There’s a man who walks beside me, he is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me.
—Jason Isbell, “Live Oak”
One of my biggest fears about losing weight is that I’ll end up thinner and healthier but a worse human being.
I’ve never been anything but fat. I’ve never lived with any other version of myself. What if I just end up obsessing about something else? What if the switch I have to flip to lose weight turns me from a nice guy into an asshole?
That’s not rational. Of course it’s not rational. But if this were a rational subject I wouldn’t weigh four bills to begin with.
That Jason Isbell song “Live Oak” hits me so hard. The narrator is a killer who falls in love with a good woman and sees a glimmer of a better life for himself. But he wonders which version of him she’s attracted to: the one who’s trying to live straight now, or the rogue in his past. The song does not have a happy ending.
Isbell is an alcoholic whose addiction nearly ruined his life. The people who loved him had an intervention and sent him to rehab. Now he’s clean and making brilliant music; I think he’s the best living writer in America right now. But while he was getting sober, he worried about the pieces of himself he was casting off. He said in one interview with Lehigh Valley Music: “I was thinking, when I get my life sorted out and stop behaving irrationally, am I going to lose something, you know? Is there something that people are drawn to that’s going to be left behind? And are there really two people there—the person I am now and the person I was before?”
That’s what I wonder, too. Is there something in the fat version of me that also makes me likable and creative and a decent human being? Are the best parts of me all knotted up with the worst? Is there some way to untangle it and leave just the good stuff behind?
Most of the time I think of my fat as a husk—something I have to shed so the best part of me can come out. But sometimes I wonder if I’m more like the shells I used to find on the beach, where the outer part is the attraction, and the animal inside is dull and shapeless.
My story is “Live Oak” inside out. There’s a man who walks inside me. He is who I’m going to be. I hope when people meet him, they don’t prefer the other me.
• • •
I can hear what you’re thinking: You’re not going to be fat anymore? How awful! You mean it won’t wear you out to walk up a flight of stairs? You can flop down in a chair and not worry about it? You’ll be able to buy a shirt at the mall? You might live twenty extra years? How terrible!
There’s no doubt. If I wrote down everything that will be better when I lose weight, it would be as long as the Old Testament. If I wrote down everything that might get worse, it wouldn’t fill up an index card.
But this is why people buy insurance—to hedge against unlikely disasters.
I’ve always felt like I needed to lead with my mind and my heart because my body wasn’t going to make anybody notice—except in a bad way. Has struggling with my fat been the thing that’s kept me sharp? Will I lose some of that edge if I’m not struggling so much anymore?
What’s my true identity?
I’m not dumb enough to think that losing weight will cleanse me of self-doubt. All I’m hoping is that it shaves off the lowest of the low, when it feels like the only thing that matters in the world is the meal in the bag on the seat of my car.
Those black thoughts don’t happen often. They happened enough to worry me, for a time, when I was covering all those murders and disasters for the paper. The darkness of what I was writing about blended with the darkness I saw inside myself, and it caved in over me. I saw a therapist for a while. She used a method called EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I would stare at a dot moving back and forth across a screen, listening to a series of beeps, until I felt ready to talk. This was supposed to reduce my anxiety. Most of the time it felt like a goofy gimmick. I’d just start talking to quit having to stare at the dot. But when I did start talking, I ended up crying a lot. And no matter where we started, I ended up in the same place: Because I was so fat and couldn’t control it, I felt worthless. After a few months I dug myself out far enough to see a little light. For the most part I’ve felt better since.
Thank you, goofy-ass dots.
Of course I’m worthy of love. That’s always been true. But it took a long time to say it out loud, and until this very moment for me to write it down.
• • •
Thinking about all this makes me want it to happen faster.
I’ve set out on this slow road on purpose. Quick fixes have never worked for me. Based on the research I’ve read and my own experience, it makes sense to taper down. I’m trying to fool my body into thinking I’m not on a diet at all. I believe in the idea. Then I start itching to speed things up. That’s when the Whole30 diet starts whispering my name. Thirty days, it purrs, in Kathleen Turner’s voice. All I need is thirty days . . .
That’s our nature as human beings, and definitely as Americans. We’ll sacrifice most anything for speed and convenience. When researchers noticed that cereal sales were going down, they did a study to figure out why. It turns out millennials don’t eat as much cereal because it’s too much trouble to wash the bowl. They grab protein bars or yogurt cups and scarf them on the way to work. Cooking shows are more popular than ever—you can find Bobby Flay putting meat on a fire twenty-four hours a day—but it seems like people are watching instead of cooking, in the same way people watch Fixer Upper a lot more than they fix anything up. The proof is on the shelves. The stuff you used to find in the 7-Eleven is now in the grocery store: Lunchables, protein packs, quickie meals packed in plastic clamshells. Life, to go.
