Weight Loss Wednesday: An Introduction

Like most red-blooded American men in the 25-35 demographic, I’ve consistently put on weight since graduating (or, in my case, dropping out of) high school. Then there’s the whole living in the Midwest factor, where you are often eyed with suspicion if you don’t eat giant slabs of delicious meat at every meal; the married-ten-year thing, which seems to make most men complacent (who do we need to impress?); and, finally, the quitting smoking thing, since which I have put on a good 20 pounds of solid flab, split evenly between my burgeoning “Are you trying to steal a basketball?” belly and my budding man-boobs. Add in the fact that I learned to cook delicious meals primarily by loading them with things like pork fat and heavy cream, plus my fondness for fine wine and beer, and it isn’t hard to see how I went from a relatively slim 170 to my current weight: 227 as of this morning. At a nice and short 5′ 8″, that puts my BMI at 34.5, comfortably within the bounds of Obese, and well on my way to various heart conditions and diabetes.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll be putting a weekly post on Dethroner where I weigh in, upload an image, and write a brief synopsis of how things are going. Being the first in a series, this post is full of background info and is much longer and more detailed than the rest are likely to be. Fair warning!

I’ve been wanting to drop the flab for years; who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, I’ve found it nearly impossible to do so by just counting calories and exercise. While I love working out, I quickly discovered that just working out is wholly inadequate. Building muscle underneath your fat is fine, but it doesn’t make you any skinnier, so the only solution is to eat differently. It didn’t take long to realize that I suck at following recipes, even ones I create. I did spend a good couple weeks being very careful about portioning when I cooked, measuring every teaspoon of olive oil and every ounce of lean meat, but in the end I couldn’t stick with it. It took all the joy out of cooking and was making me miserable. Worse, I would eat these meals and find myself uncomfortably hungry long before bedtime—but no eating after 8:00! Ugh.

I wouldn’t like to say I had given up, but after my experience trying to lose weight in a conventional manner I had pretty much resigned myself to being fat. That is, until I started getting the headaches. They came every day for a while, and were accompanied by distorted vision and cognition problems. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t see straight, and my head hurt. I thought, “Great, I have a brain tumor!” So I made an appointment with my doctor who, after running some tests including a CT scan of my head (just to be sure) declared that my headaches were most likely caused by the extreme hypertension (175/110) I had been previously unaware of, which was of course linked directly to my obesity.

I was prescribed a beta blocker and advised to lose some weight. Given the fat nature of Americans, I figured this must happen every day in every city in the country and mentioned it to my doctor. “Yes,” she said with her thick accent I assume to be Punjabi, “I see this all the time.” I asked for a ballpark figure of how many people actually lost the weight and got off the blood pressure medication. The answer was depressing, if not surprising: “Perhaps one percent of the patients I have seen.” One percent. She indicated that virtually all her patients ended up gaining more weight over the years, eventually having to take several different medications for blood pressure, and often ending up with diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and all sorts of bad stuff. “Americans seem to just want a magic pill,” she said. “They take the pill, they think everything is fine, but they would be far better off to just lose the weight.” Enough said.

Fortunately, right around this time I was introduced to a diet called MediFast by my good friend Vic (who has also written for Dethroner a time or two). It’s vaguely similar to those NutriSystem meals pimped by Dan Marino, in the sense that they send you a bunch of prepackaged food; but it’s more for people who are actually rather obese as opposed to those who want to drop five or ten pounds. There’s an ongoing Something Awful thread which contains several success stories, including before-and-after photos. That, and a quick chat with my doctor about it, convinced me this was a good option. A few weeks later and $275 poorer (that’s a month of the food), I have begun the diet as of this morning.

For those who aren’t already familiar, MediFast is basically a bunch of prepackaged shakes, soups, bars, and puddings. You eat five of them per day (mix and match) plus one DIY meal which consists of specific portions of a lean protein and veggies. Sounds relatively easy all things considered, and if the results from the SA forum are any indication it works as advertised. The MediFast site indicates that 20 pounds per month is not an unreasonable expectation. We’ll see how reasonable it is for me soon.

Date: 03-14-2007
Weight: 227
BMI: 34.5