lowquality.net

I haven’t publicized this on the blog yet, but Kim and I started South Beach a few weeks ago and we’ve been doing really well. We extended the first phase by a week just to get a head start on the weight we need to lose. I know I was close to 270lbs. when I started (maybe 268lbs. ?) and now I am at around 255lbs. (which seems to depend greatly on whose scale I use). When we start the second phase I am planning to exercise more– just simple stuff: biking, push-ups, sit-ups, stuff like that. My ultimate goal is 215lbs. I’d like to get closer to 200 but I figure that if I can make it to 215lbs I can obsess about those last 15 when I get there.

It started a few weeks ago when I was in NYC. I met up with my old roommate, Chris. When Chris and I lived together we were about the same size (I was always a little bigger, but I am also taller). We had the same awful eating habits and a similar history with food. The difference being that he was (and is) a way more picky eater and tended to only like a few things and I was just a foodie who’d love to hit up diners for pancakes and eggs. Needless to say he dropped from 245lbs. to 205lbs.

Bastard.

So when I came home I heard that my friend Scott was killed in a biking accident. Days later a friend of Kim’s comitted suicide. I started thinking about a lot of things in my life that I’d like to change that I never seem to do anything about. Losing weight was close to the top of the list and it seemed that if Chris could do it, I certainly could. That was something I needed, a proof of concept. My only other friend who’s made any kind of drastic nutritional change has Cystic Fibrosis and needed to gain weight, which is very different. Two days into South Beach and I ran into my friend, Will, from high school who was in town to work on his parents’ old house and he was even thinner. This guy was consistently larger than I was and now I was the fat kid. All of my fat friends were losing weight. (Though Will’s method was Atkins, which I refuse to do.)

I have made proclaimations to lose weight on lowquality.net before. In the last 3 years I have made stop/start efforts to exercise but eating right never really factored into the plan. Eating right seems like its the most important part for me, though. Forcing myself to live a different lifestyle (one that has me saying “no thank you” and leaving baskets filled with bread on restaurant tables) has also forced me to view the way foods are presented in this country. What we accept as healthy and what is actually healthy are totally different things. On the other hand I can’t believe how much more expensive it is to eat healthy as opposed to just grabbing a burger at a fast food restaurant. We know it’s not right, but it’s just so damned easy! You need one of two things to live a healthier lifestyle: time or money. The working class usually has neither of these things. Kim and I (mostly Kim) have been making a huge sacrifice to prepare our own foods to meet the needs of our diet, and it’s very difficult to do so and still have time to do the things we want. If we didn’t cook our own food we’d be paying a fortune on healthy prepared foods. It’s give or take.

It’s a shame that we live in a country where school lunches are subsidized by Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. I remember when that was just starting and even though I knew that eating that stuff wasn’t good for me, I ate it anyway. As a result I have a skewed sense of nutrition. You just can’t eat pepperoni pizza every day, or even once a week. You have to find the balance. If you have to drench everything in ketchup then there is a problem with what you are eating– maybe it isn’t as delicious as you think it is! I think we’re so used to fat and sugar in all of out foods that our tastebuds are just burned out. We don’t know how to enjoy good foods. It doesn’t help when all of the vegetables we eat as kids come in a can and are served as a slimy gray afterthought to the painstakingly cooked slab of meat on the dinner table. Kim and I have been sauteeing fresh veggies with garlic and salt and peper and they’ve been delicious and just as much a part of the meal as anything else we’ve been eating.

Actually, I have eaten more vegetables in the last three weeks than I did in the previous three months. Those of you who know me personally know I like to exaggerate, but I am seriously not exaggerating! Its amazing how your tastes can change. You can actually force your tastes to change, or, at least, observe that they can change. I wouldn’t say I love veggies now, but I definitely feel like I am creating a stronger connection with those kinds of foods. I don’t really crave lots of sweets now– I do, but it has more to do with not being allowed to eat them, than it does me actually wanting them. Something about this first phase of South Beach has kind of toned down my (as Richard Simmons would say) “strong relationship with food.” I feel kind of like one of those rehab patients who thinks he’s got it beat and leaves early to score some coke. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I can see the path.