Em is on a Diet, Again

Photo by Solene Gl, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

In 2013 I lost 40 pounds. In 2017 I lost 30 pounds. In 2020 I lost 60 pounds. Right now, I’m in the midst of trying to lose 50. No, I’m not trying to return to my birth weight; it’s just that I have put the weight back on, every single time.

I was not raised with healthy eating habits; fried chicken, fried potatoes, lots of gravy, bacon, burgers, sugary cereals and snack foods made up the bulk of my diet. And though I was not an overweight kid, eating like that caught up to me in adulthood. Just eating what I saw as “normally” means I will gain weight. There’s nothing wrong with my thyroid and I’m not super muscular; I just tend to eat too much of the wrong things, too often.

Every so often, I decide it’s time to fix it. In 2013 I started Weight Watchers (just the app, not the meetings) and found it surprisingly easy; I could still eat the things I wanted but learned moderation, and fitting things into my daily “points” was like a fun, challenging puzzle for me. The weight just dropped off. But after a while, my resolve waned. I got tired of saying no to cake or pizza when I wanted to say yes with a wide-open mouth. I would fall off the wagon.

It’s like a switch in my brain somewhere that turns my will power on and off. When it’s “off,” I only care about my weight when I’m not hungry. As soon as it’s time to eat, I care more about having what I want than I do about whether I should have it. When the switch is “on”, I am miraculously able to moderate what I eat, to circumvent the worst of my cravings and be satisfied with less food or healthier food. The problem with this switch is that I can’t seem to reach it.

In 2020, I decided that if I would be one of the unfortunate people who succumbed to Covid-19, I didn’t want everyone justifying my death by saying “well, she was fat, so…” and that seemed to flip my switch. I did really well for a few years, again with Weight Watchers. But then Weight Watchers changed their program, as they do every few years. My daily “points” were cut drastically and foods I ate often had their point value raised. I tried to just continue eating as I had been and ignore the changes, but without the app to accurately track for me, I gradually fell off. And no matter how many times I tried to get back on track, I just couldn’t. The switch was off. The weight came back.

So here I am again, in the summer of 2024, and something has once again turned my motivation on. I’m not using Weight Watchers – it’s Noom this time – and I’m back on the healthy eating wagon. It’s slow going, but I’ve read that slow and steady weight loss is better and more sustainable than dropping pounds quickly. I have had some setbacks; I went to New Orleans for a week last month and absolutely did not follow my program while I was there. I just enjoyed the culinary delights the city has to offer, and walked about 15,000 steps a day. Sure enough, I undid a lot of the progress I had made up until that point, but was able to get back on track when I got home.

It is a struggle. I hate it. But the fact is, calories in/calories out is the key to weight loss, as unpleasant as that is to admit. I don’t need Ozempic, as nice as it would be to have my appetite suppressed. I don’t need weight loss surgery. I need to eat fewer calories and to make the calories I do eat healthier. More vegetables, less junk.

In what is perhaps a subconscious attempt to motivate myself, I’ve taken to watching “My 600lb Life” in my spare time. Each episode follows the “weight loss journey” of a person weighing anywhere from 500 to over 900 pounds as they try to qualify for gastric bypass surgery. The doctor they see, Dr. Nowzaradan (“Dr. Now”) is an adorable little old man with a thick accent who is one of the few bariatric surgeons in the country willing to operate on a person that large. But surgery is never the first step. Each person who comes to him is given a weight loss goal they must achieve on their own before Dr. Now will approve the procedure. At their weight, the goal can be anywhere from 30 to 100 pounds in a month. It’s important, because if they can’t stick to healthy eating habits after the surgery they risk stretching their stomachs right back out, rendering the surgery ineffective (not to mention potentially ripping stitches out.)

Dr. Now prescribes a high protein, low carb, 1200 calories per day diet and gives a list of “off limits” foods. Nearly every patient fails, at the beginning. These are people routinely eating 10,000+ calories per day; 1200 calories is a side dish for them. And yet, Dr. Now sends them home with nothing but a directive to eat drastically less and move a little bit. No Ozempic, no appetite suppressants, no tools other than the diet.

As you can imagine, many of them struggle and many fail, coming to their next appointment having lost next to nothing or even having gained a bit. It’s frustrating, watching them continue to eat entire pizzas and boxes of donuts knowing exactly what’s at stake for them, and then whining that they don’t know why they can’t lose weight. But it’s not surprising; these folks didn’t get this way by having a strong willpower. It is unnerving when I hear them say something I myself have often said: “I want to do better and lose weight… until I’m hungry.” I get it. Boy, do I get it. And yet I am “fat” at a weight that would be a goal weight for these people. How do they get so big?

Most of the people on the show have some serious trauma in their background, and an overwhelming number of them are survivors of sexual abuse or rape, which probably contributes to a mental health issue that exacerbates their problem, which is why therapy is often a component of Dr. Now’s program. They have learned to turn to food for comfort; they’re happy when they’re eating, escaping their sadness for a while. Some say they ate to become unattractive to their abusers, which is the saddest of the stories. Some people self-medicate with drugs and alcohol; these individuals self-medicate with food. Who can’t relate to that, to some extent?

I also think perhaps there is a genetic component. We all know people who seemingly eat whatever they want and remain at a healthy weight. But I think the people on the show may have just the opposite, a genetic propensity toward heaviness. Everyone is different, from their level of willpower to their tolerance for hunger and their taste for vegetables. And I think most of us would die of a heart attack or other obesity related causes long before reaching the weights these folks do.

Somehow, many of the people featured on the show are able to eventually get on track and lose enough weight to be approved for the surgery. If these people can go from 12,000 calories to 1200 calories per day, I can certainly cut back as well. I relate so strongly to their love of food and the difficulty they have in saying no to pizza, but seeing them unable to stand, walk themselves to the bathroom, or bathe themselves unassisted definitely adds to my motivation to get to a healthier size. There but for the grace of God go I, and all that.

I hope to keep up the momentum I have right now and get back to a weight range where I feel physically comfortable and feel good about how I look. Just like I have several times in the past. Of course I gained it back when I stopped eating well; that’s just reality, not because the “diet” was bad. When people say that “diets don’t work”, they mean that when you stop dieting the weight comes back. Well, duh. You have to continue to eat fewer calories than you burn or yes, generally, you will gain weight. It’s physics, or something. Hopefully this time, when the weight is gone, I do a better job of keeping it gone.

Society has no sympathy for fat people. I’ve learned to accept that, just as I’ve learned to accept that I can’t eat whatever I want without consequence. Now, if I could just figure out how to reach that damn switch.