Prologue
Fair warning, this prologue contains what is ostensibly another prologue. Still in for it?
Cool.
I was a runt. Born early, scrawny, excitable kid. I chubbed up a bit in middle school, and more in high school. I didn’t think much of it, both of my parents are overweight, and despite having two siblings that do not fit that profile, I assumed overweight was where I was supposed to be.
I lost a little weight in college. I gained it back in college.
And then grad school. I started grad school around 260 lbs and definitely obese* by both BMI and body composition standards.
I lost a little weight early in grad school, from about 260 to 240. I attribute this exclusively to the fact that I lived in a fourth floor walk-up and thus stopped drinking soda because I was too lazy to carry it up the stairs.
For those just joining the global narrative, grad school is largely a bad time if not just a tough time. I had a bad time. My pre-existing depression flared against new layers of episodic depression. During a particularly low moment, I was involuntarily hospitalized. It was hurtful and hard at the time, and served mostly to worsen my depression.
So I stopped eating. At least, I went from three meals a day with snacks to one or two meals at most when I was with others to appear normal.
I lost a bit more weight. People noticed. I got compliments.
I was still depressed. People noticed. I got a lot of unsolicited advice.
I’m sure for those who have been or are overweight, it comes as no surprise that the top piece of advice I received was “well have you tried exercise; I hear it releases endorphins.” I’ll get back to that.
In short, if you’ve said this to me I was mad at you then and I’m still a little mad at you now.
But hey, eventually you were annoying enough for me to reach this conclusion:
“Fine, I’ll go workout. I’ll lose the weight, I’ll be pretty, and I’ll be sad as fuck. Then what can they say? Fuck those assholes.”
And so I did. Driven by spite, I started going to the gym. I started going to the gym around 240 lbs. I was drinking a lot at the time, which mitigated and slowed the weight loss. When I cut down on my drinking severely, I lost about 60 pounds in 4 months.
I then got salmonella. It was an accident, but it was also my fault. I lost another 15 pounds in three weeks with that, but honestly it was about as fun as I could make it.
That’s it. That’s the prologue.
Unfortunately for a lot of people, “spite and depression” is not a great go-to solution. I’m not going to advocate for it either.
Fortunately, there are two (or three) pieces of information that are really very valuable in terms of weight loss and fitness here.
- I lost weight just by removing soda. It was only about 15 pounds and it probably happened over several months, but it was a small change that made a difference..
- I lost a ton of weight by cutting back on drinking while engaging in a regular exercise regiment. This is two things happening at once, which means it was harder, but the effect was greatly amplified.
- I started this for spiteful reasons. Spite is an external motivator, and honestly, it’s enough to get me off the couch any day of the week. You can start with external motivations. No judgments.
* I think most people who knew me at the time would not have used the word ‘obese.’ Certainly in the U.S. we dance around that word, but it has a specific meaning tied to specific standards. We even qualify it with ‘morbidly’ or ‘extremely’ to clarify that there is gradation to the additional weight. I was, by definition — obese.
