Losing weight isn't easy, but it is simple

The fat activists have this one backwards

I thought about doing some sort of before/after image of myself instead of this candy-colored stock image, but no one ever takes my picture, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that I’m pretty thin these days

i. an analogy

Back when I had a podcast, one of my early guests was a self-styled “fat activist.” I don’t want to call her out by name here, because I consider her a dear friend, though I do think she is, and was, wrong about many things.

We had a long conversation about how she was fat¹ from a very young age, how she was always attempting diets and failing, how nothing seemed to help her lose weight—until finally she had an epiphany: the “purpose” of her body wasn’t to be “skinny,” or “attractive,” or “fit”; it was for living in, enjoying, and serving the people around her.

I could affirm all this, of course, but then she started hammering me with factual claims that I instinctively knew were wrong: that diets “don’t work,” that BMI is racist and meaningless, that “health at every size” is possible, there are no “bad foods,” that some bodies are just “naturally fat.” A lot of it just didn’t make basic intuitive sense (you’re telling me that there’s no downside at all to putting twice as much stress on your knees every single time you take a step?), but I wasn’t really equipped to argue with her at that moment—and, being that I myself was obese at the time, I was temperamentally inclined to at least nod along.

But I’ve been thinking about the conversation in the years since, and I think I’ve finally landed on an analogy that makes the point I wish I’d made at the time²: consider how conservatives and libertarians talk about climate change.

Bear with me on this; it makes sense, I promise. I think a lot of the rightwing talking points on climate change make sense, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them: the most dire predictions have often been wrong; nobody really knows what can be done about climate change, and it’s entirely possible that nothing can be; meaningfully arresting it would take global cooperation between literally every government on earth, on a scale that has never been seen—and would likely put the entire world out of work, all at once (have fun dealing with those angry mobs); even if it’s possible, it sets a dangerous precedent of government control.

Now—I don’t agree with all of those points, but they all strike me as defensible positions to hold. For whatever reason, though, holding those views simply isn’t enough for a lot of people on the right, and they end up working their way backwards from their opinions into a parallel-universe set of “facts” to justify them: Climate change is a myth! It was all made up by the Chinese as an excuse for a one-world Communist takeover! The world has actually gotten colder!!! (You want proof??? It snowed in Canada, back in January!!! Checkmate!!!)

And just as those on the right are willing to work their way backwards from valid opinions (“Efforts to slow climate change are likely to do more harm than good…”) to factual insanities (“…therefore, climate change is made-up Communist propaganda”), fat activists are quite willing to start with a valid moral position (“We do not exist to be skinny, and everyone ought to be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of size…”) and from there, argue themselves into believing nonsense (“…therefore, weight is irrelevant to health and diet and exercise don’t work.”)

Which is all just a fancy way of saying that we’re living in an era when those on the activist left, despite all their “Science is real!” signs, are just as happy to embrace pseudoscience as those on the populist right.

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ii. dropping some #science

It came to my attention the other day that I now have a thirty-two-inch waist, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been the case since my freshman year of high school.³

I should probably be clear here: “I have a thirty-two-inch waist” is not a literally true statement. I measured my waist, and it is pretty much exactly thirty-six inches around. However, thanks to the clothing industry’s rampant vanity sizing, the largest pairs of pants that do not fall right off my body have tags on them that say “32”.” A few years ago, I was barely squeezing into nominally 36” pants; now I can’t wear 34” pants without suspenders.⁴

How did I make this happen? I mean…diet and exercise.

Because, here’s the thing: Your body (and my body) has to obey the laws of physics, just like everything else. The first law of thermodynamics—which has been known for more than a century now, by the way—states that no matter or energy can be created or destroyed, only changed from one form into another. So if you are a fat person, as I used to be, it’s because your body is storing a lot of energy—namely, chemical energy in the form of fat—and that energy didn’t materialize out of the ether. It entered your body, almost definitely through your mouth.⁵

I think a lot of us fail to make the connections here, probably because none of us paid attention in grade school science class (unless there were baking soda volcanoes to be made), but a calorie is just a unit of energy. Energy, of course, is the ability to do “work” (in layman’s terms: move stuff around), and it can be used or stored—but, again, it can’t just disappear into, or appear out of, nothing. When you eat food, you’re consuming stored energy—whatever poor dead plants or animals you’re eating spent their whole lives taking in energy (either from the sun or from other living things) and creating chemical compounds out of it; when you eat them, your body breaks down these chemical compounds, releasing that energy, and then either uses it (to run its basic systems and/or move around) or stores it, by creating new chemical bonds in your fat cells.

The upshot of this is that talk about “metabolism” is mostly nonsense; people who seem to eat and eat and never gain weight—well, that energy is going somewhere. Maybe they walk a lot or bike everywhere, or maybe they’re just fidgety. (It’s also possible that they only eat a lot in front of you. Just as some people only drink or smoke socially, some people only pig out socially.) No one knows this better than me—I have Graves disease, a thyroid disorder that, if untreated, leads to rampant, uncontrollable weight loss. Before the diagnosis, there was a brief, shining moment when I found I could stuff my face as much as I wanted and still lose weight—but all that energy wasn’t just disappearing: Graves also made me fidgety and hyperactive. I was constantly twitching and jumping from activity to activity, so I just burned a lot more energy. You could say I had a “higher metabolism,” and you’d be right, but there was nothing magic or mysterious about it. I had a disease that changed my behavior.

