My friend and former boss, Frank Barrows, brought up this idea over coffee one day: To understand what dieting is like in America, get a big stack of copies of O, The Oprah Magazine—and thumb through the covers like a flipbook.
You can do it online with a Google image search. There’s Oprah Winfrey herself, smiling out from every cover, her body an accordion—bigger and smaller and bigger again—as the months and years go by. Read the headlines and it sounds like a debate the two Oprahs are having with each other:
What’s Holding You Back?
Celebrate Who You Are Now!
Fresh Start!
Life Is a Banquet!
Are You Ready for a Change?
Let It Go!
Oprah is a billionaire with the resources to pay for the freshest food, the smartest nutritionists, the most skilled personal trainers. She famously dragged a red wagon full of fat onto the stage of her show after losing sixty-seven pounds on a liquid protein diet. Another time, she ran the Marine Corps Marathon. Over and over, she loses weight. Over and over, it finds her again. Her brains and charm made her a success. Those extra pounds make her the most beloved celebrity in America. As high as she flies, her weight pulls her down to the rest of us.
If Oprah beat her weight problem once and for all, we might not need Oprah anymore. We cheer for her when she’s winning, we root for her when she’s losing, and she gets paid either way. But I wonder how much she would give to be exactly the size she wants to be. I wonder how many billions it would be worth to her never to worry about her weight again.
It would be worth almost anything to me.
• • •
The first diet plan I remember was pills. Mama took me to a diet doctor when I was eleven or twelve and already growing out of the husky sizes at Sears. I don’t remember him saying anything about eating right or exercise. I just remember a long cabinet full of white plastic bottles. At the end of the visit he gave me a handful of pills that looked as bright and happy as Skittles. Looking back, I’m pretty sure at least some were amphetamines. They didn’t curb my appetite—I was still sneaking into the fridge at night for bologna sandwiches or banana pudding. But the next day I could run up and down the basketball court for hours. This seemed to me to be a good trade-off.
The next diet plan I remember was candy. They were these little chocolates that came in a box like a Whitman’s sampler. They were called Ayds, which turned out years later to be an extremely unfortunate name. They were supposed to have some sort of appetite suppressant. They did not suppress my appetite enough to keep me from eating five or six instead of one.
I remember the first time carbohydrates were bad for you, back in the seventies. The lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Brunswick sold a diet plate of a hamburger patty on a lettuce leaf with a side of cottage cheese. My mom and I stared at the picture on the menu like it was a platypus at the zoo. We pretended to care about carbs for a while. Mama even bought a little carbohydrate guide she kept in her pocketbook. It said biscuits and cornbread were bad for us. It didn’t stay in her pocketbook long.
I’ve gone through diets like Gene Simmons through groupies. I’ve done low-fat and low-carb and low-calorie, high-protein and high-fruit and high-fiber. I’ve tried the Mediterranean and taken my talents to South Beach. I’ve shunned processed foods and guzzled enough SlimFast to drown a rhino. I’ve eaten SnackWell’s cookies (low-fat, tons of sugar) and chugged Tab (no sugar, tons of chemicals, faint whiff of kerosene). I’ve been told, at different times, that eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, and milk are all bad for you. I’ve also been told that each one of those things is an essential part of a healthy diet. My brain is fogged enough at breakfast. Don’t fuck with me like this.
I started to say something like Name a diet, I’ve tried it. But that’s not true because somebody invents a new diet every day, and half the time the author gets a New York Times best seller out of it. Here’s a quick Amazon listing of top-selling diet books:
The Negative Calorie Diet: Lose Up to 10 Pounds in 10 Days with 10 All You Can Eat Foods
The Fast Metabolism Diet: Eat More Food and Lose More Weight
10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse: Lose Up to 15 Pounds in 10 Days!
The Wild Diet: Get Back to Your Roots, Burn Fat, and Drop Up to 20 Pounds in 40 Days
Super Shred: The Big Results Diet: 4 Weeks, 20 Pounds, Lose It Faster!
