A few years ago I wrote a story about a guy my size—well, almost my size—named Jared Lorenzen. Jared was a record-setting quarterback at the University of Kentucky in the early 2000s, slinging bombs even though he weighed nearly three hundred pounds—bigger than many of his linemen. Fans called him the Hefty Lefty. After three years as a backup in the NFL, he drifted. When he popped up on TV in 2014, the anchors on SportsCenter were making fun of him. He was still playing football, earning two hundred dollars a game for an indoor-league team called the Northern Kentucky River Monsters. He was wearing a ridiculous green jersey that clung to him like sharkskin. He had grown to somewhere around four hundred pounds—nobody knew exactly, because he refused to get on a scale. He was the biggest player on the field and surely the biggest quarterback ever to play in a professional game.
I watched the clip and saw a story. I called him up and went to his home in Lexington, Kentucky, and talked to him fat guy to fat guy. We understood each other immediately. Here’s the beginning of the piece I wrote for ESPN The Magazine:
Jared Lorenzen and I are in love with the same woman. Her name is Little Debbie, and she makes delicious snack cakes. We’re not the only ones who love her. Nick Saban has two Oatmeal Creme Pies every morning for breakfast. I’m more of a Nutty Bars man myself. “They’re all right,” Lorenzen says. “But I’ll kill a Fudge Round.”
We bond over clothes from Casual Male XL. It’s the only place we can walk into and find stuff that fits. I wear a 6X shirt. Lorenzen is a 4XT—T for tall, because he’s six-foot-four. He says he’s usually a 3X. That’s a classic big-guy line—This size is just temporary. “My pants are a 54, but that’s because my thighs are so damn big,” he says. “I have to cinch my belt way down or my pants fall off.”
The piece ended up being one of ESPN’s most-viewed stories of 2014. Millions of people read it. Tens of thousands shared it on Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of readers sent me letters. Some people shared intimate stories about their own struggles with weight. Others said they had a new understanding of what it’s like to battle the temptation to overeat. For years, I’d been afraid to write about my own life as a fat guy. Writing about Jared helped me figure out a way. Reading those letters made me see it might mean something to other people. If not for that story, I wouldn’t have written this book.
Jared has a better sense of humor about his weight than I do. Another of his nicknames as a QB was the Pillsbury Throwboy, so he started a T-shirt company called Throwboy Tees. But he’s still struggling with his weight.
Every story I’ve done lives with me a little. Jared’s lives with me more than most. There’s one part I think about a lot. He was talking about his relationship with Tamara, the love of his life and mother of their children. They had been together eighteen years and married for six. They still cared for each other, but they got tired of arguing over Jared’s weight. A few months before we talked, they had gotten a divorce.
“We’re best friends,” he said. “She’s awesome. But being divorced, that got me where it’s just chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp. Who do I have to live for? Chomp-chomp-chomp.”
That’s the moment it hit me. Jared had the same radio station playing in his head that I’ve been hearing my whole life.
USUCK-FM.
The great writing teacher Chip Scanlan was the first one I heard put a name on it. It’s that voice that tells you you’re not good enough, the voice that wonders why you ever believe in yourself, the one that leans in your ear when you’re facedown on the ground and tells you you’re a failure. The voice is low and relentless. There are no ads on USUCK-FM and no music. There are only public service announcements. There’s no point. You’ll never make it. Don’t even try.
That voice is the distillation of my craving and my lying and my anger and my shame. It’s the sound of the salt grinding in my arteries and the grease hardening my heart. It is the careless whisper of death, telling me it’s fine to give in and give up.
There are times when it fades—when I write a story that moves people, when I’m laughing with family and friends, when Alix and I are tangled together in bed. But every time I let down for a second, USUCK-FM comes back in high definition. It never takes a day off.
It’s hard for me to write with music in the background—I end up tapping the beat with my fingers instead of typing. But silence is worse. USUCK-FM fills the empty space. This is why I know that YouTube has multiple videos of nothing but a box fan running for ten or twelve hours straight. This is why I can tell you the YouTube box fan that provides just the right hum of white noise. There’s no mute button on USUCK-FM. You have to drown it out.
