Look at the last ten pages of any guilty-pleasure magazine, and you’ll find some toothy fool who claims to have lost 60 pounds in just 99 days.
He’ll tell you that he has more energy. He sleeps more soundly. His stress-level is lower. His jeans fit better. He, of course, doesn’t need to tell you about his jeans. This will be self-evident by the compulsory profile shot with his extended arm tugging his before pants a half-foot from his after abdomen.
Most important, the transformed after man will insist: if I can do it, anyone can do it.
This information will be set in 36-point type. It will be in quotes. Exclamation points will be used recklessly.
This fool is pretty much me. Right down to the abusive exclamation points.
I am a weight-loss cliché(!)
What’s not cliché, I suppose, is that most of the guys in these ads were allegedly freed from the albatross around their mid-sections by way of pills or exotic fruit extracts or contraptions with “burner” in their name.
By contrast, the secret to my weight loss was horror.
I had recently come across an old travel journal from 1994. In one particular passage, I was recounting a bout with a gnarly stomach-bug I picked up while trekking in Nepal. My weight, at the time I stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed in front of the Taj Mahal, was a full 100 pounds less than the amount I weighed as I sat wide-eyed and slack-jawed reading this entry.
Horror.
Within days I was shopping online for an elliptical. In my research, I discovered that some of the home-use equipment wasn’t recommended for people in my weight range. In case the implications of this aren’t readily apparent, allow me to translate: I was too fat for machines made for people who are too fat.
Sheer. Horror.
This prompted me to immediately Google some online body-fat calculators to help substantiate to myself that things weren’t so dire.
Suffice to say there are few words in the English language that can drive a man to take action like these: clinically obese. Insult, meet injury.
Sheer. Fucking. Horror.
Something had to give.
I had run out of delusions.
I had run out of excuses.
I had run out of pants.
The Bro-tund
I once heard that an ideal weight-loss strategy includes taking weight off at the same rate you put it on. It took me ten years to put on my weight, and the prospect of a decade-long reversal was enough to make me want to curl up with some crullers and take a nap. I was determined to drop the weight as quickly as I could and use the experience as a way to jumpstart a bigger lifestyle change..
It would seem the Gods of Health, Wellness and Superficiality were conspiring that week. Two days after my elliptical arrived, I received an email from Spencer Riviera. It was an invitation. A diplomatic invitation (“… not that we don’t love you just the way you are, but a few of us were wondering if you might have interest…”) to join Hey Fat-Ass!: a three-month quest for long-lost abdomens and healthy-living, wrapped up in winner-take-all fatboy smackdown. The timing was impeccable. I leapt at the chance. Technically, it was a fist-pump. The leap sounded too strenuous.
The First Rule of Fat Club…
Get a strategy.
The first thing I did was to hand my body over to someone who knew their head from their fat ass. I signed on for Hey Fat Ass! without much of a plan. The initial weigh-in, included getting our body-fat calculated by a trainer.
Now whenever I hear “trainer”, my mind goes to a guy with a face like a dried crab-apple. A war-vet. A guy who works in a gym, not a club. He deploys “buddy” within the first twenty syllables of meeting him. Someone you can slouch in front of when your shirt is off. Curiously, (and cleverly, mind you) Mark Rurka’s take on a trainer was a woman. Not just a woman but a woman in spandex. A hot, young woman in black spandex. With an Eastern European accent. More of a purr, really. Dosta: a kitten with calipers. Completely flustered, clad in plain white boxers, I genuinely apologized for my physique. I found myself calling out things like the lack of arch in my foot. I think somewhere in between prattling on about not really knowing how this hair got on to my back and her state of the art, cold-steel calipers digging into my inner thigh, I think I may have passed out briefly. I can’t speak for the other 24 Fat-Ass guys down-to-skivvies weigh-in experience, but I can tell you that when the door swung open after my turn I saw at least a dozen guys go silent and suck in their guts like high-school sophomores on the beach when the cheerleaders pass by.
Pathetic.
(Touché, Rurka.)
But I digress.