These diets are all hugely popular, and they all fail what I call the Carny Test. The Carny Test applies whenever somebody is trying to sell you something: If you can imagine a guy in a straw hat hollering it outside a carnival tent, it’s probably a bad deal. “Step right up! Lose up to 10 pounds in 10 days with 10 all-you-can-eat foods!” You would never spend a ticket on that at the county fair. But people pay thirty bucks a pop for the books, and most of the time, the only thing that gets smaller is their bank balance.
Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets:
1. Almost any diet works in the short term.
2. Almost no diets work in the long term.
A diet works in the short term because it’s better than no diet at all. If you ate nothing but deep-dish pizza for the next month—pause with me a second to daydream about eating deep-dish pizza for a month—as long as you didn’t OVEReat deep-dish pizza, you’d probably lose weight. You’d take in fewer calories just by limiting your portions and paying attention. (I do not endorse the Deep-Dish Diet, and neither does your lower GI tract.)
But even a diet that’s working grinds you down over time. If I go low-carb or no-carb for a while, I start to drop some pounds. I also get that little fizz of energy that comes from being morally superior. No, YOU take the bread. I’ll nourish myself with WILLPOWER. But at some point I notice that every street in town has a bakery on it, and sometimes for lunch it would be nice to have a sandwich, and I go to a party and there’s a bowl of hummus and hummus is (kind of) good for you, but I can’t just scoop it with my finger—oh look, there’s some pita chips . . .
Oprah invested forty million dollars in Weight Watchers not long ago. I’ve spent maybe four hundred dollars on Weight Watchers over the years. Based on our respective net worths, that seems about right. Weight Watchers is the closest plan to what I’m trying to do with my Three-Step Diet. It’s based on counting calories (WW converts calories into points to make counting easier) and it’s intended for slow, steady weight loss. You can even do Weight Watchers online now, which makes sense, because the problem with Weight Watchers is the meetings. They always felt strange and awkward to me, even when I was among friends. The Weight Watchers rep is always a little too cheery. The members generally sit there in silence except for the occasional mumbled confessional. It’s like a corporate team-building seminar for overweight people. Most people are just there to do the weigh-in. We’d all empty our pockets and take off our belts and shoes, as if we were going through airport security, just to shave off a pound or two on the scale. I always hoped somebody would go the full Ultimate Fighting weigh-in route and strip down to their underwear, then stand around and talk shit to everybody who didn’t lose as much weight. Maybe there would be a pull-apart brawl. My mind wandered a lot at Weight Watchers meetings.
It’s also possible that Weight Watchers pissed me off because they never had a scale big enough for me. (How do you know you’re really fat? When you’re too fat for the Weight Watchers scale.)
I don’t know if my simple Three-Step Diet will work. Some days it feels like capitalism—the worst system ever invented, except for all the others. Mostly, though, it feels like baseball. Mood swings don’t work in baseball. It’s too long a season. So you have to enjoy the wins, but not too much, and worry over the losses, but not too much.
Some days I overeat. Other days I don’t walk enough. Some days I fly off the rails and end up facedown in a pizza. My Fitbit log swings back and forth like the Flying Dutchman at the state fair. One day I ate 1,603 calories and burned 3,343—more than half a pound to the good. The very next day I burned 4,205—but ate 4,917. That’s nearly double the recommended intake. It was a long travel day. I had a one-night stand with a double cheeseburger and a chocolate shake.
But I’m winning more than I’m losing. And I’m not day-trading my own body by switching to the diet of the month. By losing weight this way, I know it’ll go more slowly. I’ll never experience the joy of having somebody’s jaw drop because I’m six sizes smaller than I was the last time they saw me. But I hope I won’t have the pain of backsliding all the way to where I started.
A diet is no good if it works for just a week or ten days or a month. It has to be something you can live with (apologies to Shakespeare) tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
And tomorrow.
