Muse on this Brocket Fish

420 lbs.

So the first summer of my weight loss ended.  I was secure in my hold on both not eating after 6 o’clock and anything carbonated had now become the liquid equivalent of my mother’s “no-no” room.  I basically had anxiety attacks anytime I got within a few feet of it.  Then the school year started.  I was worried about how I would handle living with constant food access and no helpful family members to give me the stink eye.  I was terrified that the work I had started would be entirely erased in a month’s time.

It turns out my will held out.  The first few weeks I had to really watch myself.  I had moved to the bigger house, the one that has the kitchen in it.  That meant access to food was that much closer, that much easier to sneak.  As I said previously, I was becoming two different people:  the one who wanted to lose weight, and the one who wanted things to stay the same.  The one was stalwart, wanting to give it all for some serious weight loss.  The other wanted to dive into a bag of Cheetos and surface somewhere around a quarter-ton.   It wasn’t to the point of schizophrenia, but I had to be careful not to fall for the constant arguments that I put forth.  “This one time isn’t going to hurt anything.”  “It isn’t that big of a deal.”  “I’ll go to the Colvin later and work it off.”  All of these thoughts would pour through my mind as the clock chimed 7:30, 10:00, midnight, and I would have to fight them.  An uninsurable life was a very big deal.  This one time would lead to other times, which would lead to every time.  And I wasn’t fooling anyone; I hadn’t been to the Colvin in ages.

The biggest morale boost came in the form of change.  I HAD lost weight, just by doing these two simple things.  I had lost several tens of pounds since the beginning of summer, and while I wouldn’t know until later the exact amount, I knew that things had gotten better.  My size 56 pants were fitting almost too loosely, I didn’t have to pop my t-shirts as often, and I just felt better about me.  I was building a small but steady reservoir of confidence in myself.

There was also the notion that eating after six slowly stopped bothering me.  By the middle of the school year, around six months after I really started doing it, I stopped being hungry past a certain time in the evening.  The closest I can explain it would be that I trained my body to stop wanting food so late, and finally it began to respond.  Or maybe it just decided to cut losses and give up.  Every evening I wouldn’t be hungry by 8 o’clock.  It was like an internal alarm just stopped ringing and shut down for a few hours of peace, finally away from the demand of food.  I have to say how liberating that was.  I could go out (and often did) with college friends looking for a late night bite, and I would sit there and eat nothing.  Before, when I first started and all summer long, if I missed the deadline, or was around food past curfew, I would sit morose, wishing I was eating.  Then with time, it didn’t bother me so much, I didn’t have to resist snatching the nearest plate away from whomever I was eating with and gorge myself, oblivious to baffled stares and curses.  Then I became completely apathetic about it.  Then I took pride in it.

“What can I get for you?”

“Oh, nothing for me, thanks.”  At first I said these with disdain.  Then I said it with a knowing smile.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything Broc?”

“Nope, I’m not hungry.”  The weirdest words that would ever come out of my mouth, but for the first time in a lifetime of lying, I meant them.

I would just sit there and watch everyone else eat around me.  It may sound morbid, and I bet it made my fellow restaurant patrons uncomfortable, but it was cathartic.  I started looking for reasons to go with people to eat, and then NOT eat.  It became a great boost to my morale, being able to control myself.  I had spent my life impulse-eating whenever anyone around me so much as considered getting a snack.  Now, I could watch, smell, and not have to want to do the same.  I was in charge of my impulse, finally not the other way around.

So I was able to keep my own personal promise.  Thank the powers above for giving me a flexible dinner window that started at five o’clock.  That was a key element.  Not necessarily that my schedule worked out to a five o’clock time window, but rather I made it work.  Then with the addition of no soda, I utterly destroyed the juice machine daily.  A huge automatic dispense unit the size of an industrial espresso maker that was installed in my house. Apple juice, orange juice, and fruit punch.  These were my new liquid lifelines that kept me anchored into hydration.  I didn’t like drinking milk.  I had too many bad experiences pouring clumps at my grandmother’s house.  I lost my taste for it as a beverage after the day we had nearly cultured our own brand of cheese.

I still couldn’t quite get used to drinking water.  Luckily though, I was finally leaning more toward apathetic about it.  I tried to drink water with at least one meal a day, even though I had begun using the juicer as my new drug dealer of choice.  Water had stopped making me sick to my stomach.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t prefer it either.  I saw it as a necessary cross to bear.

I started watching all these infomercials that I used to just skim past.  They promised massive weight loss, providing delicious meals and full portions and it was so easy!  There were pictures of football players standing in baggy chinos signifying their achievement with this “breakthrough system.”  They were all smiles and promises.  I picked up the phone to call half a dozen times but something always stopped me.  I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but I had a strange feeling that if this was so “breakthrough” then it would be more mainstream, more widely known or talked about.  I already knew by looking at America that if weight-loss was so easy, then no one would be overweight.  So I put the phone back down and wished things could be that simple, while knowing that they wouldn’t be.  I played around with the idea of pills, drank a couple of supplement shakes here and there, and chomped through the gluey cardboard of a protein bar.  They were simply distractions, good for a laugh or a hope, but not effective for me.  I had no idea what I was doing, so eating a couple of healthy alternatives wasn’t going to make me run a mile without a defibrillator.

Then there were the negatives.  I felt like I had begun to plateau.  I had reached the point in the regiment where I wasn’t going to lose any more weight or have any more positive gain unless I changed something up or added something new.  This is the point in which I could have screwed up again.  The whole weight loss affair was walking an edge, with temptations and setbacks pulling me one way and then another, trying to pull me back down.  For some reason, I knew in my (very) slowly decreasing gut that I couldn’t get complacent.  It would be so easy to just go on with my two steps and hope that everything panned out in the end.  Life doesn’t work like that.  I had started, I had accomplished, now it was time to add something else.  That was the key.  By not piling everything on at once, I could manage.  But still continuously adding as I could cope with each task would soon create a snowball that would obliterate weight like zero gravity.

Secretly, I felt things starting to stagnate, and as much as I wanted to believe it, I wasn’t making the gains that I thought I was.  I thought I had been.  I thought that I was on the perfect path to a new and thinner, more manageable me.  More to the point, I thought I had made some serious strides down that path.

Then I met Helmer at the end of the summer.

I had been feeding off my family’s compliments for a long time.  “You are looking so good Broc!”  “You have lost a lot of weight!”  Finally, I started to believe them.  I thought I had made a serious difference.  In truth, I had lost about 60 pounds at the end of summer, and under any normal circumstance that wouldn’t be something to shake a stick at, but for me it wasn’t that big of a deal.  It all comes down to weight ratios, 60 pounds to me was only about 6 pounds to someone else.  At the time I thought it was wonderful.  My shirts fit a little better.  My thighs didn’t want to start a fire every time I walked more than 20 feet.  All in all, I felt better about myself.  I felt like the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I wanted to show it off to someone, someone who I hadn’t seen all summer, and someone who would appreciate just how much I had done.

So I called Helmer and invited him out to a round of golf.  Things didn’t quite go as I expected them to.  We met at the country club, and I stepped out of my truck with a jaunty tilt to my step, waiting for him to remark about my new looks.  He greeted me warmly, as two friends apart for two months often do, but remarked nothing toward my looks.  I bided my time, hoping that he was just waiting to bring it up at some point during the day.  He never did.  Over the course of a 4 and a half hour golf game he didn’t say one single word about the weight I had lost.  For a while I thought he was a jerk.  I fumed at how insensitive he was to something that was this important to me.  My golf game suffered accordingly and I lost my 4 iron.

