Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 7 (Hiccup)

I started my new job in mid-December. Gone were the days of $12/month gyms. On the other hand, gone too were the days of spending upwards of 2 hours in my car each day heading to or from work. Now, work was a 10-minute drive from home (on a busy day).

From the day I started my new job, I knew riverside walks wouldn't get the job done. If I wanted to really shed the pounds, I needed to join a gym. And to take advantage of my erratic schedule, 24 Hour Fitness seemed like the perfect choice.

I was hoping to take advantage of the whole "new year, new YOU!" type promotions - in other words, I tried to capitalize on the New Years resolutions, which seemed like logical promotions.

It would end up being two weeks without working out. And it was incredibly difficult. I didn't want to become one of those workout-burnouts after just five weeks of trying like crazy to lose weight. In other words, I didn't want to fall back into the same trap I'd become ensnared in many times before.

One night, I came up with the bright idea of running up and down the stairs at my home. Three days later, I could walk again. My knees didn't fully forgive me for a week.

I did the river walk one night. Really stepped it up, too. Walked more than usual. But it was time.

So I signed up on a Monday night and was in on the elliptical pretty regularly for the next three months. I played basketball occasionally, but the court was usually busy. So it was on the elliptical four days a week for between 33-48 minutes. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. If I missed a day, I had the weekends. I kept track of my progress on the scale. The weight continued going down, down, down.

My eating habits were good, too. I wasn't really making food for myself, though. Cooking was not yet an art I'd mastered. Things were good. Life was good.

Then I moved. Another change was on the horizon.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 6 (Redemption)

After hearing the news that I was closer to 400 pounds than I had ever been, I didn't waste anytime. The doctor had managed to put the fear of an early grave in me.

At the behest of another very good friend (word up, Lena!), I started keeping track of everything I ate, my sleep schedule and my exercise habits on a form downloaded from Flylady.net.

Before I go any further, let me just endorse the idea of writing down everything you eat. Every time I think about cheating a little bit, just thinking about having to write it down and hold yourself accountable is enough to make me back away from the food.

So on the first day after finding out the news, I had a bowl of Special K for breakfast, some Sun Chips for a snack, some Caesar salad, cheese and crackers for lunch, my Mom's chocolate chip cookies for an afternoon snack, a chicken breast, couscous and salad for dinner and cookies and Sun Chips for dinner. With no exercise.

Not the best way to start a lifestyle change.

By the way ... IT'S NOT A DIET. IT NEVER HAS BEEN A DIET. AND IT NEVER WILL BE A DIET.

Diets, you can go on and off of. Either you or someone you know has almost surely at some point gone on a diet. And they've almost as surely gone off the diet. It's easy to do. But a lifestyle change? There's no turning back once you commit yourself to something as serious and permanent-sounding.

Don't worry - the second day was much better. I had Special K for breakfast, a ham sandwich with Baked Lays and water for lunch and a snazzy little psuedo-Meixcan pizza dish for dinner. Oh yeah, and I got acquainted with the elliptical at my employer's gym.

For the next six weeks, I worked out three times a week, every week. I spent 35 or so minutes on the elliptical machine and another half hour playing basketball. I stopped snacking. I drank water almost exclusively.

It's all about committing so much of myself to this one thing ... it has been the only thing in my entire life I've completely thrown myself into (besides the school newspaper). And I think, for people who want to lose weight - who really want to push themselves - that's what it takes.

But after two weeks, I had lost four pounds. After a month, I lost 10 pounds.

Then in mid-December, I left Fred Meyer and found my true calling: working for the local newspaper. Gone was the cheap gym membership, quick and healthy cafeteria lunch options and the routine I'd become used to over the previous six weeks.

It was time to adapt.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 5 (November 5, 2005)

It had been six months since I got my first dose of weight loss reality. On Friday, November 4th, I sat in my family room, riffing about weight loss and my frustrations to mom. I was scared, nervous, tense and frustrated. At most, I figured I had lost 10 pounds over the previous three-month stretch.