The most depressing five-word Google search I can think of—and I can think of a LOT of depressing five-word Google searches—is “gained all the weight back.” Not long ago I read a beautiful piece by a writer who lost 125 pounds in a year. He linked to a story that had inspired him by another writer who lost 153 pounds in a year. When I clicked through to the second writer’s story, I landed on his website. His recent tweets ran down the side of the page. One of them said how proud he was to have been an inspiration . . . even though he had gained most of the weight back. Losing weight is not the hard part. The hard part is living with a diet for years, maybe the rest of your life. That’s why almost no diets work in the long run.
When we go on a diet—especially a crash diet—our own bodies turn against us. Nutritional studies have shown that hunger-suppressing hormones in our bodies dwindle when we lose weight. Other hormones—the ones that warn us we need to eat—tend to rise. Our bodies beg us to gorge at the first sign of deprivation. This makes sense when you think about the history of humankind. There were no Neanderthal foodies. They ate to survive. They went hungry for long stretches. Their bodies sent up alarms telling them they’d better find something to eat. Our DNA still harbors that fear that we’ll starve. This wasn’t a problem when there was a chance we really might waste away. But now most of us have access to food that is more abundant, cheaper, and more addictive than at any other time in human history. Our bodies haven’t caught up to the modern world. Our cells think we’re storing up fat for a hard winter when actually it’s just happy hour at Chili’s.
Even worse, when people succeed at losing a lot of weight, their bodies slam on the brakes of their metabolism. Scientists from the National Institutes of Health found this out most recently by studying contestants from the eighth season of The Biggest Loser. The New York Times did a big story on the study. It showed a photo of one of the contestants, Sean Algaier, and said he was now a pastor at a church in Charlotte. The church is a fifteen-minute drive from my house.
A few days later, I went out there to meet Sean. His office has sturdy chairs.
• • •
At the time we talk, Sean is thirty-six years old, a husband and a father of three. He is funny and open and says dude a lot. He keeps his zero-calorie sports drinks cold in his son’s Transformers lunchbox.
In 2009, when they were living in Tulsa, his wife found out about a Biggest Loser casting call in Oklahoma City. She told Sean he was going. He went thinking he had no chance—something like 350,000 people around the country tried out for the show. Even when he made it to the final screening group of forty—they all met in Los Angeles to see how everyone got along—he thought everybody else was more interesting. But back home, with NBC’s cameras watching, he got the phone call that he was in.
He lasted on the show just three weeks, mostly by his choice. In that time he lost thirty-six pounds—dropping from 444 to 408—and volunteered to be kicked off because others on his team were struggling, and he thought they needed the trainers and counselors more than he did. He believed he could keep losing weight at home. And he did. He got all the way down to 289—a total of 155 pounds. He celebrated by running a marathon in Tulsa. It took him almost seven hours, but he crossed the finish line. “You get to a place where nothing will stop you from doing whatever it is that you want to do,” he says.
But he did stop. And then he slid backward.
The day we talk, about seven years after The Biggest Loser, Sean had recently been in the hospital briefly for cellulitis—a bacterial rash on his legs. His doctor told him he had type 2 diabetes. Sean went back home, dieted hard, and lost twenty pounds in a week and a half. He had weighed in the day before we spoke. He was at 444. Exactly where he’d been when he started on the show.
No one thing tipped him. His job in Tulsa wasn’t going the way he had hoped, so he and his family packed up and moved. He had the normal stress of any parent raising three young children. He spent time in counseling and it opened some old wounds—he had been in foster care for a few years when he was small, then had hard times with an adoptive family. It all rolled up on him.
“I developed this pattern of feeling worthless,” he says. “And so, I guess in my darkest places now, there is still a little bit of a feeling of worthlessness.”
Like me—like so many people—he tamped down those feelings with food. He’d go to a Charlotte breakfast joint called the Flying Biscuit and gorge on biscuits and gravy. He’d dig into the stashes of cake and doughnuts they kept around for the kids. On his best days he could avoid those things, or just have a bite or two. But when he felt down, he dove in with both hands.
He knows he can lose a lot of weight. He’s done it. But when the scientists studied him and the other contestants—before the show, afterward, and six years later—they made a heartbreaking discovery.