When I was a teenager, USUCK-FM told me no girl would ever like me. When I was right out of school, it told me I’d never be good at my job. These days it tells me I peaked ten years ago.
It saves its most ruthless chatter for the times I try to get in shape. It reminds me of all the times I’ve tried before and quit. It tells me there’s something broken inside me that can’t be fixed. It tells me to go ahead and finish off that pizza, because it doesn’t make any difference.
I used to wonder: Does anybody else hear that? Then I learned that many of us have our own personal station, customized to punch us in the kidneys the moment we start to feel good about ourselves. I haven’t met many people who never hear that voice. Some of the people who act the most confident, I’ve found, are the ones who hear it the loudest.
USUCK-FM is a cousin to impostor syndrome—the idea that you’re a fraud and will eventually be found out. It’s a common psychological problem, especially among high achievers. Even Albert Einstein had it. Late in life, in a letter to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, he wrote: “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.” When I worked for the Charlotte Observer, our legendary sports columnist Ron Green retired after working there fifty years. At his retirement party, I told him I admired how he wrote so well for so long. He said: “Every day I came to work, I thought that was the day they were going to fire me.”
Steven Pressfield, in the book The War of Art, lumps the forces of self-sabotage into one thing he calls Resistance, and he believes it’s an actual evil presence, like the devil. What scares me about that idea is that I don’t hear some satanic cackle when USUCK-FM is on. What I hear is my own voice. It’s me not believing in me. The call is coming from inside the house.
• • •
The result of all this is that my life has fewer colors in it. I plow my little fields deeply but don’t wander off much. I end up watching things more than doing them. When I teach journalism classes, I always tell students to live a full life—even if they don’t write about it, the experiences and emotions will work their way into the stories. I’m terrible at following my own advice.
In some ways I know USUCK-FM is just the voice of fear. Fear has it harder than it used to. Most of us are lucky enough that we don’t have to face life or death every day—the commute to work no longer involves bears trying to eat us. So those old useful fears spread into places they don’t belong. They morph into anxieties and superstitions and phobias. Instead of just keeping us alive, they keep us from being our best.
In other people I know, USUCK-FM takes much darker forms. One friend of mine has dealt with depression since he was a child. He can’t remember ever having a happy day. Despite that, he has a beautiful family and has built a towering career. The older I get, the more I’m in awe of people who have to climb out of such a deep hole every day just to get anything done. Even on my worst days, when the voice is blaring the loudest, I can still see up above the rim.
The thing I have always wanted to know about USUCK-FM is why. Where does that voice come from? Why does it pull me toward the worst version of myself? What does it want from me?
My old calendars are littered with broken promises. Here’s when I started that diet. Here’s when I vowed to start going to the gym every Wednesday and Saturday. Here’s where I wrote in my journal that this was the LAST time I’d ever touch fast food, so help me God. Here’s a Seinfeld chain, from Jerry Seinfeld’s idea that if you want to get good at something, you have to do it every day. Look at the row of X’s marking off every day that I met my goals. Look how they disappear after a week or two. This is the maddening part. I knock USUCK-FM to the floor, broken and beaten, and then I let him up every time.
The easiest thing to call it is laziness, or a lack of willpower. In my case, I could also blame all the forces lined up against my effort to lose weight: all the easy and cheap junk to eat, all the entertainment to keep me planted in my chair, all the advertising calibrated to make me keep craving the very foods that hurt me.
All those things are true, and if you want to claim any of them for your own, I hear you. But they never felt like the answers for me.
One night after another eating binge I lay in bed sleepless, Alix breathing deep beside me. A new voice came into my head. It sounded like me, too. But it wasn’t USUCK-FM. It was trying to help.
Why do you do this to yourself? it said.
I don’t know, I said. Maybe I want to die.
You know that’s not true. Go deeper.
I don’t want the ones I love to die before me.
Go deeper.
I don’t want to be alone.
Deeper.
I don’t want to get old. Being old looks too hard.
Almost there.
I don’t want to grow up.
That’s it.
That’s it.
I stole my own childhood from myself. I ate and ate and ate and so I never jumped off a high dive, never sprinted across a football field, never played spin the bottle at a party. I missed out on so much I can never get back. So something deep inside of me refuses to grow up.