So the next morning, I woke up and went up to Kaiser for a weigh-in. I didn't bother with breakfast; the way I looked at it, every pound counted toward the final total.

I didn't wait long and stepped on the wholly accurate digital scale, which looked like an out-of-order treadmill.

In mid-May, I weighed 351 pounds.

By November 5, I weighed 372 pounds.

I was mortified. I picked up Subway on the way home, called Mikaela and met her down by the river for our weekly (or so) 2-mile walk. It was cold and wet outside, but when we met, it wasn't raining.

We walked for a mile as I replayed the scene over and over in my head. I was probably six months away from 400 pounds. Four hundred pounds. Say it out loud.

We made it about a half mile before the rains start falling. We stepped under a bank of trees separating the trail from the river, and this moment ... Mikaela will always be one of my best friends for what happened next.

I tried to keep it together, rationalizing how I'd gotten to this point and scared about what to do next. If I wanted to make positive changes, ... well, I wasn't thinking about positive changes. I was scared to death. How long would it be before I suffered a heart attack? And I quit eating fast food - shouldn't I be in better shape?

Finally, I couldn't keep it in anymore. I cried. Not just an idle tear; more like a puddle. Mikaela gave me a hug, and I cried. Whatever momentum I thought I'd established had evaporated.

I remember an episode of The Simpsons where Homer got to work from home after ballooning to 315 pounds. Homer had nothing on me. And that scared me. Would I need a muumuu? A motorized cart? In short ... what was wrong with me?

I cried until the tears wouldn't come anymore. I cried harder than I ever had. Mikaela never once came down on me or even tried to cheer me up; she knew that I just needed to go through this. Your best friends are the ones who are there when you need them most ... and Mikaela was there. If she hadn't met me down by the river that morning, who knows what would have happened?

Eventually, when I caught my breath, we agreed to continue our walk at the mall, which was undercover and much warmer. So we did just that. We walked from one end to the other. Slowly but surely, my mind drifted away from the horrors of weighing 372 pounds and more toward the positive steps I needed to start taking.

We put together a shopping list. Mikaela gave me tips for losing weight. I still had my gym membership at work.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't going to say, "I'll start my diet tomorrow."

If you've never thrown yourself into trying to lose weight ... well, it's easily the single most daunting thing I've undertaken in my life. Every aspect of my life, from the physical activity to the food to my attitudes on weight loss, needed changing.

I realized that I could never "treat myself" to a KFC snacker again. I'd taken my last sip of Diet Coke. Post-workout hot dogs were a thing of the past. Hell, those walks were a thing of the past. Literally, when it came to my diet, every single thing changed.

Even my attitudes about dieting changed. Try this on for size: I refused to say I was on a "diet." Being ON a diet means you can go OFF the diet, and I didn't want to give myself the option to slip and fall. It is and always has been a lifestyle change.

November 5, 2005. It was a turning point. It's when I bottomed out. It was the slap in the face I needed but feared. It was the end of one stage of my life, and the beginning of another ... a much happier, healthier stage.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 4 (Back to Square One)

Last March, I went to the doctor and discovered that, in spite of my steady fast food diet and a total lack of physical activity outside of my normal grocery store job, I weighed the same as I did in high school: 300 pounds.

This encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing: no fast food and no physical activity. I thought that, by virtue of not eating out all the time, I would shed the pounds like crazy.

So when I went to the doctor in May to talk about some anti-depressant alternatives (I was on Zoloft at the time), imagine my surprise when I tipped the scale at 355 pounds.

I didn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. So the nurse weighed me on the digital scale, which corroborated the slide scale's reading.

I was incredulous. Had I gained 50 pounds in two months? No, the nurses told me, the slide scales can be "off" by up to 50 pounds. Which prompted the question, "what the fuck are they good for, then?"

Both the nurse and the doctor shrugged off the egregious nature of the sliding scale as if it were no big deal that I was 50 pounds heavier than I thought.

My visit turned into one long lecture about how I'm in "serious trouble" and I "need to do something before it's too late." I never got around to my original complaint: anti-depressants suck.

