Fit2Fat2Fit (9 page)

I persevered. Sticking to my meal plan that first day, I pushed myself through the continued headaches and hunger pains. I tried to convince myself that the healthy food I was eating was more enjoyable than, say, a can of Pringles, and that the absence of sweets and desserts was probably better for my wife and children, too.

When I'd climb the stairs and feel my lungs ache for oxygen, I'd tell myself that tomorrow I'd be a little lighter and the trek wouldn't hurt quite as much. And more than anything else, when I got on the computer and read the stories of the countless individuals in the community who had joined me in pursuing their own health, I felt a sense of both responsibility and accountability.

I remember anticipating that the hardest part of the Fat2Fit stage would be the exercising. I'd feel sore, struggling to do exercises that I had long since perfected, and would probably feel self-conscious at the gym.

After only one day, I realized that the upcoming exercises were the least of my problems. I had to deal with my nutrition, and it wasn't going to be as simple as switching back to “what I'd always eaten.” I'd willingly forced my body to accept the diet of a typical, overweight American. Now, as a result, the struggle between what I should eat and what I wanted to eat was going to dominate every single meal.

I'd broken up with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Mountain Dew. How long did I have to wait until I stopped missing them?

Turn on the television, browse through a magazine, look to the shelves of your local pharmacy, and you're inundated with quick fixes to any potential weight problem. It doesn't matter what the approach is, or who the experts sponsoring it are, the claims are the same: stick to this approach for a short time, and you will see results.

Some diets aim to strike all carbohydrates from your diet, filling you up on only protein. Others provide simple instructions to drink some of your calories, and you'll stop feeling hungry through the majority of the day. Other people swear by eating cabbage soup (or some other specific food) as a way to shed the pounds.

Regardless of the fad, all such approaches share the same inherent flaw—the fact that they're diets. The idea of a diet is straightforward: eat specific “good” foods and restrict yourself from “bad” foods. The problem is that someday (whether it's in a week, a month, or a few hours) “bad” foods will fall back onto your plate. Any progress made will be quickly reversed.

Think back to every diet you've tried. Early on, the going is smooth. The weight starts to drop off as you remove forbidden foods from your diet. Then you start to plateau. Or you're constantly faced with those same foods that your body once used to rely on and are tortured by the temptation.

Gradually, you sneak in one of the forbidden foods, claiming that you'll start dieting again next Monday. Then Monday becomes the
next
Monday, and one forbidden food becomes two—and the initially promising attempt becomes deflating failure.

And yet, whatever the reason for stopping, months after one fad diet has failed you're on the hunt for the next. Before you know it, you're filling your grocery cart with indulgent amounts of cabbage (or whatever), hoping that the answer lies in a never-ending portion of soup or Tabasco sauce or grapefruit juice concoction.

That's the diet side of the health industry. The other side of the equation is the fitness industry. For every quick-fix diet, there's an equally compelling exercise program promising that a few minutes, hours, or routines later you can have the body that you've always dreamed of.

Exercise fanatics believe that hard work at the gym is the real means to long-term weight success. Less dependent on what you're eating, the true change in health, in their view, comes from how many calories are being worked out of your system.

These claims are just as straightforward as those of the diet gurus: put a small amount of work in, and see the results. Only in America could the idea of little effort equating to ridiculous results be embraced as if it were going out of style. How else could you justify the existence of contraptions like the “weight vest” or any variety of metal bars that promise six-pack abs just in time for summer?

The typical exercise-to-lose-weight program takes a similar course to that of fad diets. The initial interest carries results, but a plateau eventually occurs. Or because you're now burning more calories, you also eat more food—and the net result is zero.

For every one of us who's tried a fad diet, we've also tried the quick-fix exercise route. The end result is the reason the health industry is one of the fastest-growing in our nation. Quick-fix exercises don't work, forcing you to go out and try another.

Upon plateau, the exerciser or dieter starts to doubt that those washboard abs or slim thighs are going to come before the next millennium, let alone summer. Dwindling motivation, fading dedication, and busy, busy life start to intervene, and the best-laid plans become just that. Action takes a backseat until next January.

I've always believed that exercise and nutrition go hand in hand. While exercise is important, the key to losing weight and keeping it off lies in what you eat. I'm not talking about a fad diet, though. I'm talking about a nutritional lifestyle change—a holistic approach that takes into account that you will fall off the wagon, eat out at restaurants, and plateau in your journey to lose weight and get healthy. What you eat is the single most important factor in losing weight.

As I stood at the mirror, examining my 70-plus pounds of baggage, I realized that it was critical to share with those who were following me that exercise doesn't get you all the way. It helps, absolutely, but it isn't the critical piece.

So I decided to forgo one of the most important parts of my personal training regimen—working out; I would do only stretching and basic core exercises. I would change my nutrition first, hoping that my results would show that what you put into your system is much more important than anything else when you're trying to lose weight and become healthy.

Unlike the fad diets and workouts that many of us have experienced to some degree (my condolences to all of you), my approach to health is simple. It's my belief that we're all in charge of our own success in finding the path to our health. This approach is a lifestyle, not a diet!

