Since you’re here, you’re at least overweight, if not downright obese.
You’ve come to the right place. This blog’s for you.
I’ve been told that, in order to gain your confidence and then your loyalty as blog readers, I need you to identify with me. That notion conflicts with my very, very strong feelings about personal privacy. So, I’m confronted with a hurdle right out of the box.
I’ll do my best and I hope that that’s good enough. Where I’m not explicit, I hope you’re savvy enough to infer. I’ll try not to be too subtle so that those slouching down in the back of the class can take part.
I realize that the only way you can identify with me in this context is for me to tell you that I’ve been overweight all my life and that that life spans more than 60 years. From as early as I can remember in grade school until today, my weight has always defined me to me and, I’ve always suspected, to everyone else, including siblings.
If you haven’t already inferred the following, you need to pay closer attention: my history gives me street cred to deal with all issues of weight and obesity for chunkies of all ages. However old you are, I experienced what you’re experiencing at the age you are now. It’s all a well-traveled road for me. Been there, done that. I’m out of clichés; let’s move on.
I suspect that my youth—indeed, most of my life—has not been happy. I can only suspect because my memory of almost all personal emotional events in my life is non-existent or, at the most, dim. My recollection of all sorts of facts and figures, including trivia, is quite good, so I must have purged or at least repressed memories of my personal life.
First, we'll look for repressed memories of malpractice suits.
Since I’m intelligent (Mensa member, IQ 159), I must have had good reason to purge and repress and, since that’s probably the case, I’m not going to dredge up what my psyche has slain and buried. (Psychiatrists and psychologists are gnashing their teeth as you read!)
I don’t recall how much I weighed in grade school, but I know that I weighed more than 300 pounds as a ninth-grader (15 years old) and things didn’t change until the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I don’t know how I lost more than 100 pounds in those three months, but I did; that I didn’t die doing losing so much weight so rapidly is testimony to the innate stamina with which youth, even morbidly obese youth, is blessed. I do recall that my weight loss involved a lot of dieting and walking during the hot, hot summer.
I worked in a warehouse and walked 1.25 miles to work, 1.25 miles home for lunch, 1.25 miles back to work, and 1.25 miles home in the evening; that’s five miles a day, five days a week, for three months. A lot of walking in the hot, muggy summer. I think I followed The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet authored by Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman that surfaced in the late 60’s.
Bigger than I've ever been, but not bigger than I thought I was. You get the idea.
My blog is based on my 45 years’ yo-yo dieting experiences coupled with my current (since 30 April 2009) very effective, very organized, amazingly easy, well-thought-out, irrefutably healthful, undeniably tasty (to me) diet regimen. In three months, I’ve lost 25 pounds. And, believe me, if I didn’t live in a rural area, the weight loss would be even greater—but it’s hard to bicycle on gravel-dirt roads.
If your goal is only to lose weight, you’re not as focused as you should be. Your real goal is to lose fat. Understanding that is absolutely necessary to doing it. Certainly, by losing fat, you lose weight; however, you don’t want to lose muscle and you don’t want to lose other tissue. You want to lose only fat. It’s a complex process that can be more convoluted than The Da Vinci Code by slim and trim Dan Brown, so pay attention and you’ll learn how to do it.
All the basics—and they’re really quite simple, despite the immensity (pun intended—gird your loins, there will be a lot of them!) of our common problem—will be laid out in the next few days, but they don’t tell you how to achieve your goal, i.e., how to achieve your ideal weight.
My regular blog will do that. Stay tuned. Comment. Spread the word. Keep me honest. I’m smart as hell, I’m arrogant, and I’m surprisingly reticent, but, despite my education and experience, I don’t know it all, so it’s up to you to clue me in when I wander off, okay?