Most (admittedly rough) estimates I’ve seen say that a pound of human fat stores about 3,500 calories of energy; if you run the numbers on that, you’ll find that eating a mere 150 calories more than you need each day (or about half a candy bar) will result in gaining fifteen pounds per year. That’s the bad news; the good news is that eating 150 calories less than you need per day is enough to lose fifteen pounds in a year.

Or, to put it another way: If you eat less and move around more, you will—at the VERY least—gain weight more slowly. The laws of physics are on your side here, if you’re willing to work with them.

iii. how i did it

A catchphrase I keep seeing on the internet is that weight loss is simple—just not easy. Unless the laws of physics have completely changed (in which case we’ve all got better things to do than lose weight, like building a perpetual motion machine and an antigravity funhouse), it really does come down to “calories in, calories out.” That doesn’t mean you have to count calories to lose weight, in the same way that you can win a basketball game without ever looking at the scoreboard—but, y’know, it can help.

For my part, I didn’t start counting calories till I was several years into this process. In can be helpful to make changes one at a time and see what works—basically get in touch with your body at your own pace. For me, the process has been a four-step one:

1. Start lifting weights.

I’d resisted this for a long time—maybe because it was boring, maybe because I found gym bro culture obnoxious—but when I finally started doing this regularly, it gave my ✨fitness journey✨ the kick in the butt it needed. I assume that’s for a number of reasons:

1. It gives you a nice little preview of how you “could” look, given that your body is a lot quicker to build muscle than to burn fat (especially in your early days of lifting).

2. It actually makes your body burn more calories, even when you’re just sitting around, since building and maintaining muscle is calorically expensive.

3. It doesn’t stimulate the appetite much.

4. It’s an easy habit that requires very little—I just bought a barbell and started working out in my basement.

2. Cut carbs.

I’ve since come around to the realization that calories are calories, so there’s nothing magic about carbohydrates, but there are some good reasons that cutting carbs seems to bring down most people’s caloric intakes:

1. Calories from protein and fat tend to help you feel satisfied longer—especially compared to “refined” carbs (i.e., carbs without fiber), which your body will immediately process into sugar, leading to a quick high followed by a quick crash.

2. On a related note, refined carbs tend to be the main component of junk foods, which are literally designed to be addictive. PepsiCo makes more money when you buy more Doritos, so they make sure Doritos (a) taste very good and (b) are deeply unsatisfying.

The “cut carbs, don’t cut calories” approach made a lot of sense to me when I adopted it—I find it very hard to write when I’m hungry, so I wanted to make sure I could eat as much as I wanted throughout the day—but what I was very surprised to find was that, once I had junk food out of my diet (since nearly all junk foods are carb-based), I just didn’t feel hungry the same way I had before. It turns out that that gnawing-at-you, pit-of-your-stomach, if-I-don’t-eat-I’ll-die feeling of hunger is a direct result of eating crummy food that your body burns through instantly and gets no nutrition from. Which I guess is another way of saying that junk food tricks your body into thinking it’s starving—which, again, is very good for PepsiCo’s (and Kellogg’s, and Hershey’s, etc.) bottom line.

3. Re-introduce cardio.

Just cutting carbs and lifting weights were enough to get me down from sixty(-ish) pounds overweight to twenty(-ish) pounds overweight. After that, I stalled out a bit, and I realized that I was never going to get any lower unless I started burning more calories.⁶ So I committed to doing more cardio.

This was two-and-a-half years into the process, and at that point I was lifting four days a week (two arm days, two leg days—don’t skip leg day, broheim), so I committed to adding two days on the ol’ rowing machine to my schedule.

At that point, it had been years since I had done much cardio, so it was harder than I expected, at first. I was only able to do about forty-five minutes at a time at the beginning, but now I’ve got myself up to 75. In addition to the rowing, I committed myself to moving around in other ways whenever I could—I started bicycling to work and errands, and I’ve started spending more of my free time going for walks or shooting hoops with my daughter.

4. Count calories.

I promised myself that I’d lose these last twenty pounds by the end of this summer (so far, the prospects look good!), and I realized it wasn’t going to happen until I got a really good handle on what was going into my body. I was still reluctant to do it, since I still enjoyed stuffing my face, but it was time to bite the bullet. Or to bite fewer (bunless) burgers,⁷ or whatever.

I found a handy little calculator on the Mayo Clinic’s website that told me what my daily “maintenance” calories were—about 2,900, optimistically—and started counting my daily calories to see how they compared. (This is easy for packaged foods and fast foods, since those things have to tell you their caloric content by law; unfortunately, they’re also terrible for you, so, y’know, tradeoffs. For other foods…well, it’s not that hard to google “calories in a banana.”)