I scheduled an appointment for two weeks later. In the mean time, I gave up all my favorite fried foods from the deli, stopped drinking soda and watched my diet a lot more carefully.

It worked: I lost 4 pounds in 2 weeks. I was well on my way.

Right around that time, I graduated from Washington State University Vancouver. By June 1st, I would be out of the grocery store gig and into an all new office life, writing advertising copy for the same company. Instead of busting my ass filling shelves, running around the store, scooping up carts and cashiering, I sat in a plush chair and typed away on my computer all day.

And I'll admit, the job was nice early on. After two or three weeks, I started taking walks down by the Vancouver riverfront or at a local park to make up for the exercise I wasn't getting anymore. All the while, I had a membership at the company's in-house gym, which I used exactly twice at that point.

I did the two-mile walks three or four times each week. As the walks became easier, I stopped really breaking a sweat. I thought I was making progress.

Instead of walking more (or more often), I was content to stick with this routine. And, as a result, I would reward myself for doing such great work! The reward usually consisted of two hot dogs (for $2.22), a bag of Reese's Pieces and a Super Big Gulp Diet Coke (yep, back on the soda bandwagon) from 7-11.

Once or twice, I went by Wendy's for the Crispy Chicken Combo (biggie sized) with a Diet Coke. Somehow, I convinced myself it wasn't fast food: the chicken is healthy! There isn't much mayonnaise! The fries aren't greasy! It's Diet Coke!

Other times, I would go by KFC and buy three of their "snackers" (bun, chicken, lettuce and sweet secret sauce), a side of baked beans/cole slaw/potato wedges and a Diet Pepsi.

Whatever "no fast food" declaration I had made was effectively moot. I guess it's not that bad in moderation, but when it came to fast food, I just couldn't contain myself: I needed it all the time. I lied to friends about my meals. I wasn't eating at a rate of three or four times each day, but I was still eating it five or six times each week, easily.

I woke up one mid-October morning and noticed something I'd never seen before. A second chin. Every time I nodded to myself in the mirror, I felt like tucking the fold underneath my first chin so it wasn't as obvious. It didn't seem to jive with the whole idea that I was losing weight. I wasn't feeling any better. I was starting to buy 4xl shirts.

Something was terribly wrong.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 3 (Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight)

Say what you will about Morgan Spurlock's methods, his agenda, his truthfulness ... it didn't matter to me. I walked out of "Super Size Me" in June, resolving to take better care of myself.

That I saw the movie at all was a bit of a fluke; my good friend Evan had recommended the film, and if there's one thing you have to know about Evan, it's that he knows his shit when it comes to movies. If I had never seen the movie, I can't imagine how else I would have ever been motivated enough to lose weight. Even though I've slipped and fallen a few times since then, Evan's "Super Size Me" recommendation was really the catalyst for everything that happened over the next 18 months (and counting).

Finally, for the first time ever, I was throwing myself into a diet and committing myself fully.

And it lasted exactly a week.

Five days later, I stopped into Jack in the Box before working a graveyard shift. Even after only five days without fast food, I noticed the difference. It was heavy, greasy and just really unpleasant.

I knew I had messed up and was determined not to let it happen again. Feeling that badly reminded me of what it was like to eat fast food regularly, so I got back up and gave up fast food again.

And for awhile, it worked.

I started eating at home more often and actually cooking (one of my early success stories? Fajitas). My friendship with Brian (my co-editor at the newspaper) blossomed, so I joined him in working out at my college's gym. Three days a week, I used the elliptical machine and hit the weights. Between the gym and the home cooking, I really felt like I was accomplishing something.

I wasn't noticing a smaller stomach, but I saw small bicep muscles appearing. I discovered my calves getting stronger. It was enough to keep me going up until school started in August 2004.

Fall semester started, and I was in over my head. In addition to a full load of classes, I was writing for a fledging alt-weekly newspaper, running the college newspaper and working weekends at Fred Meyer.

