things and include more good things like fruits and vegetables. From what I can see, that's the current scientific thinking on how to approach the diet of overweight people. That thinking may change one day but I think we're starting to get somewhere with our understanding of how the overweight body and mind works.

I also roll my eyes when people do cleansing routines. Until science says it's a good idea, why do people do it? I "cleansed" my colon for two colonscopies and I was no different afterwards. Plus, there were no fifty pound chunks of undigested red meat coming out or found in my exam.

If you're not smart about things, you don't stand a chance on improving your health. You're doctor probably knows best, not the person you work or your odd cousin Harold who swears by something unproven by science.

Science: It's something to believe in!

I'm Surprised I'm Fat

Although I've shed fifty pounds of fat mass, it really doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Very few people even notice my reduced size unless I bring it up, then they look me over and concede it's possible.

That fact is, I'm a very large person and fifty pounds doesn't amount to much more appearance-wise than the equivalent of me sucking in my stomach. With someone my size, fifty pounds translates into only a shirt size or two in reduction. With someone smaller it might be a pant size per ten pounds.

So I'm still a gigantic "morbidly" obese man by all accounts, but the remarkable thing is I've begun to forget this fact. I find myself surprised by my appearance when I look in the mirror. I assume I'm not morbidly obese any longer because I've stopped feeling morbidly obese. Exercise has made me feel so "normal," strong and capable that it almost doesn't matter that I'm huge.

One approach that has crossed my mind is to solely focus on exercise and not worry about diet so much. Exercise has decreased my appetite for whatever reason and I feel obliged to eat more reasonably when I'm exercising regularly.

I saw my doctor today and he didn't notice anything different about me, although he was very happy when I filled him in on my progress. The last time I saw him five months ago, I was a very different person. Then, it would have been an agonizing, slow and tedious journey from my bed to his exam room.

What he didn't see today was how I floated effortlessly into his clinic, strong, energetic, and with a very capable cardiovascular system that wasn't sucking air before I got ten feet from the car.