Other studies had already shown that the body’s metabolism slows down as people lose weight, which means they have to eat fewer and fewer calories to keep losing. But this study showed that, for the contestants who lost weight quickly, their metabolism kept slowing even when they started gaining weight again. Basically, however fat they had been, that’s what their bodies wanted them to be.
Sean remembers all the tests the researchers ran—blood work, sleep studies, assessments in an egg-shaped thing called the Bod Pod to get a precise measurement of body fat. He had lost touch with some of his fellow contestants and didn’t realize that many of them had gained their weight back, too. He agreed to talk to the Times for their story, but when it came out it was an anvil on his chest. He had given speeches around the country telling people they could lose weight the way he had. He felt like a hypocrite: “It’s like, anyone that had inspiration from me before . . . now I’m disqualified from being inspirational.”
The response to the story surprised him. People were encouraged that he was still trying. They supported him no matter what. The people who loved him still loved him. Sean and I talk about this for a while. We struggle with the same fears. A lot of the time, because we haven’t loved ourselves, we don’t think other people will love us. We don’t think we deserve to be loved. We both turn to food for a moment of peace.
“I’d look in the mirror, and I’m like, what is wrong with me?” Sean says. “Why can’t I feel fulfilled or happy? And for me, the feeling was like, if my stomach was full, then I was comfortable. I’ve eaten; I’m good; I’m full.”
He looks at me across his desk. I nod back. I know exactly what he means.
We’re about the same size right now, Sean and I. We are two fat men trying hard to be something else. He found a better version of himself and lost it again. I’ve never seen my better version.
Sean has nothing but good things to say about his time on The Biggest Loser. I believe him, but I can’t stand the show. I hate the way they run the contestants until it looks like they’re about to die. I hate the double-meaning dagger of the title. I hate, more than anything, the way they make the men take their shirts off when they weigh in, all their shame displayed for ratings’ sake, so viewers will stare in disgust and tune in again next week. Under all the inspiration is the rancid smell of a freak show. And I hate it so much because I know it would probably work. If I had to take my shirt off over and over on national TV, I would goddamn sure lose weight. Or die trying.
But no one lives on camera forever. What happens when the lights go off, and the support staff goes home, and our own bodies work against us?
Sean is a pastor, and I am a believer, and so we talk about God for a while. I tell Sean that when it comes to my weight, sometimes it feels as if I’m set up to fail. Sean sees it differently: “I think God is like, Look, son, I really need you to listen to me.”
What causes us to fail: the devil’s whisper in our ears, or the angel we ignore? At some point it doesn’t matter. The number on the scale reads the same.
Eat less and exercise.
That’s what some of you are saying right now. That’s what some of you have said the whole time you’ve been reading this book. That’s what some of you say—maybe not out loud, but you say it—every time you see a fat person downing fried eggs in a diner, or overstuffing a bathing suit on the beach, or staring out from one of those good-Lord-what-happened-to-her? stories in the gossip magazines.
Eat less and exercise.
Yes sir, yes ma’am, thank you for the advice. We will take that under consideration—me, and Sean, and Oprah, and all the millions of others like us. Eat less and exercise. Such a simple thing.
What I want you to understand, more than anything else, is that telling a fat person Eat less and exercise is like telling a boxer Don’t get hit.
You act as if there’s not an opponent.
Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides. The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.
On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of doughnuts couldn’t fill.
My compulsion to eat comes from all those places. I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense. But I’m always craving an emotional high, the kind that comes from making love, or being in the crowd for great live music, or watching the sun come up over the ocean. And I’m always wanting something to counter the low, when I’m anxious about work or arguing with family or depressed for reasons I can’t understand.
There’s a scene in the movie Monster’s Ball that I think about a lot. Halle Berry’s character, Leticia, has lost almost everything. Her husband went to the electric chair. Her son was hit by a car and died. She winds up in her living room with Hank, Billy Bob Thornton’s character, who has been through some shit of his own. They barely know each other but they start to talk, and she starts to cry, and then she turns to him and starts taking off her clothes. “Can you make me feel good?” she begs him, and her voice goes low and ragged. “Just make me feel good.”