(This might be the time to launch the idea I’ve been thinking about awhile: inconvenience stores. They have the very best stuff at great prices, but they’re way out in the country, and the shelves are through a maze of hallways and down a few flights of stairs. You can’t order online. They don’t even have a phone. I’m guessing this will not pose much of a threat to Amazon.)
There is a welcome countercurrent to all the quick meals and quick fixes. The Slow Food movement, designed to get people to cook at home again, is building around the country. Farmers’ markets and homemade goods are catching hold in the suburbs. It’s along the lines of the new craving for music on vinyl, where the materials matter and you have to get up and flip the record instead of streaming forever. Some of those slower, smaller, more personal ideas are starting to seep into how we take care of ourselves. Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer, talks about the difference between health and well-being. Terminal patients who have lost nearly all their health can still find pockets of well-being that make their lives worthwhile. Gawande writes about one patient who was facing a severe disability and said he could put up with a lot of pain if he could still eat ice cream and watch football. I’m thinking about my life the same way: What do I need to be happy that makes the slow struggle of losing weight worth it? In the end, it’s not much. I need family and friends. Good live music. Time near the water. And, yeah, some ice cream and football, too.
Overcoming any addiction means something else has to fill that space. I like to play poker—every time I go to a city with a casino, I try to get in a few hours at the tables. Sometimes I look around in the middle of a game and I see a lifer: dead-eyed, fish-belly skin, one of those guys who has surely drawn to an inside straight with his rent money. And I wonder: Did he always need the action? Or did he give up something else, and the action took its place?
This is the big question for the man who walks inside me. Once I kill the hog, will I be fine? Or do I need to be hooked on something? There’s only one way to know.
• • •
I’m already preparing for when the man who walks inside me comes to stay.
There are some clothes I want him to wear. In the bottom drawer of my dresser is a stack of T-shirts that are too small for me now. There’s one for Willie’s Wee-Nee Wagon, the greatest restaurant in the world. There’s one for St. Paul and the Broken Bones, one of my favorite bands. There’s one for Rapala fishing lures that’s so old I can’t remember where I got it. It’s an XL—five sizes smaller than what I wear now. If the day comes when I can wear an XL shirt, I’ll go to my favorite bar—Thomas Street Tavern in Charlotte—and buy a round for the house.
There’s a ladder I want the man who walks inside me to climb—the pull-down ladder to our attic. It’s rated at 250 pounds. I’ve never been up in the attic because I’m afraid the ladder won’t hold me. Whenever we need what’s up there—Christmas ornaments, winter clothes, an extension cord—Alix has to go up and get it. I’m embarrassed that there’s an entire part of our house that I’ve never been in. I want to climb that ladder with confidence.
There’s a boat I want the man inside me to put in a lake. Daddy’s johnboat lives in our backyard. It’s green aluminum and still has its Georgia registration number on the side. When I was a kid we hauled a thousand catfish over the side of that boat. Daddy died in 1990 and the boat hasn’t been in the water since way before then. I’ve always been afraid that I’m so big I’d tip it over. It needs a drain plug and a little love. But it’s still strong enough to hold a normal-sized man, and maybe his beautiful wife.
There’s a place I want the man inside me to go. My friend Jon Bauer moved to Japan not long after college and never moved back. He got married and teaches English in Hamamatsu, on Japan’s southern coast. He posts beautiful pictures from there on Facebook. I’ve always thought Japan would be impossible for me—all those tiny hotel beds, all those crowds shoved together on the Tokyo subway. I want to move in that world without everyone thinking I’m a sumo wrestler.
There’s a bicycle I want the man inside me to ride. Nothing fancy—I’d be fine with one of those old-man bikes with straight handlebars and a cushy seat. Our neighborhood is full of bike riders. There’s a group that rides through the neighborhood every Tuesday night. Sometimes we sit on the porch and wave at them as they glide past our house, a rolling parade. I’m tired of watching parades. I’d like to be in a few.
There’s a game I want the man inside me to play. Damn, I miss basketball. It’s been so long since I boxed out for a rebound or put up a shot with a hand in my face. It doesn’t matter if I’m just the old guy who jacks up threes from the corner. It doesn’t matter if I sprain my ankle for the eighteenth time. It would feel so good to be back in the game again.