So with less free time than ever, I stopped working out and started eating fast food. Yes, I reverted back to my old habits after two months.

At the time, I was too busy to be worried about eating fast food, and I stopped working out. I rotated between Sunrise Bagels (for the cheesy bacon bagel), McDonalds, Burger King and Burgerville for breakfast. Lunch consisted of fish 'n' chips or hamburger and fries. I caught dinner on the way home. If it was a work night, I grabbed something on the way to work, at work and again after work.

This continued through mid-January.

Early in January, I was eating three cheeseburgers and washing them down with a large diet coke on the way to school. By the time I got to school and booted up my computer in the office, I had to use the bathroom. I could feel the crap foods making their way through my system. Something was definitely wrong.

On January 14, I grabbed Burger King for breakfast and headed to the local school district offices for a high school transcript (I was applying for graduate school at the time). I got to the parking lot outside the main office and felt worse than I had at any point in the previous six months (during which I was actually eating fast food regularly).

I wasn't going so far as to start working out, but I was again laying off the fast food. That was January 2005. To this day, I haven't touched Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell or any of that nonsense since January 15.

I was eating healthier and feeling good, up until March. I caught a pretty nasty virus around that time, which essentially acted like a prolonged cold. Hoping for anything to help, I went to the doctor's office, where I stepped on the scale weighing 300 pounds.

Before you recoil at that number, know this: I had weighed 300 pounds just after a summer of walking almost 30 miles every weekend in 2001. So, knowing that my fast food binging hadn't caused any weight gain was an enormous relief.

I couldn't believe my good fortune.

As I learned two months later, I shouldn't believe my good fortune, either.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 2 (My Turn to the Dark Side)

It was the spring of 2004, well into my second headfirst foray into the world of fast food (I was eating out regularly throughout my senior year of high school, as well). Depending on my schedule, I would grab McDonalds or donuts for breakfast. My best friend and I would get cheeseburgers from the burger joint nearest to our college for lunch, or I would hit up McDonalds. For dinner, I would eat at one of the aforementioned burger joints or the other, depending on where I went earlier that day.

Then I would eat dinner at work; my lunch break usually consisted of a frozen TV dinner or deli sandwich and potato/macaroni salad. And on the way home, I occasionally stopped by Jack in the Box, McDonalds, Burger King or whoever else happened to be open at 11 p.m.

This was an everyday occurrence. I was averaging fast food two, maybe three times a day. Half-full cereal boxes at home were thrown out. The sandwich meats in my family's refrigerator went to waste. The dinners my parents saved me went down the drain. The only thing I came home for was soda pop (and that was usually to refill the Diet Coke I had already drank on my way home from getting food). At my worst, I was averaging 3-5 Diet Cokes a day. I never drank water.

I began noticing that a set of stairs became difficult. Pulling boxes from the back room at work became tenuous. And in the occasional pickup basketball game, I routinely let my opponents drive by uncontested. It's hard to block shots when you're too busy with your hands on your knees and your face between your legs.

Still, I couldn’t convince myself to drive past a Burger King without buying something. I always said I didn’t have the time to make something, the money to buy something healthy or the know-how to actually get myself onto a balanced diet.

I ate as much fast food as my schedule allowed for. Sometimes for breakfast, I would go to the bagel shop nearby and buy two bagels with cheese and bacon and proceed to call it "healthy" by virtue of being a bagel. And this was on a weekday. On weekends, when my schedules were more flexible, fast food four times a day was pretty much the norm.

On the non-food side of things, I was on my way to becoming the Managing Editor of my school's newspaper, where I met Brian, my co-editor. We didn't know each other very well; all I really knew was that he was on Atkins.

This fast food habit kept up through. By the summer, I was up to nearly 20 times per week. At the time, I lived within a 15-minute drive of more than 20 fast food outlets. Wendy's, Jack in the Box, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burgerville, Dairy Queen, KFC, Arbys and a few others I'm sure I can't remember were close enough so that I didn't feel like I was going out of my way to pick up dinner.

