Found And Lost in 2022
(Nature 1 - Jamie Dupuis)
There are many different platitudes out there that people will offer you when you set out to do something difficult. Some of them imply that the first step forward is the hardest one. Others, that it's not how you start the journey, but how you finish it.
There has been no easy part of this journey. Only hard parts and slightly less hard parts.
Don't misunderstand me, this whole process hasn't been without its rewards but every single one of them was, in retrospect, hard-fought.
My initial plan was to try and reach 355 pounds, a full one hundred pounds down from my starting weight, by my birthday in August of 2021. When I hit 354 in July, I was bolstered. A month later, I would drop all the way down to 349, and would celebrate that with one last visit to the Bariatric Center shortly after my birthday.
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"That's new," my physician noted with some interest.
She was, of course, talking about the tattoo that shone out with the kind of moist look that only fresh ink can. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised that she noticed. She had ink of her own after all.
I rotated my right arm a little so that she could see it a little better:
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"Generally speaking, you're still absolutely on the right track here. Your weight loss has, with only one small exception, been exactly what we want: Slow and steady. You've made incredible progress and clearly have a grasp on how to move forward from here." My psychologist closed his laptop, the traditional signal that our visit was at its end. "When would you like to come back?"
I thought about it for a moment this time. Traditionally, I'd been loathe to go for more than a month or two between visits. My progress over the last two years DID sort of suggest that I was committed to this whole thing though...
As I was mulling this over, my mouth got bored and I blurted, "How about after the holidays?"
My brain made a frustrated sound and promised to have yet another discussion with my mouth about going off half-cocked. 'After The Holidays' meant sometime in January. Five months.
For his part, my psychologist smiled a little behind his mask and said, "That absolutely sounds like a great idea, if that's what you want." Then he stood up without additional preamble and opened the door to the exam room.
A sudden rush of emotions hit me like a train at that point and I shot up out of my seat with a hand half raised. "Hey doc?" He paused on his way out of the room, eyebrow arched. Inside, my mouth was frantically trying to get my brain to engage for once, and my brain was pretty staunchly refusing to for some reason. And then there was the fact that I was finding it physically difficult to speak around the sudden lump in my throat.
Very slowly, my psychologist shut the exam room door, cutting the noise from the hallway off again. Making the room safe again.
I swallowed repeatedly, trying to steady my...well, everything. Finally, I croaked, "Listen, if I put hand sanitizer on like...right in front of you, and you put hand sanitizer on right in front of me, and we both promise to hold very still after that, can I shake your hand?"
For his part, my doctor took a beat to assess everything happening in that moment, along with what it represented, and then took a step towards me with his hand held out. "Yeah," he murmured. "We can do that."
I devoted significant amounts of effort into not crushing his hand in mine when we shook. I bobbed my head a few times, hoping that this would somehow shake words loose from my brain. All I managed to get out was, "Thank you."
Thank you for being honest with me.
Thank you for supporting me with your knowledge and wisdom and kindness.
Thank you for giving me the tools to succeed, and letting me know that it was acceptable to fail.
Thank you for being safe.
Thank you for giving me the courage to stand on my own.
Thank you for not hurting me.
"You're welcome," he replied warmly, giving my hand a little squeeze. He understood.
Such is the power a doctor wields.
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It would naturally follow that the moment I elected to step away from the shelter of the Bariatric Center for an extended period of time, my weight loss would run face-first into a wall. This would have been frustrating enough on its own but apparently after bouncing off of that wall, my weight got dizzy and started walking backwards. By the time September had ended, I'd gained back eleven pounds.
Seeing 362 on the scale again was absolutely soul-crushing for me in the moment. It had taken around a month for me to gain back 10 pounds somehow. 10 pounds was two, maybe three months of hard work for me depending on how much my body was cooperating with me at the moment. Three months of hand-wringing, of trying to remember to work out as often as possible, to get outside...
To fix myself.
September had...not been a good month from a diet and exercise standpoint. I'd gone out of town twice, both times on pleasure. I'd managed to get some exercise in during the first excursion but the second trip had been longer, two weeks of sedate life and rich food.
They tell you that it's much easier to put the weight on than it is to take it off. They're not lying. Still, at least I -knew- what I'd done to earn the weight this time.
I also knew what to do to get rid of it again.
By the time Halloween rolled around, I'd burned that weight back off, and then some. I was down to 350 pounds again and had every intention of keeping a spine of iron over the next two months in the face of what I knew would be a stampede of good food and drink...and colder weather.
I would end up needing a lot more than an iron spine by the time New Years rolled around.
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Some people say that the devil is in the details. Those people weren't engineers though. Data is in the details. Nothing more, nothing less. Data is just data. What we do with it? That's where the devil lives. The good news is, he's not the only one that lives there.
Between Halloween and Christmas, I lost virtually no weight whatsoever. I would absolutely have crawled out of my skin if it weren't for the whiz-bang scale that I'd purchased. See, weight is THE yardstick that almost everyone insists on using when any health-related discussion begins. This is largely due to the sheer number of corollaries that one can draw from either an excess of weight or an excess lack thereof. That said, weight is only one piece of the equation where health is concerned.
The scale was telling me that while I hadn't lost any weight, I'd lost a TON of fat mass. Muscle weighs about 20% more than fat and...
I'll spare you the details -- seriously, the original section of this post was...much longer -- but less fat good. More muscle good. Steve good.