Then the truth sort of just crept on me, oozing from the pores of cold, stark truth.  He didn’t say anything because he didn’t notice.  If he didn’t notice, than what I had done must not have been that noticeable in the first place.  That made me drop anchor, dragging across denial, disbelief, and anger.  It was a two day fit of despair where I considered what I had done.  If I was honest with myself I hadn’t done that much really.  I tried to pretend otherwise, and my family was being supportive and encouraging, but I really hadn’t done anything but start.  SO what if I had stopped eating after six?  It helped sure, but like a piece of gum staunches a cracked in an hourglass.  Sooner or later, it is going to start leaking again.  An effective, more permanent plug is needed if the sand is ever going to stay where it belongs.  If I was going to join this weight loss dance party, I was going to have to do more than just stand in the doorway.  I was going to have to get into the thick of things and get dirty.  Trouble was, I was making up all my own dance moves.

I figured a good place to start would be the place that made the most sense.  I decided to do the one thing every “chubby or above” person knows they should do, but try to find any possible way to get out of.  Since not eating after noon seemed sort of silly, I thought I might try my hand at something more physical.  I was going to exercise.  So when school started, I went to the Colvin.  More than that, I did something besides clank around two plates.  This is where Acea came in.  Acea was a guy I had known since high school, I have undoubtedly mentioned him before.  The thing about him was that he wanted to lose weight too.  He didn’t really need to in the same since that I did, but he stood to lose a bit of flab.  He was looking to lose, and we had a bond in that.

I strongly recommend this to anyone.  Not the flab losing, I will let your final motives be your own prerogative.  I mean having a partner.  You will HAVE to start doing something physical at some point, and having someone to do it with works on several different levels.  One, it helps keep you accountable.  You already know that the main hurtle that you are going to have to face is your own apathy, now you have someone else to keep you on track.  Two, it gives you motivation to actually get up and go, because you know you will be letting someone else down if you don’t.  You help them the same way they help you.  Like using someone’s back to not sleep with your head in the sand, the fact that they are using yours gives you the support you require.  They are forcing you to go, and in return, you are forcing them to go because they are having the same mental battles as you are.  So it all works out for the best.

Acea was my accountability.  If I had to go of my own volition then it would have been an easy choice.  I easily would have made the decision to not go at all.  I would have sat in my room and talked myself out of it, time and time again.  Self discipline is a trait that is integral to weight loss, but it doesn’t happen after 20 sit ups, and it most certainly doesn’t come with new gym shorts.  I needed a crutch, and I highly recommend this type of crutch to anyone trying to get started in doing something physical on a regularly basis.  It is so very easy to go once or twice and let it drift off into a forgotten fancy, a lost ambition to the annals of “I just couldn’t find the time/energy/place to do it.”  It is a comfy funk that is easy to slip into, and extremely difficult to claw your way out of.

So we debated on how often we should go.  We both had a healthy respect for the type of guys that went there every day, packing jugs of muscle milk and pump-up pills.  We simultaneously decided that we weren’t quite at that level.  That seemed a little too intense for either of us, and we were fresh out of connections for “muscle building” anything.  Plus, I didn’t really want to abide by the tool-bag code of dress.  A little bit less then that seemed acceptable.  So three times a week, we went.

I started off about the same way I began with my first outing to this facility.  CLANK. CLANK.  Awkward movements.  CLANK.  CLANK.  I had no idea what I was doing.  But like playing an instrument, with each goofy stroke, I got stronger, more confident.  I started feeling what muscles were being worked and finding, underneath the copious amount of body padding liberated throughout my body, that I had muscles.  Like any amateur bassist, I started to explore my fret board, making up routines of my own within what I felt comfortable with.  Like an instrument, I needed practice.  Then more practice.  Wait, then I needed some more after that.  That was when I found my rhythm.

I still avoided the frat-pit, with it’s “thought to be shirt optional” dress code.  I stuck to my regulated weights, surrounded by the types of people who looked like they really didn’t know what they were doing.

I did the same thing every day.  I developed a (not to intelligent) workout routine that covered the same random muscle groups every day.  This was a good place for me to begin though, because I honestly needed to get comfortable with the idea of working out.  That was the most important part of this step, getting acquainted with iron.

I would start with a basic incline press, then I’d bounce to a lateral pull down, then over to a bicep curl, then to an abdominal crunch machine.  These are all words and terms I learned far later in life.  At the time they were ruled by names like the “lean back push thingy,” and “this one makes my tummy hurt.”  I didn’t need to know the name of something to figure out how it works.  That is the majority of successfully working out, experimenting until you find something that works for you.  A name tells you nothing.  Then I would do 10 minutes on a stationary bike.  I tried to run on a treadmill the first day but that much weight clomping on a moving belt was about as smooth as gravel in a washing machine.  It made running impossible and sounded like I was torturing a robot.  So I stuck to something that could bear my weight without too much complaint.

I tried not to get too complacent with it either.  I could have just sat there for 10 minutes on the lowest setting possible and called it good.  I did that for a few days and an inanimate piece of metal never made me feel so guilty.  So I played a game with the rpm.  I would race up the electronic hills above a certain speed, and cruise down them at another, pumped on by heavy rock ballads that helped me pretend I was living a montage.  It must have looked ridiculous.  It was a new definition of stout on a straining stationary bike bobbing his head and looking like he was going to lay the world’s biggest egg.  It wasn’t fun.  It felt like I was giving birth out of the stitch in my side.  It was progress.

That was it.  The whole workout routine only lasted about 45 minutes or less.  A few random machines followed by an elliptical.  That was how I started.  I forced myself to go at a certain time each day with Acea, and he did the same with me.  Every day we hated doing it a little bit less.  Then we were apathetic about it.  We had developed a habit of going to the gym.  Words that I never thought would enter my paradigm.  It was enough to keep me making progress, but not so much that I didn’t want to go back.  I was toying with a fine line, especially when half of my psyche was playing jump rope with it.  Let me make one thing very clear, I didn’t exercise as much as I wanted but as much as I could.  I won’t pretend that I was a perfect gym-rat from the gate.  I loafed more than Sara Lee on occasion, but I didn’t let that lethargy outweigh actually getting something done.

I think the main motivation to keep moving forward was how I felt when I had actually worked hard, versus when I didn’t.  I would feel satisfied and content when I came back exhausted.  I could eat and not feel irrationally guilty.  A habit I had developed since I had started this whole affair.  I knew deep down that I still had to eat no matter how big or skinny I got, but I said it was irrational.  When I came back knowing I had cut corners or entire pages, I couldn’t get comfortable in my own skin.  I felt like I had stolen something and I was just imminently bound to get busted.  Then every bite I took for the rest of the day, be it steak or salad, made me feel like I hadn’t lost any weight at all.

So I had a looming sort of incentive.  It could be great and it could be terrible, all depending on how I chose to act.  I still always knew when I hadn’t done enough, and I couldn’t fool my own mind.

We kept it up all year.  The first semester was brutal.  For one thing, I never wanted to go. It was just something I wasn’t used to yet.  I had never worked out of my own volition, usually leaving it to an authority figure, a coach or doctor, to force me into some sort of physical activity.  Now the only person who could talk me into it was someone who didn’t want to go in the first place.

Then there was the fact that everyone had behaved in a similar vein as Helmer.  My first day back I hoped that his not noticing was just a fluke, a trick of the sunshine and the putting greens, but that wasn’t it.  No one seemed to notice that I had lost sixty pounds.  People I hadn’t seen in months, people I barely knew, and people I knew intimately all reacted the same way.  That is to say, they didn’t.  I don’t think someone who has lived their lives under 200 pounds understands the difference between a 480 and 420 pound fat man.  That is maybe because there isn’t much of one.  Once you reach that point, you are just in one clustered category of massive human being.  I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to that encouragement until it didn’t come.  That first semester, it didn’t.  That really tore me down too.  It made me really reconsider if I had lost any weight at all.  I knew that I had, that I had lost more than I ever had in my life, but if no one even noticed, what was the point?  I could say that I was doing it for myself, but it was a convoluted personal gain.  I was doing it so people would look at me differently, see something besides the mass that was my exterior.  I know I wasn’t alone in that train of thought either. Human beings allow their drive of perceived of appearance rule every aspect of their lives.  I just wanted the chance to change my own transmission.

