This book tells how I lost 200 pounds

This is my food story

Something needs to click inside us. I think that’s why most programs fail in the long run—the internal click doesn’t happen. The overeater hasn’t figured out why they can’t stop when all they want to do is lose weight.

Outside support can help, but losing weight is mostly an inside job. Hearing how others did it helps the most, I think.

In addition to losing weight, I discovered how to get along in the world as a highly sensitive, people pleasing, compulsive emotional eater. I even found my own personal secret to happiness along the way.

People often ask me how I lost the weight, especially those who knew me at 280 and above. I’m not a weight-loss doctor or a nutritionist or a therapist, though I feel I have a DIY PhD in all three.

In the end, I only know what has worked for me, and I want this for anyone who is fat. I really, really want this for you. I hope that what I’ve learned along the way will help you get on with it because nothing is better than being thin.

Though eating runs a close second.

Some ideas from my book…

Being thin helps me feel comfortable in my skin.

THIS IS WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT, I THINK. Stepping out of the shower and not hating what I see (though I may not love, love, love it every time) clears so much emotional garbage out of the psyche.

Not having that self-loathing, and the hundreds of extra pounds, simply lightens the load of living. For this alone, I would love everyone who needs to lose weight to make it a priority.

Yes, loving yourself when you’re heavy is possible, but it’s so much easier at 170. I could never get there when I was in the 200 and 300s.

I’m not sure any of us who turn to food for comfort, love, and security ever completely get over it.

We food addicts all feel powerless under its spell at certain times, no matter what stage of the process we’re at. We don’t want to eat, but it’s as if we can’t help ourselves. Something inside makes us do it.

I needed to find a way to make my food addiction work in my life, so I could lose weight. I’ve decided to keep my old friend close by, but I’ve cleaned up his act.

I’ve never lost the urge to binge—I may never—so I friendly binge, as I call it.
When I need to eat, eat, eat, I give in, but in as healthy a way as possible. I do half a watermelon rather than half a cake. A bag (or two) of microwave popcorn rather than a bag of corn chips. Wasa crackers, which are thin and very low-calorie, are also a go-to.

Hobbies are a higher calling that bring us meaning and purpose.

Working on a project daily and making it more beautiful and complete builds self-esteem. It’s powerful to effect a positive change on something and make the world—even your tiny part of it—better. Gardening, knitting, painting, pickleball, biking, cooking, macrame, antiques… the list is endless. We all have a couple. I don’t accept when someone says they don’t have one, but it may have been abandoned somewhere in the past.

I know that many times when I head to the kitchen, if I stop and think about it, I’m just bored. I’m skimming over the surface of my day, afraid to drop into something deeper, and too many moments like this turn into days and then weeks and then a life that is unexplored and unrealized and often, addicted and overweight.

If not food or the scale, then where do I get my self-esteem?

If the scale isn’t telling me I’m a good boy and have done well, who is? If I don’t go to food when I feel unsafe, insecure, bored, or generally not in control, then what do I do? Do I try to not give a damn? It struck me one day, that’s what I must do to keep this up. I simply must not give such a damn about what others think or say.

Getting over the real addiction of caring so much about the opinion and approval of others might be what it’s all about. It helps to do things that make us feel good about ourselves—even real little things—and do them every day, over and over.

Whatever you have in your life that is making you eat will be easier to deal with after you’ve lost some weight.

Losing weight may require eliminating things in life that make you turn to food. This can be challenging because it might be something big like a job or a relationship. The most important thing is to find a way to get on with it, even if you’re not in the place to make that big leap. I can testify that whatever you have in your life that is making you eat will be easier to deal with after you’ve lost some weight. Even 10 pounds lost begins to clear the storm clouds.

The secret to exercise is to find something that connects to a lost part of yourself.

It reclaims something left behind in life. The abandoned dancer or kid who loved to bike a summer day away. Then when you do it, you retrieve a part of yourself, and the feeling makes you soar. All you want is more. Walking does it for me, along with dancing, gardening and biking on my recumbent exercise bike. When I walk, I feel like an adventurer hiking to a higher plane in my own life.

Finding something you love so much that you don’t want to miss it is the secret. Anything else is futile and will be left behind.

An enormous bowl of steamed vegetables is the dieter’s best friend.

To this day, when I need the comfort of shoveling it in to fill the big hole in there, this does it.

Many nights I cook potatoes, carrots, onions, green beans, peas, and corn in a big pot. The colors are so vibrant all piled together, how could this vegetable kaleidoscope not be incredibly good for me? Even with the extra calories of butter and starch of the potatoes and carrots, I can eat a mixing bowl the size of a hard hat and feel very full and lose weight.

I had a tendency to invite things into my life that made me uncomfortable, nervous, or generally not excited.

So many of us get caught living lives of “should.” We spend our days “deep in the should.” This is how I was feeling at my job at the phone company and living in a city that didn’t feel like home. I should like a job at a big company. I should like to do something that makes lots of money. I should move to the city and take on big-town life. I should get a Master’s degree. I should like having kids. I should like to live in a nice house in a nice suburb with a nice car.

I seemed to always have an excess of “shoulds” hanging around, and again, we all have some necessary ones, though I think just about anything can be questioned. Bad feelings about something or someone are almost always a red flag that something needs to go away, I think, but I didn’t yet trust my feelings, my inner compass. This question became a turning point: What things just didn’t fit into my life any longer? Or ever did?

There’s a hole that many of us feel deep down inside that we try to fill.

The hole reminds me of this sinkhole I saw on the news one spring when potholes form everywhere in the streets and highways of Minnesota. People thought it was just a little pothole, and then boom, one day it opened up, and it was a cave in the belly of this intersection that a car landed in. Potholes are everywhere, but we laypeople don’t really know what causes them, which is how I felt at the time about the hole inside me.

I could feel the hole, but I didn’t know what it was all about. I did know I never ever felt safe or good enough or whole. Living the life of “should” expands and deepens the hole even more, and it will never be filled by living the life that perpetuates it. You can never get enough of what you don’t want, as they say. We addicts will keep at it like soldiers, though.

To do whatever we want to do, and do it responsibly and kindly, is the only way to escape an unhappy and addicted existence.

When I let myself do what I want, I don’t need my addictive substances nearly as much; I have an incredibly easier time saying no to them. And I am a much better friend, husband, brother, uncle, neighbor, co-worker, and citizen of the world. I am happier, kinder, and easier to be around.

I see it as especially crucial if you’re a male in Minnesota. At least in my personal orbit, there’s an epidemic of addiction and early death in us northern men, and I suspect it’s the case in many places. To do what you want is the only way to avoid an early death or at the very least, to avoid dying inside while you’re still walking the earth.

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