All-juiced 12th: Journeys.

This is a story about a long and winding road...

Day 43 (of 45). Hi, kids! The word of the day is antepenultimate. That’s just a fancy way of saying “next to the next to the last one.” I’m in the antepenultimate day of the fast, and really, REALLY looking forward to being done. Especially since I’m still just inside the borders of OneDerLand, on the outskirts of the state of Emotional Bliss, just in sight of the road to Healthy Body Image, on my way to the county seat, Goalweightsburg. I weigh juuuuust enough to be here without eliciting many curious looks, but too much to advance much farther inland unmolested. 

This morning, the scale told me I gained weight from yesterday, which heaps enough frustration on my head to make my blood boil. I know I have to change something up in the way I’m drinking my juices – less fruit? Fewer juices? Drinking too late? – but I also know that there are only a couple of days left, so what’s the point? It’s only 9:45am, and I’ve already had several pointed conversations with my adversary over some of the food I’ve prepared for my family this morning. “Why not eat the rest of that oatmeal? You’re not losing weight anyway, and it will probably jump-start you towards weight loss these last few days…!”

Two more days, after today. Finishing strong means something a little different than it did a week ago.

The point, of course, is to finish strong. I had hoped to ride a straight line of weight loss down to a wonderful transition to eating solid food, which would have me at my Ultimate Goal Weight by Labor Day. Clearly, it’s not going to happen that way, but…you know what? I didn’t commit to 45 days with an asterisk (unless I stop losing weight a few days short of that, or it’s hard, or I don’t want to anymore). I committed to 45 days. That’s forty-five days. Not forty-three, or even forty-four. Regardless of what that stupid scale says from now on, I’m in it to cross the line with my arms held high in triumph.

This looks a lot like my mom's "grapefruit diet" from back in the day.

So that settles at least one little mental debate. One more thing that has been going through my mind lately has to do with how I’ve gotten here, all the way from the primeval past. I’ve been thinking about my history with dieting quite a bit lately. My earliest memories of any sort of diets come from my parents and the way they dealt with the excess weight that crept on their respective frames over the course of their early to mid thirties. One of them would bring home a typed sheet of instructions on everything they should eat on a three-day diet, guaranteed to lose them at least ten pounds. Or my mom would eat grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar and coffee for breakfast. Or my dad would mix up a massive ceramic bowl of salad with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and slathered with thousand island dressing. I’m not sure if any of it ever worked for them, because my mom steadily gained weight, though little by little. My dad always carried a few extra pounds for someone his size, although he was nowhere near the heaviest or least athletic person I knew. In fact, he worked extremely hard to keep our yards clean and mowed, and even cultivated a pretty righteous garden while I was in high school. The one thing I inherited from him, though, was his ability to sweat buckets whenever he did even the most basic calisthenic activity.

Personally, I never really cared all that much about how much I weighed until the summer before 10^th grade. I was coming off of a knee injury that took me out of the football and basketball seasons my freshman year, and I was determined to make a comeback. I remember starting my own impromptu summer training program in June at about 250 pounds. My mom would drop me off at school on her way to work, and I would go to the athletic center with an old-school red, white, and blue ABA basketball, a couple of sandwiches and some pieces of fruit, and all the water I could drink from the fountains inside. I took myself through conditioning and shooting drills until signs of life began to trickle in. Sometimes those signs of life involved my friend and uber athlete Preston, who was also one of the few rising 10^th graders old enough to drive. Effortlessly, he was already better than I was at my absolute best, and he actually ended up playing D-III college football. Even so, working out with him pushed me to do things better, with more intensity, and longer. Well, as long as I could. I soaked through several outfits a day with my own sweat, and managed to work myself into the shape of my life, to that point.

Even then, at my strongest and arguably fittest, my diet was still awful. Between basketball and lifting Preston and I would head to the Burger King nearby and I would get what ended up being called “the usual” – a bacon double cheeseburger, large fries, and a Dr. Pepper. Sometimes I would vary it up with an order of chicken tenders. At home, it wasn’t much better. My dad’s signature meals were spaghetti with meat sauce and homemade macaroni with cheese. This latter dish would be made either with about two pounds of cheddar cheese, or half a container of Velveeta. I ate either one with equal gusto. My mom made some pretty amazing dishes in her own right, when she cooked. But we also spent quite a few Friday evenings dining on take-out foods: Chinese, pizza (toggled among Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Little Caesar’s), and Ukrop’s amazing fried chicken and potato wedge family dinner packages. [Everyone from Richmond knows exactly what I’m talking about.] What was in it, you ask? A 10-piece bucket of chicken and about a pound and a half of wedges. Southern-style potato salad and cole slaw, plus about a dozen soft, sweet rolls. Most of it a distant memory by the end of dinner time. Most of it by my own Herculean efforts to eat my parents out of both house AND home.

That little white glove was the source of many a meal in my youth.

Since both of my parents worked, by the time we could cook for ourselves, we usually did. Simple stuff, like boiling noodles for pasta, at times. Eggs and pancakes for breakfast, but usually just three big bowls of cereal. Or, even worse, I’d make anywhere from four to six sandwiches involving toast, mayo, sliced processed American “cheese food,” and some sort of deli meats. And you can’t forget to add chips in there, either. Not even the good chips, because kettle chips weren’t even around until about 1992. Although we did get Pringles from time to time (back when you could sustain some serious injuries from the top of a Pringles can). Nope – we usually ate the greasiest, cheapest chips available: either Lay’s, or some local knock-off of Lay’s that was a few cents cheaper at the local grocery store. The first thing I learned to make from start to finish was Hamburger Helper, and believe me – I made more than one pan of Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper, that is intended for a family of six to share, and finished it all off myself in a night.