That’s all I want sometimes. Just something to make me feel good. At the right time, or in the right place, I can find something higher: satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment. But food brings me the quickest gratification, the swiftest bliss. Those feelings aren’t the same as the higher ones. But they almost rhyme.
Just make me feel good, my whole being begs. So I rise like a sleepwalker and head for the fridge.
The hardest part of South Dakota was the stupid green dinosaur.
A group of us flew up to Rapid City to see our friends Gina Nania and David Gwinn for Gina’s sixtieth birthday. We packed as much into three days as we could. We marveled at the Black Hills. We saw Mount Rushmore at night, the presidents’ heads hovering in the dark like spooks. We clambered around the Badlands, which look like the Grand Canyon turned inside out. We saw bighorn sheep and herds of buffalo and a billion prairie dogs. We laughed at a wild burro that poked its snout in our car and scratched its chin on the edge of the window. We visited Wall Drug, which was like the entire tourist strip of Myrtle Beach condensed into a bouillon cube.
Alix and I walked miles every day and slept like boards every night. We got closer to some of our favorite people. The whole trip was fantastic.
Except when I looked up from the bottom of the hill at the green concrete dinosaur.
Five dinosaurs, actually. They’re part of Dinosaur Park, a tourist attraction in Rapid City since the 1930s. They’re all painted green, and you can see the big one—the brontosaurus—from just about anywhere in town. It’s an obvious place to visit if you’re tooling around Rapid City. We went on the first day. The only thing was, we had to climb up the side of a hill to get there.
I didn’t mind climbing a hill to see Hadrian’s Wall. I wasn’t crazy about climbing a hill to see concrete dinosaurs.
This is what I do when we talk about trying something hard. I grumble about it. I convince myself it’s not worth doing anyway. I sigh and mutter and bitch under my breath, knowing Alix will hear me but hoping nobody else does.
Later on I found out there had been a lot of email traffic about me before the trip even started. We were up there during the week of the Crazy Horse Volksmarch, a six-mile hike that’s one of the rare chances every year to get a close look at the massive Crazy Horse mountain carving. Our group of friends includes some die-hard hikers, and they hoped everybody would go on the Volksmarch. There was no way I could do six miles, especially if part of the trail was uphill. Notes got passed back and forth. In the end, half the group hiked, the rest of us went to Deadwood, and we met up later on. It all turned out fine. But I suspect everybody would’ve gone to Crazy Horse if I hadn’t been around.
And now, this damn hill. I grumbled and started to climb.
The path didn’t have great railings—they were really low in places, and I had to hunch over to hang on. The steps got steeper. I had to stop a couple times. Our friend Chuck Lampe, who could’ve bounded up the steps two at a time, hung back and talked to me as I caught my breath. I pulled myself up the last few steps to the top, ready to hate the stupid green dinosaurs.
The view was breathtaking.
I’m enough of a flatlander that looking down from the top of anything is still a surprise. The city pooled down below us, and lights from houses twinkled in the hills. A breeze came off the prairie and cooled my sweat. I’m from the coast and Alix grew up on Lake Michigan. We both miss the wind. You don’t get much wind in Charlotte. But here it was on the first night of our trip. The rest of the weekend was gravy once we felt that wind.
It turns out this way almost every time something is physically challenging. I don’t want to do it. I try to get out of it. I grumble about having to do it. Then I do it and it’s great. It seems like I would remember, having repeated the pattern this long. But my rat brain—the part that operates on fear and instinct—always wants to say no. My rat brain cares only about survival. It doesn’t know the value of doing something hard. And it has no understanding of why it felt so good to have the wind in my face at the top of the hill.
I need a poster that says DON’T LISTEN TO THE RAT BRAIN. Maybe it could have a green dinosaur on it.
Weight on May 31: 449
Weight on June 30: 444
For the month: -5