It was probably the hardest time with my weight loss; not knowing for certain if I was really doing anything worthwhile.  I had my own motivation sure, but it had been heavily depleted.  It is always so easy the first day of your diet, the first day of a new promise.  You can do everything you set out to do in those first twelve hours of cognitive thought.  The real work comes at day two through six hundred.  Those are the days you find out just how motivated you really were.  I got through three months relying solely on my own motivation, so I had some drive in me to be sure.  That drive wasn’t gone, but it was in desperate need of a boost.  I was hoping that I could get it from my peers.  I was mistaken.

380 lbs.

Still nothing.  Not a damn word had reached my yearning ears.  It was the darkest days of weight-loss.  I still kept at it, mainly because I had someone relying on me, and partially because I was too damn stubborn to quit.  Being bull-headed can get you into trouble a lot sure, but, channeled in the right direction, it can become a downright alarming tool for gritty optimism.  It is a valuable trait to have in the weight loss department.  I promised myself that I wouldn’t quit, and I kept to that stupid promise like it was the only spoon in a sea of cereal.  I spent 4 months in a dark, painful tunnel of my own design, led on by a silly idea of loyalty that I had created in my head.  I did it all for the fleeting ghost of a compliment.  The one thing that kept me working out was the notion that I should be told that I looked good.  It was stupid, but it got the job done.  That is what it boils down to; you have to find a way to get the job done.

We all do it for the day we can quit.  Nobody WANTS to workout, not in the beginning, or even in the middle.  Like I said, if it were something so easy, then nobody would be overweight.  Take it from me.  Nobody would choose that life on purpose.  Like a well is so easy to plunge into, but so hard to claw your way out of.  Weight is situation you fall into, but is damn hard to change.  I knew that.  I knew how hard it was because I was doing it.  I think the knowledge that the only thing keeping me going WAS me became my little paradoxical glowing talisman that got me through the dark ages of my time.  It wasn’t much in the way of light, but it was bright enough to see by, and keep on living with what I was doing.

We had developed our routine, and I worked by it.  Any well-versed athlete or gym Nazi can tell you that complacency in your routine is a bad thing, but I didn’t care.  I started allowing my eating habits to slip a little bit.  I still refused to eat after six for the most part, but I stopped trying to control how much I was eating.  I didn’t realize how much I had been actually controlling my portions until I wasn’t anymore.  I didn’t slip completely, I wasn’t that far gone, but for the first time in months, I felt like I was losing.

We still went to the gym, but we stopped going as often as we used to.  I had finally gotten down to size 48 pants, something that I had applauded myself continuously for, but now they were starting to feel a bit tight around the seams.  It was probably just a psychological reaction to my behavior, a sort of “no-no” mechanism that was subconsciously triggered by that guy inside of me who was so fervent about losing weight.  The only thing was, he was getting harder to hear.

I was in the Colvin, just sort of meandering through the motions and thinking about the weight just being gone.  The gym smelled like industrial disinfectant and years of sweat, neither smell broke through my dreams.  I just wanted to weight gone.  I wanted to wake up one morning and find that it had disappeared like a half-remember nightmare, forgotten before my head left the pillow.  I would give anything for that to happen.  I would gladly shave off years off my life expectancy, deal with the devil, consult the Mayan Calendar; I’d do whatever it took to have it vanish.  It never did.  Every day I woke up and it was still there, tugging on every part of my body, a grim reminder of so much more than physical weight.

I rotated to another machine, not even really noticing which one I was on.  You were supposed to feel a good workout.  You were supposed to have aches and pains, knowing EXACTLY what muscles you stressed.  I would be lucky to remember that I even came here at all.  I looked around with my hands on foam pads.  Everyone seemed focused.  Maybe they were just zoned out and any second someone was about to drop 90 pounds of careless lead on an unsuspecting and undeserving toe.  I might have been that person.  I still didn’t notice anything.

I remembered going to the doctor again.  It was a different doctor this time.  This guy was equally obsessed with my weight.  He was a big, rotund, bald fellow telling me the ins and outs of weight loss while using a pompous X-Acto knife to cut out one of my ingrown toenails.  It was weird getting fat-fighting advice from a guy who was a hundred pounds north of proper himself.  It was like getting extinguisher training from a kiss-ass who is already on fire.  He told me he would be happy with me getting down to three hundred pounds.  I told him I would if he would.

I didn’t have a problem with authority.  I had a problem with hypocrites.  It was so hard for me to do something when I was being talked at by all sides.  “Broc do this, Broc don’t eat that.”  All the while they DID that and ate damn near whatever they wanted.

That was when the doctor wanted my blood.  I didn’t really understand why.  He sort of just sprung the request on me.  In response to my raised eyebrows he said he wanted to get my blood-work done to see if I had a thyroid condition.  When he talked me through what exactly that was, I had pounced on that idea with fervor.  It was something I could blame my weight on that wasn’t ME.  I loved those little tic-tac fairytale solutions.  Every fat person does.  So I kept my fingers crossed for a serious and life-long physical ailment to use as a perma-crutch.  “No worries mate, I have a thyroid condition.  That totally makes it okay for me to weigh this much.  It is beyond my control.  I can eat this cheeseburger with my super-special thyroid issues”  It sounded like a good plan, even more so because diseases had medicine.  I was hoping for a bottle of pills that righted 20 years of accidentally overweight.

Then, about a week later, we got the blood-work back.  He waddled in and flipped open his medicinal clipboard, scanning the results.  His eyes glowed expectantly.  They were no doubt reflected in mine.  It turned out that I didn’t have a thyroid condition.  He told me so as he rummaged back and forth, looking for an error or perhaps a hematologist with a nasty vendetta against folks with high cholesterol.  Then I saw his eyes fall.  We said damn at the same time.  We both seemed confused at the other’s reaction.  His seemed weird because I was a patient who was sad due to good news.  Mine was weird because a doctor had just willingly wished ill on a patient.  There was an infringement on the Hippocratic Oath in there somewhere, but since he only wished harm in passing I guess it was an ethical gray area.

So that had ended those high hopes of illness.  An odd hope if ever one existed.  With a disease I could have kept pretending, using every crutch that would support my weight.

I was still sitting on that machine, completely zoned out.  I quickly pushed out a couple of repetitions and tried to clear my head.  The smell of rubber and foam mixed with fresh sweat clogged my senses.  A smell that once sounded progress started to cloy in my nostrils.  I still wanted an excuse.  I looked around.  That was something I had never really done.  Usually I only focused on me and what I was doing.  I learned long ago not to look too close at the way people might be looking at me, because it was never something I wanted to see.  Alone in a crowded room was something I had a penchant for.  There were virtually topless men with torn shirts flung across their shoulders like tattered banners of a fitness soldier’s commitment.  Then there were girls in tight spandex and ponytails, tiny iPods attached to every imaginable surface that didn’t hinder 360 degree rotation.  They all looked so content.  They all looked so fit and wonderful.  I would take 20 years off of my life just to look like one who was completely average, not fit, not fat, and not me.

I let the weights drop, the harsh clang of dense lead slamming onto form metal sounded across the open room.  The sound echoed off steel beams and plaster.  I didn’t care.  Casual passerby would assume the noise was some frat guy ‘roiding out and slamming iron.

I couldn’t do this.

I tried.  No one could say that I didn’t give it a valiant effort.  I felt suffocated.  I felt sick to my stomach.  If I couldn’t have it now, it wasn’t worth it.  I just wanted to eat.  I wanted to sit on my ass and do nothing for the next 5 to 10 years.  Losing anything should never be that difficult.  In this case it was more than I could bear.  I wiped my forehead, then let my hand hover 6 inches from my face.  I could see fat there, even in my fingers.  I didn’t have to look to feel it along every inch of my body.  It was less than what it was, sure, but what was that worth? I was used to waking up each day fat.  I would still wake up tomorrow fat.  I was used to it.