Based on my doughy BMI numbers, the hot-trainer told me that I was a classic belly-carrier. Given that I had seen my toes about as frequently as I had seen fiber over the course of the previous year this wasn’t really an epiphany. However, hearing it from a professional immediately made it clinical and gave me focus. Dosta offered up some thoughts about the types of exercises I might consider and sent my fat ass off to get schooled in belly fat.
I searched “belly fat” books on Amazon and found 6,280 results. I bought a book that afternoon. I read it that night. I was really disciplined about everything and in my first week I lost 11 pounds.
Putting the Die in Diet
I thought my change in eating habits was going to kill me.
For the first ten days, I was always hungry and usually pissed off. But it got better quickly. I didn’t track calories but I changed what I ate and how I ate.
- I ate five times a day to keep my metabolism chugging. I ate smaller portions–usually never more than fist-size helpings of any one thing. And I split my lunch every day: half at 1p.m. and half at 4 p.m.
- By no means did I go über-vegan during the competition. But I did use this as an opportunity to make myself try new healthy foods to replace all the fats and empty carbs I had learned to rely on. Turns out I can’t consume enough beets, anything with lentils or wheatberry rocks and, to my complete and utter astonishment, I found that tofu doesn’t suck. Boxed Lunch on Kearney Street does an amazing baked tofu salad that’s now a mainstay in my lunch repertoire.
- I ate notably fewer carbohydrates, but not to the point of eliminating them entirely. I needed a little carbo-reserve to help me get through my workouts. I had some starch at breakfast and some at lunch, but usually got off the carbo-train by 4 p.m. Brown rice was my grain of choice. It’s crazy-healthy, but you gotta go brown. I learned that the milling that converts brown rice into white rice destroys 80% of the nutritional value and practically all of the dietary fiber. I’ve become a proud rice racist.
- I ate a lot of protein. Lots and lots of fish (the mega-salad bar at Julie’s Kitchen–Montgomery at Pine–offers three or four different kinds of fish daily). I ate Kashi high-protein cereal or hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. Hummus, edamame, and skim mozzarella sticks to snack on.
- I ate mostly salad concoctions for dinner. I became pretty adept at the Hippy Salad with a home-made balsamic vinaigrette. Collectively, not very artful (a mess, really), but surprisingly satisfying. Mixed greens, nuts, carrots, tomatoes, avocado or any vegetable I could find. Nectarines, cherries, grapes or any fruit I could find. Any fish or the leanest meat I could find. The stinkiest cheese I could find. In general, eating particularly flavorful healthy food was key to keeping me sated and focused.
- I did give up Coke (my biggest vice). I didn’t start drinking diet Coke. I did drink a lot of water. I didn’t drink juice or anything processed in a factory. I did drink more coffee than I was used to. I didn’t drink alcohol. And I am single-handedly responsible for the bulk of Lipton’s Iced Tea Bags West Coast Q3 sales volume.
- I gave up the cake-y sweets. Instead I had nuts, fruits, and an occasional square of extra dark chocolate–85% cocoa to get all the health benefits.
Other Tricks Up My XL Sleeve
I also came up with a few other ways to run interference on my fat self.
- I have two children and I used to find myself continually grazing while I was prepping meals and clearing the table. As a result, at every meal, I was eating my own heaping portion plus a bonus meal composed of bunny-shaped macaroni, dinosaur-shaped chicken, sammies, etc. To dissuade my grazing tendencies, I tried chewing gum before and after meals. And it worked. There’s really nothing that can fuck up the enjoyment of a good PB&J like Arctic-Blast Dentyne.
- I read that you’re almost twice as likely to keep your weight under control when you weigh yourself every morning. So I did, and I kept a journal, too. It helped me figure out what was working, where I was blowing it and helped me focus on the decisions I was making every day.
- I also enlisted the help of a virgin. I read that if you consume two tablespoons of virgin olive oil swabbed up on a butt of bread twenty minutes before you eat dinner, it will suppress your appetite. The oleic acid in olive oil produces something that tricks your brain into thinking that your stomach is full. This sounded really duplicitous. Plus, I am not convinced it worked. But, if some witch-doctor posing as a nutritionist was going to give me license to scarf focaccia and a nice fresh-press, extra-virgin olive oil during this veggie-fest, they would get no arguments from me.