A broad approximation of the diet roller-coaster that began when I was about 15.

Flash-forward to New Year’s Eve, 1990. I’m fifteen years old and supremely unhappy with everything life represented, which isn’t too far off for the vast majority of fifteen-year-olds, but since I had only been 15 once, there was no way for me to know that. Anyway, I tended not to express my thoughts out loud but to write them down in some sort of journal. Part of my resolutions that year, for the first time, was a number. A goal weight. One that I would try with all of the strength I could muster to achieve by the end of that year. I have no idea how much I weighed at that point, but the number I wrote down, 175, seemed far enough away to make my shoulders slump even further than they already were in my angsty mid-teens. The resolve of the moment was stronger than it was at any moment after that, and I never made it to my goal weight that next year. However, my trip on the rollercoast-uhhhhh. Of weight…[say what?] began with that simple numeric declaration.

I even tried hypnosis, and I think some of it might have worked! My sister had these tapes that played subliminal messages for you to listen while you meditated or slept. On one side was a man’s soothing voice, guiding you through the process of self-hypnosis. On the other side, new age-y instrumental music accompanied by the sound of ocean waves crashing gently against the shore. I think this might have been where the subliminal messages were buried, but of course I can’t be sure. I “borrowed” them one day and listened to them for a few weeks. To this day, over 20 years later, I can still remember the man’s voice telling me that sodas and white bread “do not look good, they do not smell good, and they do not taste good.” I haven’t been a fan of either white bread or full-sugar sodas since those sessions, although the rest of it obviously took some serious work.

I ate a TON of these packages in the mid-'90s. What college kid can argue with 6 for $1?

I hovered between about 220 and 240 through my freshman year of college, and then I made a pivotal decision to spend my summer out west, selling books door to door for the Southwestern Company. I didn’t make any money, but I also didn’t pretend like I was selling a bunch of books and fill out fraudulent orders (like one of our contingent), either. The 12-plus hour days of walking the hills of the suburbs of Portland, Oregon and eating a light breakfast, then two pieces of fruit and two sandwiches for lunch, then ramen noodles for dinner – wash, rinse, repeat – resulted in some pretty dramatic weight loss. At my yearly physical I weighed in at 215 lbs., which was lower than I had been since about 8th grade. I remember getting a ton of compliments on my appearance during those first few weeks back at school, and feeling increasingly confident that I could make my hazardously low calorie intake last.

Alas, it didn’t. College life got in the way, and before I knew it, I had ballooned up to 270 which, as you recall from the previous paragraph, represented my heaviest weight through high school, plus a few pounds’ worth of interest. Fortunately for me, I lived in a house with two guys who were in pretty good shape, and one who was in super-insane shape (he was a cheerleader and a fitness fanatic besides that), so I found that it was easier to rein it back in by going to the gym with those guys. I managed to get down to about 250 and add muscle by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life was going off the rails. I had earned an extremely prestigious full-ride academic scholarship, based on my performance in high school, but I lost it due to several factors. First, I picked the wrong major! Kids – do yourselves a favor when you go to college. Pick the right major. In this economy, pick one that will guarantee you a career when you graduate. I picked chemical engineering, and the shoulders of every history and English teacher I ever had slumped visibly when they found out. My AP English teacher, one of the best I’ve ever had to this day, said, “What a waste of a great brain…” I had my reasons, though. One of my distant relatives was an engineer, and he was making a lot of money. I cared about making money, but I also knew that talented people doing amazing things with their actual talents also made a lot of money. I got some poor counsel that I couldn’t refuse, as it turns out. I had even attended a summer science program for minorities at MIT before my senior year of high school – and received my highest accolades for my writing skills. Keep your silly signs to yourself, I said. Full speed ahead…into the abyss.

Probably should have spent more time here, in hindsight...

Second, I wasn’t ready for the social scene. I had really missed out on having much of a social life in high school, so when it came down to making the choice between hanging out with the friendly and extraordinarily attractive coeds who lived a few floors up or studying for classes I didn’t particularly like in the first place, there really was no choice at all. As a result, I never learned how to balance my social life and my academic life. To my dismay upon reflection, in the two-plus years I lasted there, the time I spent in the beautiful, information-rich libraries of this, one of the oldest universities in the country, could be measured in minutes, not hours. But the time I spent in fraternity houses, in various states of consciousness, and the time I spent not in class because I was recovering from those late nights in fraternity houses? That’s where I received my true education, the first time around.

...and less time here!

Third, the arrogance of youth got in the way when I could have taken a life boat out of my situation instead of going down with the ship, so to speak. At the end of my first semester in this prestigious scholarship program, my grades were just below the cutoff line to avoid any sort of academic sanctions that could include losing my scholarship. In a private meeting to discuss my progress, the director of the program asked me if I wanted to transfer out of the engineering program and into another major that might have suited me better. I don’t know what the process for transferring out of the E-School is at my abortive alma mater today, but back then the director was implying that he was willing to pull some serious strings to get them to make a rare exception to save my academic and career bacon. I thanked him for the offer but was convinced that I could do better as an engineer, which was never, ever true.

This book changed my life forever.

So the summer before my third year in college, I knew that unless I changed many things radically, I was headed towards a cataclysmic failure. That’s when I opened a drawer at my mom’s apartment (the one she rented after my parents had separated and, ultimately, divorced between my junior and senior years in high school) and found a book that would play a huge part in the way I viewed eating for the rest of my life.

But, as I have far exceeded my word count…that’s a story for tomorrow’s post!