Grown-ups watch what they eat. Grown-ups exercise. Grown-ups stick to a schedule. Grown-ups are honest with other people and with themselves. The boy inside me says: Fuck that.
I stare out into the dark. I can hear Alix breathing soft and slow. I ought to wake her up to apologize. She thought she married a man, but instead she got this child who can’t control his worst impulses. She doesn’t deserve this. Yet she chooses me every day and sleeps beside me every night.
She has this amazing talent of being able to fall asleep within seconds of closing her eyes. One night we were talking in bed and she reached out, caressed my face . . . and then she was out cold, her hand still draped over my eyes. Sometimes I tell that story for a laugh. But it has come to mean so much more. That peaceful sleep of hers, knowing what she knows about me. That hand resting on my face instead of pulling away. She feels the good inside me that sometimes I can’t feel. She loves me when I can’t figure out how to love myself. Her heart is the truest thing I know. There, in the dark, I have never wanted anything more than just to be her man.
• • •
One Sunday not long after that restless night, Nancy Allison—our pastor at Holy Covenant United Church of Christ—preached a sermon that felt like she had been listening to my thoughts. “How many of us,” she said, “even into our thirties or forties or fifties, say, ‘When I grow up . . .’ or ‘In my next life . . .’? It’s a way of minimizing our existence. Of asking people—God—not to expect too much of us today.”
It made me think of something I’d written in my Jared Lorenzen story: “Part of being an adult is taking care of your body. He and I agree that we can’t be grown men until we are not such overgrown men.”
In much of my life I’m a grown-ass man. I work for a living, pay taxes, cut the grass, follow the news, vote. But underneath all that I want to be a kid. I want to stay up late and sleep in. I want to lie around and watch TV. When I moved to Charlotte as a single man, I bought a video game console—it was long enough ago that the hot console was a Sega. It came with a Tiger Woods golf game. I bought it on a Friday and played all weekend. I mean ALL weekend. On Monday I took it back to the store. I couldn’t have the thing in the house, because if I did, that’s all I’d do.
Looking back, it’s amazing how many ways I’ve dodged adulthood. I’ve never had a job where I had to punch a clock. I write a lot of sports, which most definitely has grown-up issues, but at its core is people playing kids’ games for fans who jump up and down in the stands. I didn’t have younger brothers or sisters. Alix and I don’t have children. I’ve never had to be responsible for anyone except our dog.
Lew Powell, a great writer for the Observer, once said that the surest sign of an adult is the ability to accept delayed gratification. When it comes to food, I want to be gratified NOW. Alix can tell when I’m stressed at meals because I try to stuff everything in my mouth at once. Whenever I get ice from the freezer, I always grab too big a handful and drop a couple cubes on the floor. It pisses me off every single time, as if I just now realized what would happen. This is not how an adult behaves.
One of my favorite procrastination tricks is to read about the habits of successful people. What I see, over and over, is discipline. Successful people are always getting up at five in the morning to go to the gym. They cook and freeze a week of meals in advance. They block out times for reading, TV watching, even sex. They don’t waste time. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century British writer, wrote for three hours every morning before going to his job at the post office. If he finished a book with ten minutes left in his three hours, he grabbed a blank sheet of paper and started the next book. He wrote forty-seven novels that way, plus many volumes of short stories and nonfiction. That’s how a grown-up gets it done.
I’m not Trollope. Some days I watch cartoons and eat Doritos all day. But finally, after all these years, I’m starting to understand why. The child inside you never goes away. The child inside me rages at having to be responsible. He is eternally unsatisfied because he never was wild and free. The most dangerous thing he ever did was eat too much. So he roots around in my dreams and whispers in my ear, nudging me to touch the fire again.
I was reading back through the Jared Lorenzen story the other day and came across a passage that I wrote but had forgotten:
So much of loving sports comes from connecting with your inner child—the one who revels in the sheer joy of the game and the one who spits and hollers and stays up all night. But here’s the conflict: At some point, in sports and in life, you have to quit giving in to everything the kid wants. The inner child doesn’t understand that you can’t eat pizza every day, in the same way it doesn’t understand that you can’t throw touchdowns forever.
I can’t be a grown man until I’m not such an overgrown man.
