I don’t remember always being overweight; in fact, I have some clear memories from early childhood of being a lean, energetic, mischievous kid. I remember being able to fit into tight spaces to hide on my parents, jumping over fences and climbing high into trees. Most of all, I remember being able to run fast enough to evade anyone who might be chasing me. I don’t exactly remember when things changed; I was still young, though, because my earliest memory of being overweight is also my earliest memory of trying to lose weight. At 10, I had somehow scored the soundtrack to some Charlie Brown TV special on audiotape, and had a newly acquired Walkman. Something about that soundtrack inspired me to try and change myself. It may seem an awfully young age to have gone through that sort of revelation, but I did. And so, one day, I equipped myself with the Walkman, a sweat suit (complete with head- and wristbands) and a bottle of water, and made various attempts to jog around the block. I wouldn’t try to lose weight again for another 13 years.
Judging by my pre-obese behavior, one would almost believe that God, fate, or whatever is out there granted me my weight problem as a means to prevent me from doing anything stupid. But I don’t believe that, it was an intimate relationship (emotional & physical), which I formed with food over the course of many years that made me who I would become.
The core of my child hood played out much like any obese person. You don’t fit in anywhere (no pun intended). The world is made up of cliques. The discrimination is never-ending; being in the minority, you are always an outcast and rarely embraced. And as an overweight or obese person, you are even an outcast in your own clique. You are made to feel ashamed by everything and everyone. The message they eventually try to program into your head is that you are repulsive and don’t have a right to be any where near them. Average people are afraid of you because you represent what they can become, and your peers fear you because you remind them of who they are; it’s a lonely existence. The class system in modern Western culture no longer has anything to do with race or money, but now revolves around the glossy kind of self-image to be seen within the covers of pop-culture magazines like Chatelaine. Your ability to relate physically to the people that grace their covers determines your social position.
I was fortunate enough as a child to have a handful of things going for me. Unlike most people who suffer from obesity, I was not depressed; I consider my self very lucky for this. I also had on my side some good people who defied the norm and opposed my oppressors in many situations. Still, there were few people who would not hesitate to laugh at me when I walked by. Even teachers, afraid of their own popular standing amongst the students, would promote harassment and humiliation. There were very few places in the world where I felt safe from ridicule.
I survived high school and started college. Overall, college was a great experience for me. You get to start fresh, with a whole new group of people. It was between my first and second year that I decided to become pro-active about my weight . The strange thing is, there was no motivating event, I had lived with it for a good 70 percent of my life, yet on this particular day, for no particular reason, I rolled out of bed one morning and walked to a Jenny Craig clinic near my home. I was very successful with it. I was on the Jenny Craig program for eight months and lost over 70 pounds. It was a great time for me: the prison shackles of my weight had been cut from me for the first time.
In a perfect world, my story would end there, but it doesn’t. In November 1998, not even a full year after joining Jenny Craig, my life took a bizarre and tragic turn. The various chunks of unrelated bad luck that fell into my lap during a short period are almost too surreal to write about; I even find it hard to believe my self that so much bad happened, Because this is not intended as a novel, I will not go into great detail about all of the events, but will instead focus on one, the one that affected me the most.
On November 16, 1998, my mother suffered a massive brain aneurysm. Within the first 24 hours, my father and I were approached three separate times and told that she was not going to make it. Fortunately she survived, but, sadly, she slipped into a coma, one in which she remains today, seven years later. I was 23, an adult, when this occurred, but it set me back. I suddenly found myself with the emotional stability of a five-year-old. I turned to the only comfort I knew from childhood, namely food, and before long I was on my way back to being obese. It was during this period that I discovered I was an emotional eater. I ate when I was sad, I ate when I was happy, and I ate when I was scared. Every emotional state was an excuse to eat.
Between the fall of 1998 and the summer of 2001, my life seemed as if it were on hold. Since I had no confidence in what was going to happen in the future, I did my best to lay low. I had graduated from college in 2000, and was fortunate enough to be employed in an internship. Things went well until June of 2001 when the TV show I was working on was cancelled. The television industry in Toronto at the time was not in good shape, and I spent the next six months unemployed. But like the first time I took action, once again, one day, out of the blue, I walked into a Jenny Craig clinic and rejoined.
Like my first attempt, this one worked very well for me. Being unemployed allotted me a lot of time to not only concentrate on being physical, but to teach myself how to cook as well. This time I would eventually lose 79 pounds, which put me only 20 pounds from my desired weight. I was able to maintain it this time, much longer then before. My eventual re-gain had nothing to do with a tragic event or even an emotional reaction. Very simply, over time, I fell back into all my bad old habits. Part of me knew I was gaining weight, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. Then, one morning, I found a photo of myself from when I had reached my lowest weight, and realized that I had screwed up everything that I had worked so hard to attain. So again I joined Jenny Craig. This time, though, it was anything but cold turkey. It took me about two weeks to work up the nerve to call them and rejoin, and another two before I started going to the gym. Like every time before, though, I started with great success.
About six weeks in, however, a chance appointment with a dermatologist sent me to my own doctor. There was a minor fear that I may have lupus, since a skin disorder that had been treated had returned, so I went to my doctor. Fortunately, I did not have lupus; unfortunately, the doctor detected that my heart was working overtime. An EKG showed it spiking in odd locations. I was sent to a diagnostic clinic that specialized in cardiac cases. An extensive and intrusive exam showed that my left ventricle had more or less swelled to a point where it had stopped working, so the right side of my heart was compensating. The doctors told me that if I left it untreated, I would have had a massive heart attack some time in the following weeks.
A birth defect, mixed with many years of a bad lifestyle, had brought me to this point; it would eventually be the wake-up call I needed. While one doctor suggested that they install a pacemaker, another felt a six-month re-assessment, involving meds, diet and stress management, might put me in a situation where no surgery would be needed. Obviously, I opted for the latter. Nine weeks later, I have begun to heal, my doctors are astonished at my progress, and meanwhile I am well on my way to reaching my weight goal. This time I am doing it to save my life, so failure is not an option. I am scared shitless, because, for the first time, my own mortality has been brought into question, and it is partially a consequence of my own actions. This is the greatest motivator, though perhaps the least desirable, anyone struggling with weight can have.
This alone isn’t driving me though; something else, something almost peculiar has entered the picture: mathemetics. Some time ago, while looking at my numbers (weight, goal, time), I realized that dieting is a matter of simple math. The biggest argument obese people use against dieting is their fear of time and effort. It seems like an impossible task. I had convinced my self of the same thing, and as much as anyone would like to deny it, that attitude is a major cause of laziness. Once I was able to step back and look at the numbers, I realized three things: 1) I have been overweight almost my entire life; that’s 30 years. If I followed any basic, logical diet, anything approved by the most basic standards of the FDA, I should, on average, lose three pounds a week. That would not be all that taxing. At three pounds a week, it would take less than a year to lose all the weight I needed to lose. In fact, for me it would take approximately 44 weeks to reach my goal. That would mean losing 133 pounds. Even at one pound a week I would lose 52 pounds a year. That is phenomenal if you consider that I had been overweight almost my entire life. The thing about it is, the time needed to lose the weight would pass whether I made the effort or not, so for me, the choice was: did I want to spend that time losing or gaining weight? The choice was obvious.