Sometimes, I would have a sausage biscuit with egg, a plain sausage biscuit, a hashbrown and a large Diet Coke for breakfast. Lunch would be a big mac, a plain hamburger, large fries and a large diet coke. Then dinner might be a crispy chicken sandwich, a cheeseburger, large fries and a large diet coke.

That's a lot of McDonalds. Of course, I mixed it up most of the time. I let my heart do the talking, even as my head screamed, "you fucking idiot! Don't you realize what you're doing! You're killing yourself! Have a bowl of cereal! A salad! A ham sandwich! For fuck sake, your heart is crying a river of tears, fatty!"

Then, on June 21, 2004, I saw a double feature: "Dodgeball" and "Super Size Me."

"Dodgeball" was hilarious. But "Super Size Me" changed my life.

To be continued ...

Matt's Weight Loss Odyssey: Part 1 (The Boring Introduction)

My name is Matt. I'm 23 years old. On November 6, 2005, I went to the doctor's office, only to find I weighed 372 pounds. For reference, that's roughly equal to, oh, 372 cans of chili. That's a lot of chili. Since then, I've been on a mission to lose weight. And, nearly six months after that fateful day, I've lost 50 pounds and climbing (or falling).

So I'm going to tell my story. Then I'll continue to chronicle my continuing efforts. And who knows what else? It'll be interesting, whatever it is.

It'd be nice if, for reference, I had a "before" photo to share. Unfortunately, the only known (recent) photos of myself picture me in a two-sizes-too-large black graduation gown. Bad reference point. Alas, you're just going to have to trust me here when I tell you that, six months ago, I was big. Uncomfortably big. How did I get to that point?

As long as I can remember, I've been a big kid. Sure, I was teased and taunted all through school, and I probably have a good many years of therapy ahead of me. But I was never ridiculously overweight.

I stayed active by playing baseball in the spring, riding bikes and hiking in the summer and -- for two years -- playing basketball in the winter. Not just that, but my first job at age 16 (bagging groceries at the local Safeway) kept me busy.

In my junior year of high school, the Atkins diet really took hold, and one of my bosses extolled the virtues. He himself had lost a noticeable amount of weight seemingly overnight, and I was intrigued.

I went to bed one Saturday, determined to shed weight quickly. Up to this point in my life, I'd been perpetually single; I never even attended a high school dance. I didn't have any self-confidence, which I blamed my weight on. So, the line of thought was that if I could lose weight overnight, I'd be confident, and the ladies would flock to my side.

I woke up the next morning, had breakfast and went to work. My boss asked how it was going.

"Well, for breakfast, I had a couple pieces of sausage, a couple of eggs, three slices of toast --"

"You blew it, man. That toast right there was 20 carbs."

I was stunned into never giving Atkins another shot.

It even worked in 2001 for a spell. I was living in Seattle, attending one of those fast-food computer schools, and I was a security guard on the weekends. I worked 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, which should give you an idea of my social life. Anyway, my job involved loading up with a solid 10 pounds of shit - a Mag Lite, a clip board, two dozen keys, , a cell phone and a heavy pen-like object used to register each checkpoint my route - and lugging it around a complex roughly five times the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

I would come back to Vancouver every other weekend, and my weight loss was obvious. It had as much to do with walking 20 miles every weekend as it did with the fact I rarely ate. Then, when my once and only girlfriend broke up with me, the food intake came to a grinding halt. I just lost interest in eating. My food intake was down to maybe a donut for breakfast and a bowl of spaghetti-os for dinner.

Realizing I was pissing money down the drain, I moved back home and took another job in another grocery store while completing my degree.

That was almost five years ago now, and since then, I periodically told myself I would start dieting tomorrow. Every couple of months, I would make a determined post in my other blog about wanting to lose weight, but I never made it past day 1. Never.

Two years after graduating from high school in 2003, I was only going through the drive-thru here and there. Mostly, I was decent about eating around the house.

Then at a certain point in mid 2004, I drifted to the Dark Side, as it were. Fast food wasn't an exception - it was the rule.

To be continued ...