I felt crimson rush my cheeks and looked around to see if a voyeur had witnessed my shame.  There were none to be found.  I stood up, felt my knees creak, and walked toward the exit.

I felt like I was stealing something, like I was doing something illegal.  I was giving up on weight loss.  There should have been someone to stop me.  Someone at the door saying encouraging words to get me to turn back around, tilt my head back and charge back to fitness.  There would be a modest employee keeping an all day vigil for those of us who needed him most.  I looked up making my way down scuffed tile, half expecting him to whip me back into shape with a quirky comment.  Then, with cartoon finesse, I would stroll back and man my montage.

No one was at the door.  I pushed through, shoved meaty fists into cramped pockets and walked on into the biting cold.

The days blurred.  I made a few more attempts at the gym here and there, and I tried to keep a handle on my eating.  I could feel my already loose grip slacken.  The only place I was still succeeding was not eating later than six.  It was easy enough to keep myself in check there, fraternity dinner was at 5.  As long as I didn’t see it I didn’t want it.  Out of sight out of mind met out of sight out of stomach.  So when it came to food I would bolt it down then bail.  It worked, and it made me feel like I hadn’t given up entirely.  I was still “doing something” about the whole weight-loss thing.  I started eating things I knew weren’t good for me.  It doesn’t take a degree to recognize what you I should and shouldn’t be eating.  Anyone who tries to say that they just aren’t “aware” of what is bad for them is swearing through sugar frosted teeth.  It is simple.  The solution is simple.  The getting there part is not.  I had stopped looking almost completely.

Acea could see a change in my behavior.  He knew something was up.  He has never been the type to question things though, he goes with the flow, and this time he just let me float on by on a lethargic river of my own self pity.  He never liked being told what to do and he never tells anyone else what they should do either.  Black thoughts crept into my head almost constantly.  A never ending stream of why I wasn’t good enough.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“I can’t do this.”

“No one gives a shit about me anyway or else they would have noticed.”

It was a darkness that crept in from the corners of my vision until it was all I could see.  I tried to keep a grip on myself, to rationalize the truth and tell myself everything would turn out.  Before I could get the words out I felt grip slacken, sweaty fingers slip, and an exhausted conscience give in.  Then I was swept under, surely to drown below the blackest tides imaginable, the ones only I could create.

And I didn’t even care.

…

…

__

440 lbs.

That was how life went for me for a long time.  I fell back into old rhythms, found familiar niches of existence and watched as if from another person’s life as I let myself go.  I stopped going to the gym.  My hair got longer.  I hadn’t shaved in weeks.  I looked awful, and for the first time in memory, I wasn’t wrapped up in every other person’s opinion of me.  I went to class for something to do.  I was in the very definition of a funk, and proportionally my funk was pretty massive.  I just lay there in the base of it too, looking at the pregnant clouds overhead and not caring that I wasn’t wearing a jacket.

I didn’t really talk to anyone, just went through the motions of life as I still cared to project to the world around me.  I ate what I wanted and when I wanted to eat it.  My waistband did not approve.  I ripped a few more shirts by trying to stretch them out to go around my swollen body.  I did it all without thinking or feeling.  I just was.

Then one early spring day still clinging to windy Oklahoma frost, I was given something that was going to be a pebble to my avalanche.  Without discord, warning, or reason something happened.  Breath was given to me, a guy who was intentionally holding his head under the waves.  That is sort of how life happens though, one minute we are drowning and the next we are drinking.

Acea and I were going back to the gym one day.  He was now the only person who could talk me into going at all.  I drug my feet through the whole preparation process, dreading the whole affair, knowing it was pointless.  I promised him we would do this together, and I was going to try and keep my word to whatever extent I could.  Pulling on an old t-shirt became painful. Putting on each shoe became more pointless than the last and I only had the two feet.

I knew I was in an extremely dangerous place in that moment.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do anything.  Every single day of doing something you don’t like is a day you don’t want to.  That is why you didn’t already do it years ago.  The very best you can hope for is to get to a place where you can tolerate it, where you can stand the dieting, the weird eating habits, and the late night staring contests with processed chicken fingers.  There will be a time when you can take what you know to be the right course of action at the right time.   Until that moment though, it is a damn struggle every second you are conscious.  I knew that.  I expected it.  It is a price you have to pay to be in a place where you can be happy.  The part that scared me in this precise moment was that I no longer cared to eve try.  Still, I decided to go, if only for Acea’s sake.

We were walking out the big, ornate front doors of the fraternity house when one of the guys who were sitting on the front porch did a lazy, almost confused sort of double take.  He seemed like he didn’t really know who I was, or like he had forgotten my name.  I don’t remember what he said, it was a generic sort of statement, appreciated but forgotten in the presence of that look.  That was when I realized something tantamount:  I didn’t want to be recognized anymore.  I wanted to fully transform who I had been into who I wanted to be.  The best compliment was going to be not being acknowledged for what I had been all my life.

“Holy crap Broc, you look amazing.”

I felt needles dance along my spin and heat grow to my face.  My stomach swooped and for a second I thought I had missed a step going down a 60 story set of bleachers.  It happened without warning or regard, but it was the dose I had needed to survive.  Even more than that, it was a shot of adrenaline injected into my eyeballs clearing my vision better than any lens.

I smiled at him and nodded.  In that one instant, with one look, he had lit me on fire.  My skin tingled; the wind blew past my face, but all I could feel was the heat of spoken word.  My internal pilot had almost guttered out, and with one sentence it had been doused in the kerosene of a kind word and was now blazing bright.  I knew exactly what was about to burn.

I took a deep breath and checked my waistband.  It was a habit I’d been doing every day, mentally recording my progress.  A big, goofy grin filled my face like a half eaten orange peel.

I started walking in the direction of the gym.  Then I started to run.  Shortly after beginning I stopped.  Heaving and panting, clutching a stitch in my shoulder like a bullet wound, I slowly straightened up.  I wasn’t in shape yet.  There was no need to have a treadmill montage just yet.

It is amazing how much one kind word can completely change your perspective.  Words always seemed to tear me down.  I never thought they could build me up just as quickly.  I envisioned that surprised double take and smiled, alive with the glory of possibilities.  I took a deep breath and felt all my muscles protest in fear of the coming beating.  It was going to be a long day for all of us.  But the day had dawned, and with that spark of light I could see where I needed to be, I could look down and see who I had the potential to become.

There wasn’t a moment of epiphany, even though everyone always asks me when my occurred, as if it is a prerequisite for life change.  It isn’t a stunning realization to recognize you are extremely overweight. You live it every moment, stepping on landmines and watching your feet do it, then wonder why your feet hurt.  It doesn’t take a drastic event.  Instead, it takes a few words.  And a few words, said at the right time, for the right reasons, can make every ounce of difference.

To hell with whether I could do it or not.  So what if it was impossible.  I didn’t care if I fell.  I was going to get right back up.  I was doing this.  I lifted two brazen middle fingers to a world who always told me I couldn’t.

The Lightning Feast

So I was fat.  I had always been fat.  I could safely be called “quarter-ton” if you put the weight of a wet cat on my shoulder.  Now I decided to do something about it.  Hopefully before I didn’t need to cat.

I didn’t feel any different, I still felt like the same me, but nonetheless something changed.  While I used to always feel uncomfortable with who I was, I never thought I could do anything about it.  Now I just sort of realized that I could, and was going to.  It was a simple difference, but one that is a phenomenal one.  It didn’t change the fact that I was still just as loss pre-scale shock as I was post.  The first thing I needed to do was DO something.  I could sit there and talk about losing weight for the rest of my life, but my weight wasn’t going to exactly stand up and leave without some brutal hostility, or at least ample amounts of coaxing.