That hog from my dream, the beast I’ve been trying to kill all this time? It’s the evil Peter Pan in me, the boy who won’t grow up.
I can’t kill him. But to live the life I want—to live any kind of life at all—I have to quiet him down.
Every day I eat right, every day I exercise, I reach closer to the off switch on USUCK-FM. I finally feel like I have the power. I want to grow up.
Thanksgiving is the ultimate cheat day. A lot of modern diets have cheat days, where you eat whatever you want so you don’t feel deprived when you’re eating cabbage soup the rest of the week. Thing is, my whole life has been a cheat day. So most of the time, Thanksgiving hasn’t felt out of the ordinary. Different grub, same calories. My Fitbit gives me a low battery warning when we wake up Thanksgiving morning. I’m pretty sure it’s hoping to die by the afternoon so it doesn’t have to witness the carnage.
We’re in east Tennessee, where Alix’s folks moved after they retired. Our hosts for Thanksgiving dinner are Alix’s cousin Jeff and his wife, Kathie. Jeff recently had surgery for prostate cancer. Kathie had leukemia and needed a stem cell transplant to save her life. They made it through and their sense of humor survived. When we walk in, Jeff is wearing an apron with the Los Pollos Hermanos logo from Breaking Bad. Just to be clear: Our Thanksgiving dinner does not include meth.
However, sweet baby Jesus, it includes just about everything else. The platters hang over the edge of the kitchen table. There might be one or two dishes a nutritionist would recommend—I see beets over in the corner—but otherwise it’s a homemade Golden Corral: turkey and ham, dressing and mashed potatoes, mac ’n’ cheese and green bean casserole. Gravy to pour over everything. An olive tray to fill in any exposed areas on your plate. You want full coverage on Thanksgiving.
Getting seconds on Thanksgiving is required by the Constitution. I also have pecan pie with a shot of whipped cream for dessert. But this is a fast compared to my normal Thanksgiving haul. In the old days I would’ve stacked food on my plate vertically as much as horizontally. It was quite a feat of engineering, like Richard Dreyfuss making Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters. But today there are just a couple of gentle hills. My seconds don’t cover the plate. I skip thirds. I don’t slip into the kitchen late at night for a turkey sandwich and leftover whatever au gratin. This is progress.
After a couple dark months, Alix and I are starting to feel the sun. My bosses at ESPN fought for me, and my contract got renewed. A stable check is a rare thing in journalism these days. Even better, I get to keep working with people I like. That’s never a guarantee in any job. Alix is also starting to pick up more coaching clients. We have a lot to be thankful for.
On the road, I’ve started listening to podcasts. My favorite one is hosted by Brian Koppelman, who cowrote the poker movie Rounders and the Showtime series Billions, among many other things. Koppelman interviews other screenwriters, musicians, authors, self-help gurus—he loves to talk about the creative process, and how to give yourself permission to be special. One day his guest was his wife, Amy, a gifted novelist. She said something that made me pull over and write it down: Your inner voice is telling you what you need to be Sometimes it’s whispering, sometimes it’s shouting. Listen.
It hits me hard because I realize that kind voice has always been in there, encouraging me to change my life. But only now is it starting to drown out USUCK-FM.
After Thanksgiving, our drive back home from Tennessee is 230 miles through the mountains—five hours if we stop a couple times. I used to mark every regular route we take by what we can eat on the way. My favorite stop on this trip is Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby, North Carolina. Bridges, which is forty-five minutes from our house, is the second-best barbecue place in the world. (The best barbecue place in the world is Lexington Barbecue, about an hour from our house in the other direction.) We’ve stopped at Bridges countless times for chopped pork and fries and hush puppies. One time, traveling alone, I got a second order of hush puppies to go. It didn’t last three red lights.
Whether I was hungry or not never used to matter. But this time we drive on past even though I think I feel my car jerk toward the parking lot out of reflex. By the time we get to Charlotte, the hunger has kicked in. We stop at a pizza place. My friend Michael Schur once said that when he eats two slices of pizza, he feels full and happy. When he eats four, he feels sick. He always eats four. I usually eat five or six. Tonight I eat three. We box up the rest and go home.
Weight on October 31: 439
Weight on November 30: 437
For the month: -2
For the year: -23