Walk It Off
Amongst the under-appreciated wall murals in the GSP stairwells is a particularly poignant fresco done in hunter green, between 3 and 4, just 10 steps from my office. It’s “720 Cali On Slopey Street.” I read the caption every day: “The steep hill will do you good”. Word. Suffice to say, I’ve gotten to know stairwells rather well. I’ve sworn off the elevator for good. Stairs always. At the office. At the subway. Wherever elevation can be found. Ideally two steps at a time, heel to toe. I’ve also started getting off the train two-stops early so I have a longer trek up the hill in the morning. It does me good.
Feel the Burn but Get Some Z’s
The extra walking I did helped keep me metabolizing but I also exercised almost each of the 99 days of the competition. After the kids were tucked in, e-mails were answered, and life was dealt with, I crept down to my mancave, armed with mind-numbing electronica, and marched religiously night after night on my elliptical. After one month I had worked up to hour-long sessions of pedaling and pumping and had lost 24 pounds. In addition to my cardio workout, I occasionally worked in some resistance training, but was much less disciplined about it.
By the middle of the second month, I pretty much abandoned the resistance training altogether, favoring instead the runner’s high I was getting from my cardio workout. I was now up to 75 minutes. Every night I would finish, all jacked up, some time after midnight. Drunk on adrenaline, I’d guffaw through the last half of Conan O’Brien. My body was producing enough serotonin that even an hour of Jimmy Fallon seemed funny. I would go to bed at 1:30 most nights but would toss and turn for another hour before my body calmed down to a state in which I could finally got some sleep. And then, three and a half short hours later my day would start again with my four-year old daughter’s cherub face pressed against mine asking if I could read her Angelina Ballerina.
I was spent. I was hungry. I was pissed off. And, despite 10 hours of cardio workout a week and being really disciplined with my diet, I had only lost eight additional pounds by the time of our two-month weigh-in. Abject failure.
I immediately went to see a trainer. He told me that it takes up to five hours to come down from the amount of cardio I was doing, and that I had plateaued in a big way because I had completely exhausted myself. I was really only effectively getting a couple hours of proper sleep a night. As a result, my bewildered brain had sent out an emergency signal to the rest of my body to go into conservation mode. So instead of happily giving up my fat reserves, my body was clinging to them, literally, for dear life.
This made a lot of sense to me.
However, much of what he told me to do to get back into fat-burning mode seemed completely counterintuitive to conventional fat-ass thinking.
He told me to cut my cardio time almost in half. Wuh?
And that I should consider only doing cardio every other day. Huh?
And that I shouldn’t exert as much energy when doing cardio…go from 95% of my maximum heart rate down to about 80%. C’mon, really?
He told me to take a full day off every week to let my body repair itself. And get some rest.
Christ.
Didn’t this guy understand? There was a couple grand at stake here and, more important, bragging rights. And he wanted me to buy in to a “less is more” strategy with only four weeks left in the competition. Saboteur!
He set me up with a three-day a week resistance training regimen and told me to get off the elliptical exclusively and to mix it up with running and biking, etc. He explained that my muscles had already built up some resistance to doing the same exercises over time and that the more muscles I could tweak, the better the chances would be that I’d lose weight. Interestingly, he also said that the same principles can sometimes apply to diet, so I would need to mix up my food choices, in addition to my exercise choices.
Against my better judgment, I did everything he said.
Five weeks later I stepped on a scale for our final weigh-in and I had lost 28 more pounds.
In total I lost 60 pounds in just 99 days.
I have more energy. I sleep more soundly. My stress-level is lower. My jeans fit better.
I am a weight-loss cliché.
And it feels pretty good.
A big, fat thanks to Spencer Riviera and Mark Rurka for their Hey, Fat Ass! brainchild and to all the bro-ly polys of Hey, Fat Ass!- Season 1 for their needling, hazing and jeering. Let’s not do it again sometime soon.