One thing that I pride myself on, something that I feel was the most integral bit of my weight loss make-up, the one attribute that helped me lose weight, is my stubborn-ass refusal to be side-tracked when I commit to something.  To lose weight I think that you need that sort of no nonsense attitude or you are going to find yourselves going in bigger and bigger circles.  I learned a long time ago to produce a thorough portion of “go to hell” applesauce whenever someone or something told me I couldn’t do something.  It was a part of the armor I donned to protect myself.  If someone told me my weight was a disability, I proved them wrong, no matter the cost.  I remember doing 100 yards of hurdles at 400 pounds because a girl told me I couldn’t do it.  It hurt like hell and on the last few jumps my shoelaces flirted with my imminent gravel-filled demise, but I did it.  I did it all so I could walk backwards and flip her the bird for nay saying and ever considering such a stupid thought.  I found, with time and added weight and loss of mobility, that these sort of “in your face” moments became harder to achieve and took much more of a toll than they used to.  But I still preserved the attitude, even if I couldn’t always back it up all the time.  If I let words or setbacks get me right out of the gate, then what was the point of even getting on the starting line?  Who cares how long it takes you, as long as you finish where you want to.  So I wasn’t going to give up.  It wasn’t my prerogative.  I knew if I did, I would be finished, not just with losing weight but perhaps losing my life period.

For the next few weeks, the paltry few remaining in the school semester, I ate my ass off.  I paid homage to the god of sugars, carbohydrates, soda pop, high cholesterol, and many more, because all too soon I would start the saddest work of my life.  I ate like I had cancer, but that cancerous growth was about to be lopped off.  Throughout this three week “saying goodbye” to food, I was constantly aware of how much I was eating.  Every time I would eat I started being aware of my exact portion sizes.  I tried to alter them to the best of my ability, but in the end I usually ate until I couldn’t eat anymore just like normal.  But I started to notice things.  I counted how many scoops of mashed potatoes I shoveled on, how many hamburgers I ate, how much of my plate was covered in pasta.  The point of the exercise was to start realizing how much I was actually eating.  I didn’t keep a journal, I didn’t start counting calories (my food was prepared by someone else in any case), and I just familiarized myself with what my actual daily intake was.  As I have said before, I knew when how much I was eating became too much, when I was pushing past the eating limits of normality.  Anyone who needs to lose weight knows the moments and situations where they are tripping the bones, and I was no exception.  The only difference between me and them was that I familiarized myself with the exact ways that I was doing it.

To be honest, it sort of felt like spying on myself.  There was the committed me, the one who was hell bent on losing weight in some fashion or another.  Then there was the old me, the hungry me, hell bent on eating his way through an entire cow.  Those weeks were spent appeasing both sides of my personality.  The one was pacified by lots and lots of food, and the other by the knowledge that this was our perpetual last hurrah, the final meal.  I didn’t gorge myself.  I wasn’t a more gluttonous mess of flesh than usual.  I just wasn’t taking my eating for granted like I used to.  One me was totally oblivious, living life as I always had.  The other watched, planned, and plotted.

Then summer began.

I thought of everything I had been told by my family, the different avenues of weight loss, and I decided on the one that sounded the easiest.  I was going to stop eating after six o’clock in the evening.  I could keep eating what I wanted, and how much I wanted, but I just had a cutoff point.  I didn’t have to spend nonexistent money, go to the gym, or anything necessarily difficult.  I was going to live the opposite of Ramadan and see if it could work.  I immediately told my grandmother of my intentions.  She was ecstatic.  Not because she thought it could actually work, or that she could help, but that I actually decided to finally DO something about my weight and she could stop being passive-aggressive about everything.

She was more than happy to be my warden too.  She brought down the cold fist of eating curfew like the best of tyrants, but the truth was, she was only my safety net.  I was my own worst enemy sure, but in that same vein, I was the best one to keep myself accountable.  I knew all my secrets, all my weaknesses, but I also knew all my strengths, and what I needed to tell myself to keep my momentum building.  You can lie to everyone in the world, become the best deception artist that the world has ever seen, but it is another trick entirely to convince yourself of that same falsehood.  I used this knowledge too.  If I couldn’t harness some form of self restraint, than all would be entirely lost.  I don’t say that to be dramatic, but it is the absolute truth.  If you cannot control your own actions, how in the Seven Eleven is anyone else going to be able to?  I was armed to the teeth in this sad truth.  It became a constant war inside my mind.  There was the sultry voice of temptation, trying to get me to just eat a little bit, just break the curfew this one time, trying to persuade with different tactics, over and over again.  Then there was the stalwart voice of reason, the angry and stubborn voice that demanded change.  I won’t lie, for the first few weeks the first voice won out more than I would’ve liked.  That part of me was a very big part of my life (sorry for the pun), the one I was most used to listening to.  I fudged a lot that first month of school free May, even with the help of my grandmother.  She couldn’t watch me at all hours of the day and she still had an early bedtime.  So the covert eating missions ensued on occasion when I couldn’t stand it anymore.

It was a weird feeling.  I had spent my entire life eating whenever I wanted to.  Now I had daily hours of eating operation.  If I wanted something outside those hours, it was just too damn bad.  It wasn’t so bad during the day.  It was like I wasn’t even on a diet.  I ate as much as I wanted and whatever I wanted, while the sun was out.  But like your favorite candy store, I now had a closing time.

This is the reason why it worked:  During the day you are active.  Your metabolism is running at its highest, you burn calories, and your basic heart rate is higher.  As the day shuts down, so does your body concerning digestion.  The later it gets, the slower your metabolism gets, the less you burn, and the more you pack onto your backside.  It isn’t hard to do, it only requires one little, insignificant thing.  The one thing in life that is absolutely free, but only if you can track it, hold it down, and repeatedly beat it into submission.  It is illusive, it is invaluable, and it is self control.  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just grow self control over night, it was something I had to work out, but like any exercise, with practice and repetition I got stronger and was able to do better and better.  Don’t use an excuse like “it is too hard to manage with my schedule” or the like, because that is just a cop-out and we both know it.  Weight loss excuses don’t work on me.  I tried them ALL on at one point or another, and I know just how ineffectual they really are.  If you HONESTLY want to get started, if you are reading this because you truly want help, then you can make it work.

My best advice for making this work is: do it.  Rearrange your schedule so you completely cut late night eating out of the equation entirely.  If it feels like you can’t do it, if it feels like you are too pressured and can’t figure out a way to make it work, do it anyway.  It is tough love to be sure, but sometimes that is the only way to go.  You have had people coddle you your entire life, which is why you have ended up the way you are, the way I ended up the way I am.  We can’t blame other people entirely.  We were the ones that believed them.  It couldn’t hurt to have an eating buddy either.  It can’t hurt to have someone who is willing to go along with you and your plan.  That doesn’t mean you depend on them to eat.  It only means that this goofy idea has some credibility because someone else is doing it too.

This is a great place to start for anyone trying to lose weight.  It doesn’t cost a dime, and you can keep eating like you want to.  You just need to have that evening cutoff point.  I didn’t do anything else for the first month, just attempting to not eat after six.  Why didn’t I do more?  I didn’t for several reasons, some of them selfish, and some of them pretty intelligent.

The selfish bit: I wasn’t ready to just dive into the deep end of weight loss.  For one thing I didn’t think I could do it.  For another, it sounded like absolutely no fun at all.  I knew losing weight wasn’t supposed to be fun, but I wasn’t ready for that amount of oppression.

It was a good thing I did it that way too.  While the main motivation for this “one step” was for my own lazy benefit, there was an underlying, integral idea to be learned.  Something that I didn’t learn so much as I stumbled over.  If you pack too much on to your shoulders at one time, you are going to buckle and give up.  My advice to anyone is to start out slowly, doing one step at a time.  Then by the time you get used to one step, once it becomes manageable, you actually find yourself HONESTLY doing it you can take another step.  If you aren’t ready than you can wait until you are.  Don’t even try to ask me when “ready” is, because you will know it as well as I do.  Once you feel that you are ready then take another step.

