LOSING WEIGHT? ARE YOU CALLING ME FAT?

When you’re losing weight, two things happen:

It’s either a celebration of mind over matter, with the matter being eating too much.

Or it’s a medical investigation because you haven’t stopped eating everything in sight and you’re still losing weight.

Either way you weigh less, and if you happen to start as an XXXL, it’s a good thing.

I know people with very strict diets. To them weight loss is no big deal.

They just don’t eat what’s in front of them unless it’s exactly what they want.

Two men in particular come to mind and both come from large families.

Not large in count but large in circumference.

So far their eating habits have kept them on the down side of the popular three hundred pound threshold.

They’re so good at it they stay below the two hundred pound threshold.

One of them works a bag of raw broccoli, the other never eats out. It works for them and that’s all that matters.

2

After an inadvertent visit to the Emergency Room for a broken heart, and an overnight stay in the ICU during the pandemic, I checked out healthy.

I also had an appointment with a heart doctor, which makes sense.

In his notes he called his patient, me, “Well Nourished.”

Well nourished? I think the doctor was charting a polite way of calling me fat.

Thank you, Doctor, but it’s not news.

Based on some charts I’ve been classified as Morbidly Obese.

Well nourished sounds better than morbidly obese?

The charts are wrong, or course. I’m not obese, let alone morbidly obese.

From a height and weight calculation, anyone who works out and lifts weight nudges up on obese because of muscle weight.

By those standards every body builder is obese. So are most football players.

Since I never cracked 300 lbs, maybe I was only a little obese? Or the doctor had the wrong data?

Losing Weight To Compete

As a young wrestler I didn’t have to cut weight.

Once I gained the skills, I was encouraged to drop a weight class.

I went from 180 lbs as a sophomore to 165 at the end of the junior season for the big tournaments.

At 180 pounds I took sixth in state for Greco Roman.

A year later at 165 I got pounded by guys I’d beat before.

Senior year I came in at a natural 190 lbs. I took first in district, won the Greco state championship, and finished 6th in freestyle.

Over the summer I took third in national Greco. Did I learn anything?

Freshman year in college I dropped to 177 lbs and got worked.

A year later I tried out for the All-Army Team at 180 and had the biggest loss of my wrestling career.

Did I learn anything? Not much.

I stayed around 185 for the next decade, then got married.

With a wife who knows how to cook, and kids who needed their plates cleaned up, I gained a few pounds, then a few more, then I stopped checking and stopped eating everything.

By the time I got back on the scale I was 240 lbs.

I thought, ‘I’d like to make it under 200 lbs again.’

Big Weight Loss

Cancer is no way to lose weight. Neither is chemo and radiation.

But the choices were pretty clear: ignore the science and die, or embrace the science and live.

For me, science was a big bag of black stuff plugged into a chest port.

Science looked like a jet engine inside the hospital that generated and delivered precise jolts of radiation to a very specific area. Not too much, not too little, not too deep, not too shallow.

Starting out, the statistics showed a 95% chance of survival. I liked my chances.

It changed when I found I couldn’t swallow anything very well, when food commercials made me nauseous, and my weight loss became an issue.

On doctor’s advice I hogged down like never before to make it through treatment.

As a result I bumped up to 260 lbs.

Two months later I was at 195 lbs. Goal set, goal accomplished.

I figured since I was done with treatment, I was done. Time to celebrate?

No, because the chemo and radiation was still cooking inside my bodies. It was my body and I was failing spectacularly.

No one was impressed by my will for losing weight. My team called me a fool for even mentioning going below 200.

I felt foolish. I wasn’t losing weight through will power, but I still hopped on that bandwagon.

I’ve rebounded like a champ since 2017 and it feels so good.

A new t-shirt purchase brought comments from my wife:

“I’m throwing those new shirts away. They make you look like you’ve got a big gut and man-boobs.”

In other words, I’m back, baby.

Pass the bag of broccoli, please.