There’s a flight I want the man inside me to take. It doesn’t matter where it goes as long as I’m in the middle seat. I want to sit there without flooding the banks of the armrests. I want the seat belt to click around my waist with an inch or two to spare. After that, I can bitch about the middle seat like everybody else. But I’d like to sit there and feel good about it. Just once.
• • •
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dusty Rhodes. He was brilliant on the microphone—Huey Long plus Muhammad Ali with a toke of Willie Nelson. His dreaded Bionic Elbow (pretty much his only move) took down all his opponents, especially the hated Ric Flair. The best thing about Dusty was that he wasn’t one of the pretty boys. He had a scarred forehead, and a giant weird birthmark, and a gut that hung down over his tights.
One of the wrestling magazines I read as a kid did a story on Dusty’s strengths and weaknesses, like an NFL scouting report. The story listed one of his strengths as his “rim of flesh.” The idea, apparently, was that his extra padding cushioned him from the bumps every wrestler takes. His fat was his shield.
It took me a long time to see it, but I’ve used my rim of flesh the same way. I’ve forged my weight into a shield that keeps me from the risks of a bolder life. I won’t try things because I think I’m too fat, when maybe the truth is that I’m fat because I don’t want to try things. I’m a more boring person than I ought to be. The chance to be more interesting is slipping away, and I’ve convinced myself that it’s OK.
It’s not OK.
I’ve shielded my feelings the same way. It’s easy to write off people who don’t like me—I can always tell myself it’s because I’m fat. But what if I’m not fat anymore, and they still don’t like me? That’s a laser through the shield. And I worry that I’m soft underneath.
Thinking this way is borrowing trouble, I know. It’s dumb to worry about something that might never happen. It’s even dumber to let that worry get in the way of changing for the better. The fact is, I’ve got two options: Lose weight and expose myself to some theoretical risk, or stay the way I am and walk straight for the grave.
I’ve never met the man who walks inside me. I don’t know what people will think about him. But if I want to live, I’ve got to find out.
We lift Fred up onto our couch, me at his head, Alix at his feet. Our vet, Dr. Mary Fluke, pulls up a chair next to us. She has taken care of him since he was a puppy. She cries as she opens her medical bag. It’s time.
We gave him a good last week. We found out near the end that he liked tuna, and in those last days it was about all he would eat. He devoured a can every meal. He also started farting loudly and lethally. Maybe it’s good we didn’t figure out the tuna thing right away.
He didn’t want to walk far. Some days he’d wander out into the yard and just stand there. One of us would pick him up—we bought a vest with handles to make him easier to lift—and tote him back to the house. But on his next-to-last day, he went down to the corner where we usually turned around and pulled me ahead one more block. It felt so good to see the headstrong dog we used to know.
On one of those last nights I took him out for his midnight pee and we came back and sat on the top step of the porch. Alix came out to join us and he put his head in her lap, and if I had to freeze time forever, never moving from one spot, that’s where I would stay.
His last meal is bacon. I lie down next to him on his dog bed and we both fall asleep. We give him one more car ride, rolling the window down and letting him feel the breeze. Dr. Fluke comes. We tell Fred how much we love him. We thank him for finding us.
Dr. Fluke does her work and soon he is quiet, and soon after that he is still.
That weekend Alix and I go to the beach to clear our heads. It rains the whole way and we get crossways at the hotel. But we make up and take a walk on the beach even though it’s still raining. We get soaked and look terrible and laugh for the first time in days.
Back home, though, I can’t get traction. I try to write and can’t find the words. I keep looking for Fred to come around the corner, keep wondering why he’s not sleeping at my feet. When I feel the worst I go back to my worst habits. One day’s lunch: two Whoppers with cheese, a family-sized bag of Utz chips, a large Coke, and a sleeve of Chips Ahoy. That’s not falling off the wagon. That’s diving off the wagon, rolling down a mountain, and plunging into a bottomless lake.
We go out of town for Halloween, and that’s good. Our street gets trick-or-treaters from three or four nearby neighborhoods. The first year we lived here, Alix had to make two runs to the CVS to buy enough candy. Now we load up on army-sized bags from Costco. Normally on Halloween night I test the candy—for quality-control purposes, of course—and end up eating three of everything. This year we remove ourselves and remove the temptation.
But Fred is still gone, and I still try to fill the empty space with food. It never works that way.
Weight on September 30: 435
Weight on October 31: 439
For the month: +4