It took me a while to get to my next step.  I spent over a month just trying to not eat after six.  It was absolutely miserable for a long time too.  I don’t think I was ever honestly hungry and just HAD to eat, but it was more of a habit that was suddenly stripped away.  I was left shaking and in withdrawals in a rehab of my own design.  The one thing that I would not let happen, that anyone trying to lose weight HAS to keep from doing, was making concessions.  Even if it was 6:05, I made myself not eat.  It was something that HAS to be done if I was going to succeed.  If I gave ground once, I’d do it again, then again, and then the whole plan would be pickled.  It absolutely sucked, especially when I was running late or just barely missed my deadline, but I stuck to my plan.  The good thing about missing a meal once or twice was that it only happened once or twice.  If you miss being able to eat because of being 5 minutes late, you make damn sure that you are never so much as a minute late again.

I have to thank my grandmother repeatedly at this point.  We weren’t necessarily late eaters (well at least concerning designated meal times) but we hardly ever made it before six.  When I told her about my plan for not eating that late, she jumped on the bandwagon and supported me.  She would make sure to cook before 6 if she could, or made sure I had stuff to make if she wasn’t able to do so.  Like I said, I made mistakes, and you are going to make mistakes too, but don’t let those mistakes hold you down.  Instead of moping because the Mr. Hyde of your appetite took over one night, let it make you that much more resolved.  If you go in KNOWING you are going to make mistakes, than you aren’t going to completely die over each one.

That is what I did, and wouldn’t you know?  It worked.  After a few weeks of knockdown, drag out brawling with my own wants and personality, I finally established a time constraint.  I had completely stopped eating after six.  I had stopped moon eating in its tracks.  I didn’t like it.  It was still something that I had to struggle with of course, but I could do it.  More than that, I honestly DID do it.  It still hurt every night at 8:30 when more than anything in the world I wanted a big bowl of Raisin Bran or some left over lasagna.  I stopped cheating though.  It felt good to be finally doing something too.  I had harnessed my first step toward true weight loss, and I found that I could actually manage it too.

The thing that kept my morale up was that I started to see change.  Well to be honest, I didn’t see a damn thing.  Everyone else said they could see change.  I still don’t know if they were being honest or were simply lying their noses off.  In either case, it gave me the motivation I needed to stick with it.

The next thing I did was cut soda-pop.  I didn’t have a set plan in mind.  I didn’t have a “weight loss” outline that I drafted up and followed.  I was more organic than that.  I let my whims rule my weight loss.  The day I cut drinking soda wasn’t planned or expected.  I just reached for a can of Coke out of the refrigerator stocked to the brim with soft drinks, and decided that I was going to stop.  So I did.  Not to get all Forest Gump on you, but I just sort of felt like quitting.  Was this a good idea?  Absolutely.  You knew that already though.  It is amazing just how much weight loss “technique” you already have in your repertoire.  You, like me, just kept choosing not to examine it closely, or pretended they didn’t exist so you could keep on living your delusions.

This one hit just as hard as the first.  I never realized how much I loved the sweet burn of chugging grape soda when I am absolutely parched.  It hit me pretty hard.  Then there was the fact that drinking too much water tended to make me feel sick, and you had a bow-tied dose of thirsty pain.

Not eating after six combined with no pop made me an irritable person to be around.  It wasn’t that hard to deal with when I was actively doing something.  When things slowed down, I had time to think about how much I WASN’T eating.  These were the times it would hit me hardest, the moments when I wanted to sneak a Dr. Pepper or make a quick turkey sandwich.  I had to stay busy, or I would lose my mind.

This is what that second month was like.  I want you to use this as a guide.  Keep the principles of the overall weight-loss plan in mind, combined with some creative sense, and use the following as an example of how NOT to do things.  In better words, this is the stupid way to start out.

480 lbs.

I woke up hungry.  Sunlight covered my bed and made my crème colored comforter glow with pure summer light.  It was the typical type of morning hunger, the kind I usually felt in the morning.  It wasn’t that pain-filled agony along my midriff that cursed me around 10 o’clock last night.  That bastardized and potent brand of need had completely vanished.  Like a werewolf of the stomach, with daylight came relief from the curse.  The later it got, the hungrier I got, until I couldn’t bare it.  I remembered looking at my door at 10:35, imagining the boxes of cereal that were no more than 6 feet away from me.  I had to fight every single moment to get up, claw open the door, rip the cabinet door completely off its hinges, and tear through every breakfast mascot unlucky enough to be taking shelter there.  My hands had shaken like marionettes.  It was the stiffest form of irony that put me in the bedroom RIGHT outside the kitchen, and irony that took my eating privileges, fully destroying that kitchen’s usefulness.  I had looked back at my computer screen, trying to remember whatever website I was looking at.  I surfed the same exact site three times in a row, never realizing it was happening.  The only thing I had seen was a two inch, lacquered wood barrier keeping me from what I desired.  Every minute that passed got harder.  It wasn’t that I was a late night eating fanatic, but you never miss something like when it is on vacation.  It was now forbidden.  That made it mystical.  It made it wonderful.  That made it’s allure nearly impossible to ignore. 10:36.

I started going to sleep earlier to avoid this very problem.  This late night hunger when I was alone was hard to resist.  You can’t be hungry when you are unconscious.  At least that was my theory.  Each day would dawn anew, and I would only have a shadow of the intense yearning I had felt the night before.  I knew it was all in my head, I had known it since day one of this stupid project.  Just because something is all in your mind doesn’t make it any less real, or potent, to the person who is trapped in the walls of that mind.

I curled my toes.  They felt like quarter cut junks of salami, same as always.  I hopped out of bed and hit 30 year old checkered brown laminate that my grandmother had repeatedly carpeted and uncarpeted during her never ending bid for domestic perfection.  I never had any trouble getting out of bed these days.  Waking up meant that the curfew was lifted.  It was time to eat.  I found a crumpled up t-shirt I had worn the night before and pulled it over my head.  It was already pre-popped and ready to wear, and nobody wanted to see me without a shirt on.  I found the cereal that had successfully eluded me the night before, and poured myself a more than ample portion, a “man bowl” as I’ve heard it called.  My grandmother was there, smoking endlessly through Virginia Slims, doing her grandma thing in her horseshoe island of kitchen ware.  I paid her no mind.  Nothing was said.  I had more important things to do.  I had to find a spoon and make 8 ounces of puffed oats rue the day they were processed.

Nothing tasted sweeter than the first morning bite.  I wasn’t much for sadism, but it was almost worth punishing myself for that first taste.  I ate standing up, not at the bar, not at the counter, but sort of hovering in a corner over the trashcan.  When I finally resurfaced, milk leaking into my beard, I was thirsty.  I looked into the refrigerator.  There was milk, half and half, orange juice, and pop.  There was so much pop.  My grandmother had been running a bed and breakfast and lunch and dinner and every other time of the day you may want to eat.  It had been going on all my life.  She ran it for her grandchildren pro-bono, and they were all, with the newly made exception of me, chronic pop drinkers.  A Seven Eleven would be jealous of her stash.  There were light sodas, dark sodas, and every colorful variety imaginable.  Nothing goes better with milk and chocolate puffs like freshly opened carbonation.  I wanted a pop.  I could stomach the OJ.  So I poured the orange and wished I was someone else.

“When do you work Brocy?”  Classic grandma move, take a grandkids name and add a “y” and you have insta-nickname.

“In about an hour,” I replied between spoonfuls.

“Are you sure you have enough cereal there?”  This was a classic example of her sleeping bear tactics.

“Pretty sure.  You know, I could probably use some more now that you brought it up.”

She stopped what she was doing and turned to face me.  She kept looking at me, and I looked at her.  She looked at me some more and puffed a few ashes down on her cigarette.  I blinked.  She blinked.  She flicked her cigarette.  I turned and walked into my room, bowl in hand.  She was a weird lady that way.