Most approaches require an individual to become almost robotic—eat this, avoid that. What this type of approach fails to consider is that we're human. We're going to struggle, and we're going to make mistakes. And if an approach doesn't make concessions for mistakes and lapses, it's easy to predict the end result: failure.

Many people start exercise and diet routines with the best of intentions, and when they encounter adversity, they quit. Quite simply, quitting is easier than putting in the work. And yet part of the urge to quit is the frustration of feeling like they aren't doing things right or the program isn't working the way they'd hoped.

Besides, when someone else is telling them what to do, it's difficult to own their own decision-making process.

I had always believed that there was an intrinsic choice within everyone—people either chose to be healthy, or they chose not to, and in this way the results spoke for themselves. Becoming overweight provided me with a new reality, a more complicated understanding. I was right that the ability to become healthy was about choice. I was wrong, though, about what the word “choice” meant. I thought that once your mind kicked into gear, everything else would fall into line.

I realized now that nothing was going to simply fall in line for my weight loss. But that's not how I became overweight, either. I had to force myself to start choosing unhealthy foods and behaviors. I had to force myself to eat that first doughnut.

As I started putting on extra pounds, I was making choices multiple times a day—the wrong choices for my health and fitness. Sometime along the journey, however, I stopped having to force myself to choose what was unhealthy. The choices became easy; I'd grown so accustomed to them that I forgot I was making choices—unhealthy ones—every single day. Instead, it just felt like my new routine.

At the end of my six months of weight gain, the concept of choice returned. As I started my way back and began to “eat healthy,” I was faced with the same opportunities to make a good or bad choice, not just daily but many times a day. And it was difficult to always choose the right option.

The initial difficulty lay in the headaches from caffeine withdrawal and the urgings of my newfound appetite. Perhaps my body now needed the sugar. Maybe it was the convenience of the processed food. Actually, it was all of the above, and I had to force myself to make the right choice multiple times a day, trusting that the decision making would become easier with time.

I gained 75 pounds in a six-month period by making the wrong choices every day, every hour. I knew that turning away from my new addictions wouldn't be enough. The temptation to make the wrong choice for my health had become a part of me. That temptation would always be just around the corner—every corner. Being healthy is a choice. Getting healthy is an entirely different enterprise that requires a mind shift, a strategy, and a lot of support.

I changed my approach to my daily routine so that when confronted with the opportunity to make choices, I made the right ones. It was the only way to ensure that I continued to move forward in my journey.

Detailed in the pages below are some of the key approaches I used to get back on the path to fitness. These approaches aren't a fad diet; I won't tell you to avoid specific foods at all costs. Getting healthy is about understanding how to make good choices in the face of seemingly more appetizing (but really more damaging) options.

The reality is that we're going to make some wrong choices. But if every day we make a great deal more right choices than wrong, our health will start to change for the better. And then, if we're patient, making the right choices will become automatic—and part of a new routine.

When we were growing up, our parents typically used every means necessary to instill life lessons into us. These lessons generally arrived in the shape of books, movies, personal experiences (which tended to involve walking to and from school, uphill, in three feet of snow), and stories.

As children (and especially as teenagers), we would scoff at these apparently trivial stories. We'd perfect the art of rolling our eyes, and our parents would desperately try to find a better analogy to make their point after all.

Little did I know that one of those stories would actually be critical to understanding why we struggle to get out of our unhealthy rut.

Why can't we step away from fast food? Why do we crave processed items at every single meal? The key to answering that question is living through a little story time. (I'll ignore that eye roll!)

One day, a little girl walked into the kitchen to see a large ham sitting on the counter. She crawled onto a stool and watched her mother pull out a knife (don't worry, kids; this isn't a Stephen King novel) and cut the ends off the ham, set the big piece of meat in a pan, and place it in the oven.

The girl was quiet for a long time, a quizzical look on her face. When her mother inquired as to her facial expression, the girl asked about the routine with the ham. “Why did you cut the ends off, Mommy?” she asked.

After a slight pause, her mother stated that it was how her mother had cooked ham. When she was little, it was almost a rite of passage to go through the same steps for the Sunday ham that the family would enjoy. The little girl pressed further: “And why did Grandma cut the ends off?”

Not knowing the answer, the mother picked up the phone and called “Grandma” to inquire. Not surprisingly, the response was very similar—Grandma had witnessed her own mother's approach, and had copied it when she started a family.

Now daughter, mother, and grandmother were curious as to the genesis of their routine. They approached a very elderly great-grandmother and asked, “Why did you cut the ends off a ham before baking it?”

The elderly woman's response was clear and succinct: “Because I had a small pan, and if I hadn't cut it, the ham wouldn't have fit.”

Three generations, three inherited routines, and no semblance of logic except in the initial instance. The idea that we do something because that's the way it's always been done seems trite and too convenient until we look at our own lives, especially our own nutrition, and realize that we've fallen into the same patterns.

Ask almost anyone how many meals they should have each day, and the answer will be “three” about 90 percent of the time. Ask them what a proper meal should include, and you'll hear something along the lines of “a meat, a bread, and a side dish.”