It started, as many things do, with a Facebook post. A friend from college had lost a hundred pounds with very little effort and without the use of any kinds of drugs, surgeries, or gym membership fees. I’m a big guy. I always have been larger than average, but in the years since college things have gotten out of hand. I’m not particularly sedentary, nor do I feel like I eat bad food. It just happened. I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t look in the mirror much, and I never weighed myself. Once you get big enough that most normal scales scream in pain when you climb on and give an error message, you just give up. Occasionally, I’d have to go to the doctor for a pre-employment physical or some appointment and I’d watch the nurse keep sliding that counterweight over farther and farther. Apathetically, I would go to the store and buy bigger and bigger clothes, until normal stores didn’t have anything that fit me. Bit by bit it began to sink in: I was one unfortunate incident away from wrecking my knees and ending up spending the rest of my short and miserable life in a motorized cart tooling around Walmart, rolls of fat spilling over my ever expanding belt line. I would probably die of heart failure before the age of forty.
Trying to get private health insurance when you’re morbidly obese is nearly impossible. And perhaps it was the embarrassment of the rejection letters I kept receiving that put me over the top. I knew I needed to change something. It had been about six years since I had been insured; six years of terror and fear of sudden illness or ambulance trips that could bankrupt my family. The Affordable Care Act had passed, but it wouldn’t have helped me a bit until 2014. My jobs, at the time, didn’t offer a reasonable insurance plan. However, because of the fact that they did offer coverage (albeit coverage that would have amounted to over half my monthly income), I didn’t qualify for any kind of High Risk state-based insurance.
My friend from college had some impressive before and after pictures; you know, the typical ones where he’s holding up his giant pants for comparison. You could see the change in his face, too, and his outlook on life. I decided to ask him what he did. “What’s your secret?” I might have asked. It was simple, he explained, he just read a book. The book that he recommended to me is called, The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss, so I immediately purchased it using the Kindle app on my iPhone and started reading. The book is packed full of information about all sorts of stuff, some of it pretty obscure and not applicable to my life, but I mostly focused on the earlier chapters that lay out a plan for losing weight.
I now had a path to follow.
Diet fads come and go. I grew up in a household that has always struggled with weight issues. Atkins, Sweatin’ to the Oldies, Weight Watchers, prayer based support groups, herbal cleansing diets, these were things I grew up hearing about and occasionally participating in. They all seemed to have a grain of truth and success, but never really worked in the long term. I guess it all comes down to motivation and will power in the end, because it’s nearly impossible to escape our genetic metabolic destiny.
This new path falls under the category of a “Slow-Carb Diet,” as opposed to the Atkin’s style low or no-carb diets. Tim Ferriss advocates eliminating carbohydrates that are most easily converted into sugars; things like wheat flour, rice, potatoes, sugary fruits and juices, sugary candies and sodas, are the worst offenders. They turn right into fat, unless you’re some kind of super-athlete. Anyone who has spent an hour walking on a treadmill watching the calories tick by knows that it takes a lot of exercise to get even close to equaling a serving of ice cream. If you are going to eat some carbohydrates, and we all seem to crave them, he says we need to eat the ones that take some effort to break down. Vegetables of any kind and legumes are our friends. Another aspect of this plan is his insistence that we need to start off our day with a burst of protein. I made it my ritual to wake up every day and eat an egg white omelet with a serving of some kind of bean or lentil, a bit of Parmesan cheese, and a lightly-dressed fresh leafy green salad. By changing up the beans and trying different spices I never really got sick of it. And, being a chicken farmer, I have an infinite supply of eggs.
The best part of the path Tim Ferriss lays out is the binge day. Once a week, you get to eat whatever you want. I usually timed it so I could make use of a whole day off to eat ridiculous things like pizza, Chinese buffet, popcorn, ice cream, more than one beer, etc. Surprisingly, once you get your body into the weight loss mode, a binge day like that doesn’t really set you back. And it is such a relief, psychologically, to go crazy once a week. It gives you something to look forward to. There are other aspects to the plan and I highly recommend purchasing the book for yourself or checking it out from a library for more details.
I guess the big question is: did it work? Yes. It is working. The first six-months I did it, I lost 50 pounds. Since then I’ve basically maintained that weight level, I’m eating and drinking more carbs, but I’ve also increased my exercise. I think I’m ready to lose 50 more, though. And that means logging my caloric intake on Calorie Counter, saving the beer for the weekends, skipping the free (carb heavy) food and snacks at work, taking a walk once and a while, and starting to care about myself again.
Side Note: In the year since I received my last insurance rejection letter, I have changed jobs and managed to get on an insurance plan; it’s a high deductible monstrosity, but it’s better than nothing.
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