I worked at a movie theater.  I was the sort of Jack of All Trades type.  I worked concession.  I sold tickets.  I worked the projectors.  I pilfered candy and popcorn as often as I could get away with it.  All I had to do was throw a box of gummy worms on the ground, step on it, and then mark it as damaged.  Two seconds later I had a never ending supply of sugar for the low price of creative thinking.  I utilized this method as much as I could, without drawing undue attention to myself.

When I was at work I dressed in an all black outfit that was provided by the theater.  Well it was usually provided by the theater, but not in my case.  The company they got the shirt and pants from stopped stocking my body several sizes ago.  The only change from black was a splash of cinema in the form of an extremely loud purple tie.  Overall it wasn’t a demanding job.  The only physical aspect it required was standing for 4 hour increments.

That was where I found myself.  The theater had just opened and no early afternoon patrons had come in yet.  I clocked in, pinned the name badge and took a 19 year old stance behind the black Formica countertop.  You could compare the size of the lobby to my own size and shape.  We were both far above average in size.  Not necessarily too big to be allowed, but definitely leaning heavily on the side of excessive.  When you first see us, you can’t help but stop and stare for a second.  Most people just aren’t used to seeing something that vast all of sudden.

I grabbed a kiddy cup.  As employees, we could drink anything we wanted to, as long as we used the kiddy cups to do it.  I looked at the 7 assorted spigots, not even seeing the diet sodas, only seeing the fully sugared Pepsi products in their mocking splendor.  I sighed, and pressed the lever back on the Lemonade.  I had decided that I could have three things to drink in the building: water, made me kind of sick, would get it sometimes when I was feeling optimistic.  Lemonade, it wasn’t carbonated but sweet enough to be an acceptable runner-up.  White Cherry ICEE, I didn’t drink the Coke ICEE so it didn’t count as pop.  I should have realized that fountain Lemonade and ICEE are just as bad, if not worse than regular pop.  My logic was that because they weren’t fizzy they didn’t count as pop.  I used that astounding logic to alleviate the guilt.  That is the stickler about losing weight. I would always found a way to take one step forward and two steps toward the nearest candy bar.

I also drank pickle juice.  It was extremely high in sodium, true.  That was neither good nor bad concerning my current dieting plan.  It was just weird and delicious.

I always liked the way customers look at a fat guy behind a concession counter.  It was one of the only places where I could laugh at my weight.  I had always noticed the way people looked at me and the way they looked at others.  Their expressions changed, their attitudes altered, even their speech changed.  I could have just been being paranoid, and not realized that every person on earth alters their approach at certain times and situations.  I didn’t though.  As I was saying though, customers assumed fat people, given any sort of control over food, will do a damn good job with it.  I laughed because regardless of the stereotype, it was absolutely true.  They would see who was about to serve them and change their posture immediately.  They may raise an eyebrow or give a slight nod as if to say, “I know, that you know what you are doin’.”  I was getting that very look from a customer a couple hours into my shift.

“Large Popcorn, please.”  He said it with inside information swagger.  His son tugged on his belt buckle.  It made the man constantly tugging up his pants.  He seemed so used to it that I felt bad for him.  His son made it look so awkward I tried not to laugh.  Such are the lives of children.  I nodded and reached for a bucket the size of lampshade.

“Butter?”  It was a common courtesy question.  I had only met three people who ever said no.  I had served thousands.

“There is no such thing as too much butter.”  He actually winked at me.  It was sort of creepy, but everyone likes to have inside commentary with a fat guy.  In any case, I took his comment to heart.  I buttered that bucket until it looked more like cereal than popcorn.  I aim to please and I wanted to test his theory.  His soon reached up and grabbed the bucket with a big smile on his face.  Then they went to their movie.

I leaned back against the counter, my feet were already starting to smart.  I broke down shoes at an incredible rate, and it would seem that my latest pair of black dress shoes was beginning to melt.  My feet paid the price for that.  They started complaining the moment I stepped out of bed.  The muscles in my feet straining and blood surging until I felt needles in the tips of my toes.  Something like that was happening.

I still had arches in my feet, which in and of itself was miraculous, but I didn’t know how long they were going to last.  These days I felt the strain along the bottoms of my feet like a balsa wood bridge ready to snap.  I was fat.  My feet hurt.  They sort of go together, and are nothing new to hear about.

I went to the ICEE machine; I needed a liquid boost to my morale.  I decided to get tricky and mixed half white cheery and half lemonade.  The spigots whirred quietly as I pressed back the levers.  I looked wistfully at the sodas, and thought how wonderful carbonation was.

The concoction tasted pretty good.  It was the down time between movies, where the theater goes from concerto level crowds to Apocalypse Now style of dead.  I was leaning, and thinking about blowing my own bubbles into my cup when I heard running and shouting.  I went into the purple hallway just in time to see the friendly winker’s kid running to the bathroom.  His eyes were closed and he was crying.  The reason for the tears was immediately evident.  Yellowish grease covered his face, his hands, and stained the entire front of his shirt.  He was holding his hands like a surgeon and I would have laughed if he wasn’t bawling into his butter.  His dad was also storming in my general direction, which also put a damper on my humor.  His palms were covered in grease, and he had a giant smear on the front of his Dockers.  Never mess with a man with a greasy crotch I always say.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a smart-aleck with the butter.  I turned around and walked back behind the counter, already planning arguments to quell his anger.  What can I say, I was a planner.

“Is there a reason you put so much goddamn butter on my popcorn?”  He started talking before he was even fully in sight of me.  That was impressive.  His was flaring his chest.  I was suddenly reminded of an angry pigeon.

I didn’t even have to prepare.  “Sure, you TOLD me to do it.  I asked you ‘how much butter?’ and you said ‘there’s no such thing as too much butter.’ So I was just doing what you told me to.”

“I wasn’t being serious.  My son completely ruined his shirt, and that’s on you.”

“Actually, I think it is on HIM, but I understand you are upset.”  I said it in a polite tone with a smile on my face.

“I was NOT being serious.  You should have known that.”  He seemed to have missed my sarcasm entirely.  Passive Aggressive tendencies seemed to skip generations.  Thanks grandma.

This guy was starting to irritate me.  “You see the name tag,” I pointed to my chest, “that means I am currently employed.  And while employed, the customer is God.  That means you sir, are God.  When God asks for lots of butter on his popcorn and tells me that there is no limit on butter, I let it flow.”  I said it fast, but with an air of casual, mocking politeness.

He just mumbled something in reply, his jaw too clenched for a coherent sentence.  The only word I really caught was “fat.”

I felt heat rise into cheeks that knew that word only too well.  “That I am, but I’m in the process of recovering.  If there was a fat guy rehab, I would already be enrolled.  Way to lash out inappropriately.  Sorry about the butter, but you shouldn’t have asked for it if you didn’t want it.”

With that I turned and walked away from him.  It felt kind of good to be able to say that to someone and it be the truth.  I had been telling people for a long time that I was “trying” but this time I actually was.  I wasn’t really upset by what he said.  After being called something for so long, words voiced or otherwise, they sort of lose their potency.  I still didn’t like it, and I wanted so badly to never be associated with it again.

My shift ended sometime later.  I clocked out and could shake my mood.  I was aloof all afternoon.  As I walked outside, the sun was still high over the western hills, casting short shadows.  The sky was alive with the sound of chirping cicadas complaining about the heat.  I loosened my ridiculous tie from around my neck and let it sit there.  I didn’t take it off.  I just undid the top button to match.  It made me feel like a businessman after a long day of career changing negotiation.  Ever the dreamer I was.

