So, How'd You Do It?

On the left: close to 300 lbs, photo made while visiting Salem, MA in Summer, 2010. Right: after we moved to Worcester, MA in the summer of 2012.

Since 2011 I've lost about 100 pounds of fat and gained 15-20 lbs of muscle. When friends or new acquaintances learn this, they want to know what the hell I did. Drugs? Steroids? Jesus? Someone triggered my Manchurian Candidate secret agent and I'm getting in tip-top shape for spy shenanigans?

I'm 45 now, 6'0" with a large build to begin with ("big boned" as they say down home) and I've dropped from 285 lbs (probably higher, that was just a measured weight) down to 185-190 and shrunk from a 48" waist to a 32" (though I can fit in a 31") since I was 43. Those are all major physical changes. I would have asked me what the hell I did too.

I am not 100% sure how I did it.

I know it wasn't magic. There are no magic tricks. Not if you want the change to last. To count.

You are not about to learn some secret formula.

On a very hot day in the heart of a Georgia summer, I started walking.

If you've never lived in a sub-tropical/tropical climate, you may not truly understand heat and the immense weight of the air in the dead of summer. The way a great sea of wet air drowns everything and slow-boils anyone dumb enough to tip-toe out of air-conditioned safety and brave the furnace for a while. Far from breezes on seashores or lakesides, summer in the south is a brutal thing and if you are obese and gravely out of shape, you are borderline suicidal to mess with it.

As a pale redhead with lifelong weight problems who grew up there I have a keen understanding of that danger so I was probably borderline suicidal. Depression is, after all, an old family friend. I have had heavy bouts of clinical depression since my early 20s, though I am certain they truly began in elementary school. My brother David committed suicide in 2000 after battling bipolar disorder and substance abuse since his teens. Both of my sisters (one, Rhonda, also has multiple disabilities besides) have had therapy and taken medication for severe depression. Depression is as consistent in my family as red hair and high voices.

So I sometimes opt for the dark joke and say that when I took that first walk, I was hoping it might kill me. Like a lot of jokes, there is some truth hiding inside it.

At the end of the street where we lived was a path that led to a 7 mile circuit of trails criss-crossing the Chattahoochee Nature Reserve. Like the rest of Georgia from Atlanta northwards, it is all hills and hollows and to a boy from hilly Middle Tennessee, it felt familiar, like home. I was also keenly aware that on those trails, few people would see my wheezy ass schlepping by. That had been one thing that stopped earlier stabs at dropping the weight--a fundamental feeling of embarrassment at someone seeing you try. Humans are weird, see. We talk a good game about maintaining health and staying trim but then often when we see a big person obviously putting in an effort to make some sort of positive change, the most immature or assholeish among us want to make fun of that. I'm not even talking about dickhead teenagers yelling from cars as they pass you huffing and puffing down the street, but jokes in all sorts of comedy and satire about the fatty with the treadmill in the living room. Hey, I laugh too, but goddamn, at least people try, sometimes.

Anyway, by the time I took that first walk I had found excuses (all of them legitimate in my head) to not meet up with friends (usually from Twitter, so we'd never met in real life before) who were in Atlanta on several occasions. I was sick, or my car was in bad shape, or my wife had a thing and it's hard to find any old babysitter to watch two kids on the autism spectrum. I never made up the circumstances, but at the root of many of these cancellations there was a persistent subtext of me feeling fundamentally embarrassed about my size.

My friends are great people, I wasn't worried that they'd judge me; I judged myself.

The walk didn't kill me. I still remember hitting the last hill before home, a sidewalk that climbed up, up, up from the pretty river valley where the trails ended and stopping at a road sign and wondering if I was going to die, or at least vomit. I also remember being vaguely disappointed to make it home alive.

A few days later, I did it again.

And again.

At first there were days between walks.

Then there was only one day between each walk.

I began taking advantage of the way the trails were laid out--segments are rarely more than a mile in length before branching--and started running a stretch, here and there. I'd run, stop and double over feeling pukey at the next marker, then walk the next section.

Eventually, by the time a little chill had begun to creep into the air in mid-Autumn, I found myself running the entire trail. I'd yet to catch on to all the fitness apps available for smart phones but I later figured out that the route I took from my house to the trail exit was 2.2 miles.

It was a slow, shuffling run--I walk faster now--but whatever it was, it was working.

I definitely did (and still do) pay attention to diet, but only in the most practical, basic way. I started cutting way back on sugar and starch and knocked off snacking as much as possible. I would treat myself to the nastiest, sugariest soda imaginable after a big run--still kind of do that--but any runner will tell you that once you start topping 3-4 miles, that actually makes sense.

I didn't really track my weight loss for a long time other than noting how my pants, underwear and sweats began falling off me. The isolation of the trails was an aid there too, as I had one memorable 3 mile run that culminated in my old XXL running shorts sliding to my ankles as I paused on the covered bridge over the river to look down at the rushing water.

My sister once told me (I don't know how true this is) that if you can do anything for 6 weeks, it becomes a habit. So one part of my answer to the question, "how did you do this?" is pretty simple: Running became my habit. And tough as it was sometimes--it still is some days--I have come around from considering it a necessary torture on the road to reducing my weight, cholesterol and blood pressure (the latter was insanely high) to an essential joy in life, something I have to do.

(Side note: I realized how I felt about running when I started feeling mildly offended whenever some Twitter wit made jokes about runners. Running is becoming like having red hair for me--it's cool if I joke about it but everyone else needs to shut the hell up.)

To be clear, while I haven't tested my running chops in any 5k races or half-marathons, I've run a 13.1 mile training run and run between 5 and 10 k (3-6 miles) up to 3 times a week. I do want to test myself with a race or marathon, even a Mudder, but when I do I'll go in with a clear head; I am not cut out to be a great runner. I have short legs, a long torso and am better built to lift, push, pull and throw. My best mile yet was 8:43. I'm proud of that, but a friend who runs marathons regularly trains 9-15 miles at a time at 9 minute per mile pace.

After I'd been running steadily for almost a year I added bodyweight exercises (pushups and crunches with sets of dumbbell workouts now and then). A little later still I added kettlebells to the mix, and these all remain elements of what I do now.

I guess you could consider what I've written so far to be part of the answer to the question of how I did it.

Except the answer doesn't feel complete, to me.

See, I think the answer to the question of how anyone makes big, fundamental changes in their lifestyle--and more importantly, maintains those changes--isn't found in the what, but the why. In many respects, I'm very clear on the "why."

Vanity, for one thing. I just didn't like what I looked like in the mirror. But health, too. My blood pressure was dangerously high. Anything that might reduce it would by definition be a smart thing to do, considering extremely high blood pressure eventually led my father to a stroke when he was 60. (He recovered well.)

If writing about it is to be helpful to anyone and not simply me just journaling--something I consider pretty useless in a personal blog, better kept to a handwritten notebook--I think it makes sense for me to sometimes use this space to talk about the "how" as well. I won't label a blog that just has my name in the URL as a fitness (or crime, or history, or whatever) blog, but I may continue to post things here related to what I do to keep the change illustrated in the photo at the top in place.

I've never admitted before this post that I was partly motivated to avoid meeting people I genuinely like out of not wanting them to see how fat I was. Admittedly, that was a pretty negative way to look at myself and socializing in general. I don't feel good about any of that.

Still, I have to admit that feeling is most certainly gone. So if you come around or I'm in your town, let's hang out. Unless you're, like, weird. Weirder than me, I mean.