I was honestly kind of shocked by what I realized: Even on the low-carb diet, I was still eating upwards of 4,500 calories some days. (Not all days, which is why I was still able to lose some weight, but still.) Fortunately, just being aware of my caloric intake made it extremely easy to keep down—I’ve been able to hold myself to fewer than 2,000 calories every day since I started counting, and most days I make it under the 1,500 bar (especially since, as I’ve said, my low-carb diet has made me less afraid of hunger). Since then, the pounds have been seriously melting off.

I don’t know if any of those steps will work for you, but you’re welcome to try them!

iv. some parting thoughts

The other day, I was trying to explain the so-called obesity epidemic—the scary reality that more than half of all Americans are overweight or obese—to my daughter, and she responded with, “But you’re not fat, Dad!” Obviously, that felt pretty good (especially since, a few years ago, my other daughter had gone out of her way to tell me I was fat), but it was a good opportunity to remind her that (1) I had to work very hard to get to the point of being “not fat,” and (2) “more than half” doesn’t mean “all.”

It does mean “too many,” though—and the fact that so many of us have succumbed to obesity ought to tell us there’s something very wrong with the environment we’re in. Not only is this continent stuffed to the gills with food—a large amount of which is very high in calories and very low in nutrients—most of us live lives where we can avoid ever going outside or moving around if we want to. A lot of us have achieved the dream of having office jobs where we sit at desks all day, and when we’re not at them, we’re either sitting in cars or sitting around at home. If you wanted to design a world where people are unhealthy, miserable, and alienated from their own bodies…I’m not sure you could do much better than the one we already have.

No one’s working very hard to change this reality, either, because there’s a lot more money to be made in perpetuating it: people who hate themselves tend to buy a lot of shit. But the good news is, you really don’t have to spend a ton of money to be healthy. Personally, I’ve spent a few hundred on weights, a few hundred on my rowing machine and my bike, and bit more on the new clothes I’ve had to buy—but on the other hand, I’ve saved a lot on groceries and eating out, now that I don’t eat much. That’s, y’know, maybe a thousand total (over the course of several years), but you can do it for less if you want. As they say, walking, running, pushups, and eating less are all 100% free.

I do agree with the fat activists about at least one thing: namely, that being overweight is not a moral failing, and losing that weight is not a moral victory—or, at the very least, it’s not terribly helpful to think of them that way. Guilt isn’t a hugely powerful motivator, and often can do the opposite, sending people into endless shame spirals. But what the fat activists have wrong is that “health at every size” is a thing. I know this, because I’ve been fat, which made me feel awful 24/7, and I’ve also been fit, which makes me feel awesome.

So maybe instead of thinking about it as a moral issue, just consider how awesome it feels to be fit, in a way that the pleasure of stuffing your face or getting drunk could never compare to. I’ve said this before, but I was seriously not counting on the world of difference in how I feel now compared to how I felt when I was fifty or sixty pounds heavier. I went on a camping trip this past weekend, and I didn’t bring my allergy and asthma meds (because I forgot them) or my CPAP (because the woods have a shockingly low number of power outlets). While I was there, I did a ton of fairly demanding mountain biking (plus a bit of swimming), and I didn’t feel short of breath once. It was wild! Sometimes, these days, I find myself doing pushups or pullups, just for fun. Just because I can. And every night (well, most nights), when I get into bed, I can feel my muscles quivering with power, and I can’t wait to get up and take on a new day. It’s like drifting off to sleep on a cloud of sheer awesomeness. It’s incredible.

I dunno, man. I’m almost forty, so I wish I’d figured this stuff out sooner, but at least I still have half my life left to feel good?⁸ And you should come join me! Losing weight and getting in shape are 100% worth it.

It’s not easy. But it is simple.

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Yeah, hell is real. Sorry

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1. Obviously, some people find the adjective “fat” derogatory or offensive, but hopefully it goes without saying that a self-declared “fat activist” doesn’t. Further, this woman has made it clear to me that I am welcome to describe her as fat. She is fat. And hey, I was fat. I’m not ashamed of that, but I am glad to have kicked it.

2. My brain works very slowly, which is why I’m not a very good blogger. Or podcaster. Or anything.

3. I’ll put this here because I don’t want to get bogged down: It’s possible that, back when I had untreated Graves, I was down to 32” or maybe even slimmer. My weight was changing so fast back then that I genuinely don’t know.

4. Of course, any excuse to wear suspenders is a good one.

5. Though not necessarily through your mouth. We don’t judge here

6. This makes a lot of sense, for the record. As your body gets lighter, it gets easier to move it around—and your caloric needs go down, since you’ve got less body to keep alive—so you end up burning fewer calories. That’s why a lot of people have trouble losing those “last twenty pounds.”

7. PSA: There’s a Texas-based fast-casual burger chain called Mooyah, and they serve an “Iceburger” (that is, a burger served on a “bun” of wedged iceberg lettuce) that is one of the best things I have ever tasted.

8. Until I get hit by a truck while I’m out biking, obviously