When I got into the cab of my pickup truck I looked at the dash to see what time it was.  5:35, I had twenty five minutes until cookie curfew.  I wanted to eat.  I wanted to eat a lot.  So I lit the ignition and went to Arby’s.  Two roast beef sandwiches, potato wedges, mozzarella sticks, and curly fries.  That was definitely the recipe for weight loss.  After I grabbed the small grocery sack’s worth of food, I bolted to the quickest turnpike gate.  I could get home a lot faster on the highway and I refused to eat in the car.  I don’t really know why, just a personality quirk I guess.  Every day I made it a game, eating before six.  I was winding around cars, through the fast lane, past horse trailers and semis, light filtered through fresh maple leaves along the bank of the road, flickering through my windshield.  While I treated it like a game, it was a game I didn’t want to play.  Like the nineteenth round of hide and seek with a 3 year old, you don’t do it because you want to.  You are doing it for someone else.  I wasn’t losing weight for anyone else, but for a me who may one day say thank you.  That day wasn’t today, but I wanted to win the game anyway.

I made it home at 5:51.  My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my earlobes.  I was sweating with anxiety.  I jumped out with the bag of goods in my hand and sprinted…strode…okay, walked to the backdoor of my grandma’s little house under the hill.  It wasn’t the same as Bilbo’s, it was more in the shadow of the hill, but it was just as cozy.  No one can stock a house for comfort like a woman in her sixties.

I walked inside and immediately sat down at the kitchen table.  My little cousin was there.  He might have said something.  I wasn’t paying attention.  I immediately tore the bag in half.  I HAD to make it before six.  I was out of breath by the time I finished, but I checked the old wooden cuckoo clock, 5:58.  I made it.  I sat back and relaxed.  There were nothing but corn batter crumbs and torn plastic left where there was once a meal for two.  At least for the moment I was content.  My cousin just stared in awe at me, a mixture of disgust and admiration on his 10 year old face.  The cereal he was eating was slowly dripping from a spoon that was halfway to his mouth, already forgotten.

By eight thirty I felt like I was hungry again.  It was getting easier though.  I could now STOP myself from saying “to hell with it” and sneaking something back to my room.  I looked at the damn door that was a stout athlete away from what I craved.  My fingers were sweating.  My foot was twitching.  I drummed a quick air solo with my hands.  I picked up a book.  It seemed to be written in edibility, so it was no good.  I looked at the door again.  It looked back.  I asked it to stop being such a smartass.  It said nothing.  I bent down in front of my TV and rifled through my collection of DVDs.  Then I went through my collection of video games.  My stomach rumbled.  My toes curled on course threads of rug.  My hands had stopped moving.  A wondrous thought had just occurred to me.

It doesn’t count if I eat fast.

I bolted to the door and nearly wrenched it off its hinges.

So I made some mistakes.  I made a lot of them to be precise.  I had some very good ideas, true.  They eventually worked out as you will see, in the end.  But I made mistakes.  That is the point of learning.  I shouldn’t have been drinking ICEE or lemonade.  I knew even then that they were just as bad as pop.  The sugar and carbohydrate content in Pepsi brand lemonade is just as bad as pop.  I have no idea what is in an ICEE, but that form of voodoo magic has to be a poor promoter for weight loss of any sort.  That didn’t matter.  I did anything to justify to myself those small things that could make me feel better.  Lots and lots of caloric intake made me feel o’ so grand.

I cheated.  I cheated a lot.  In the beginning I was only “saying” that I wasn’t eating after six, and then did it anyway.  It was more of a quasi hypothetical situation than anything set in stone.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to lose weight, because I did.  I had determination pouring from between by rolls, but I had an extremely weak will.  If you spend your whole life indulging every whim that passes your way that takes your fancy, then even a modicum of self restraint is going to take time to develop.  I could have let it be the end right there.  I could have fallen off the bandwagon and gone back to my heinous ways.   That would have been just so much easier.  That is what old Broc would have done.  But there was a small, but tantamount change.  I kept trying.  That made all the difference.  I wasn’t new, but I wanted so desperately to improve.

I eventually figured out that I shouldn’t be drinking that sort of stuff.  Well, I used the term “figured out” loosely.  I knew damn well that it wasn’t right.  But it isn’t hard to talk yourself into something if it is really what you want to do.  Still, I eventually quit.  It took a while.  Self delusion will hold your hand a lot longer than the most devoted lover.  It will never let you ago, until you decide to release your own grip.  With some time and small steps toward something that resembled effort, I eventually did just that.

I stopped eating so late after a time.  I made it to the point where I could go one day without eating after six.  Then I could go three.  Pretty soon it was the odd day out when I failed.  Every day I did fail though I never felt any better than when I abstained.  I woke up with the same level of hunger on a cheating day as when I was faithful.  It took me a while to realize that the hunger was mostly in my head.  Of course my body had needs.  It got used to producing tons and tons of fat.  So it said I needed more.  Every single body in existence wants that.  When it has excess, it creates what it thinks it needs.  Usually what it thinks it needs is fat.  It helped me, I helped it.  We both got what we want.  Until the day it stopped being what I really wanted.  This is the crux point in losing any amount of anything, from 5 pounds to 500.  If you don’t really want to, if you honestly don’t want to do something about your weight lose, you aren’t going to lose the bundle of calories it takes to quit.  But if you do, if you really want to make a difference in your life, then you can.

It was honestly what I wanted, even if it took me months to finally start being effective.  Eventually I got there.  I developed a terrible habit in the process.  That is something that I will call the “lightning feast.”  If I could just sit there and eat whatever was in my hands quick enough, then it didn’t count.  It started because I had to make my six o’clock deadline, then it became something more.  Every time I was cooking I would have something in my right hand, munching.  If I wasn’t “eating the meal” then it didn’t count as a part of it.  It started out like that.  I would take one staggering, heaving, step forward, just to be knocked 3 more back.

It took a while, but I would learn to break even.  I stopped eating after six completely.  The very, VERY, odd day out would find me scrounging past the self prescribed curfew.  If I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t eat, where I didn’t make the curfew, then I simply didn’t eat.  It seems harsh I know, and I certainly felt it at the time, but it was what it took.  There is a silver lining, because soon it became muscle memory.  By the end of the summer I stopped missing it completely.  Call me a sucker for punishment but I started putting myself into situations where I was around food but wasn’t allowed to eat.  It is leaning morbid, but it helped me build self control, which I desperately needed.

Then I cut pop completely.  And I mean, completely.  I even ditched my lemonade and ICEE training wheels.  I went to just straight water drinking, which hurt.  The only time I had ever liked drinking water was during football practice, and let’s face it, at that point I would have drunk anything.  In more normal times, drinking water would make me sick to my stomach, not to the point of nausea or anything, but I got slightly uncomfortable whenever I was forced to drink it.

So my plans became routine.  My grandma even stopped eating after six.  She is a picky bird eater, so it didn’t affect her very much.  She helped me even more by getting rid of the majority of the soda that was in the house.  That woman is missing more screws than a swing set, but still somehow knows how to come through in a clutch.

It never got easy.  Even after 3 months of continuously doing it, it never stopped being hard.  It just got easier.  If losing weight was hard, then no one would ever need over a size 34, fast food joints would lose a huge amount of revenue, and hopefully more people would figure out how fun biking to work can be.  Just the same, it became manageable for me.

You can say that I had no idea what I was doing.  That I played weight loss roulette and choose a method at random.  I would have to agree with you in that regard.  That isn’t the point.  It wasn’t how effective the method was, it was that I was TRYING to do something.  I was a 20 year old kid shooting in the dark, grasping any straw in sight for a breath of change, but I was grasping nonetheless.  It didn’t matter what I did, it is what resulted from that action.  Every action, invention, and idea has to begin somewhere.  I’m not claiming that I invented anything, but I gave that sacred something the one thing it needed to be satisfied, to give it weight and credibility.

I gave it results.  And guess what?

Soon even I began to see that something had changed.

It was almost imperceptible at first, like the beginning of a rock slide is brought on by a few lazily tossed pebbles.

It took me a while to even realize, but something had changed.  I didn’t notice at first.  Then it took me by surprise.

Something was working.