My doctors were very up front with me about the fact that, sooner or later, I was going to reach a point where I would stop simply shedding fat weight wholesale and my body would start working a little bit more in earnest to convert that fat to muscle. This would accelerate as I became more and more physically active as opposed to simply losing weight due to caloric deficit.
Without this knowledge, without the large field of data that I'd been collecting, I would have, at the very least, spent that time wringing my hands and wondering why my efforts weren't working. I might have given up all together, or engaged in unsafe behaviors in order to try and force the weight loss. (Spoiler alert, there is no safe way to force your body to lose weight.)
In return for my patience, I was rewarded shortly before the Christmas holiday with the resumption of raw weight loss. Between Christmas and the beginning of February, my weight dropped from around 350 pounds to 336, my lowest weight ever. I was ecstatic.
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My January visit to my physician was equal parts brief and amusing. She was a little concerned about how much my weight loss had slowed down. I wasn't and offered once again to show her my biometry. She declined, possibly in an attempt to hold very still around the excited nerd with the tablet. More likely, it was because her goal, the goal of all of the doctors at the Bariatric institute, wasn't for me to lose weight.
It was for me to be happy.
She didn't need to see the data. Just my face.
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The first half of 2022 has been filled with ups and downs, some of them quite literal:
UP: The weather had gotten decidedly colder during January and early February and my ability to be outside playing disc golf had waned greatly. To compensate, I ramped my workouts in virtual reality back up, always shooting for at least 500 calories burned per session. I wanted nothing more than to keep that weight loss going, so naturally, it stopped again. And then my weight rebounded again up to 345 pounds. It then proceeded to stay around that weight for the next month and a half.
DOWN: Once more, I fell back on my trusty field of biometry for answers. The story it told me was that, once again, my body was steadily losing fat mass and gaining muscle mass. Happily, my body appeared to be doing this much more aggressively than the last period. All I had to do was be patient. The other thing that the data told me was that, contrary to what I was telling myself in my head, my weight was actually continuing to drop...it was just doing it very slowly. This further bolstered my patience. I was still losing weight while also pretty steadily converting body mass. I had to learn to be happy with that and recognize that as a victory.
By the time April rolled around, my overall weight had started to drop again. I was down from 345 to 339. Even better, my 'rebound' weight was lowering as well. By the time the end of May rolled around, I'd managed to crawl back down to an even 335, with a rebound weight of less than five extra pounds.
UP: I developed plantar fasciitis in my right foot and had to basically stop exercising for a month while I figured THAT out. My weight climbed back up about five pounds before I got my arms around my injury and augmented my caloric intake to compensate.
DOWN: In June, I had one of those freak weight drops where everything was just sort of... in tune, and I slipped all the way down to 331 pounds, an exciting new low. Then it did what it always did, and rebounded. Just not as high. And then I started slowly losing more fat mass and replacing it with more muscle mass.
UP: In early July, I started augmenting my work in virtual reality and out on the disc golf course with body-weight squats and inclined push-ups, along with a few other bodyweight movements to encourage general muscle excitement. My body responded EXTREMELY well to this, and I promptly gained ten pounds of raw muscle while my body fat percentage lowered once again. Weight gain, but GOOD weight gain!
DOWN: Then...I went out of town on a business trip at the end of July. While I was gone, I made sure to eat well, to track my general calorie intake, and I utilized the hotel gym and pool frequently to keep up my general activity level. "But Steve," you cry, "If you did all of that, why did you lose weight?" Oh, that!
That was the COVID I brought home with me.
In 72 hours, COVID stripped around 10% of my total muscle mass from my body, along with around 5% of my body's hydration and a raw ten pounds of weight. I went from weighing 339 pounds with 61% muscle mass on a Thursday to 328 pounds with 49% muscle mass on the following Monday morning.
Let me make that live for you:
Now, before you reply with something like, "Holy crap, Steve, COVID did you a favor!" bear two things in mind here:
1. I am not flexing here. This is dehydration that you're seeing, pure and simple.
2. That's a comparatively slender leg, no? Well, it was attached to a still not comparatively slender man. I don't have slender legs. I have mutant turkey drumsticks for legs. The last time my leg looked like that, I weighed 245 pounds.
My recovery has been slow but also thankfully steady. I am very, very lucky.
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Around a year into this whole ordeal -- it's hard to believe that it's been THREE YEARS since I started trying to figure this whole 'weight loss' thing out, can you believe that?! -- my doctors and I agree that a very reasonable -- possibly even ambitious -- target weight for me was 325 pounds. That was... 60 pounds ago? I don't know, I'd have to go back and re-read the original set of entries, but here's the crazy thing:
I'm only about three pounds away from that. Somehow, I'm only about three pounds away from my target weight, a number that I set back before I have any confidence that I'd ever get there.
It would be better for the Saturday Morning version of this story if I said that I had no idea how I'd gotten here but the truth of the matter is that I know exactly how I got here. Maybe more importantly, I know who I got here with:
All of you.
"Wait a minute, Steve," you interject, pointing to one of those original journal entries. "You said you had a Hail Mary goal of 300 pounds set. That doesn't sound like it's such a Hail Mary anymore."
Honestly, I have no idea. My first hundred pounds took a little over two years. It took me another year to lose the next 25. It could take me longer to lose the next chunk. I don't know if that's in my body's plans.
...All I know is that a Hail Mary involves an absolute monster of a pass down-field, so one of you better start running.
I need a receiver.
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