2025-01-26 08:00:00
A question I’ve started to get quite often is “How did you get so big?” There are many quick answers that immediately come to mind, but they tend to feel incomplete when I think about it. Generally my answers could have been summed up as “I neglected the basics for far too long.” This is true, but for those who want a more complete explanation, I feel I can do better. This is where I will be laying out everything in entirety to the best of my ability.
I think telling this story can help others consider what to avoid, but more importantly understand the pitfalls many experience on their way up. With years of hindsight and a more complete understanding of my situation, I think it’s crucial for me to understand the entire ordeal from start to finish. In preparation for writing this I decided to record a video of myself explaining it all from memory. This was helpful, but will not be shared. There are many details that could be elaborated on, but I’m choosing to focus primarily on how my weight was impacted over the years.
It feels like the logical way to answer this is to lay out my story chronologically. It certainly didn’t happen all at once. For over a decade things went from troubling, to worse, to horrifyingly dire. I’ll need to go back to my earliest memories to draw out the fullest context I can. Being as large as I was, is a horrific tragedy that I wouldn’t wish on others. The road to getting that big is painful and takes it’s own toll on you. It greatly saddens me that very often, relatives and loved ones often have no idea how to stop and reverse the downhill spiral. Not only does this add to the guilt and shame, but it also makes it easy to begin avoiding loved ones. My hope is that by understanding and sharing my experience, others can be better equipped to help themselves and their loved ones.
In hindsight, there are many things I can think of from my childhood that definitely had an impact long term. Only recent events have made me seriously take a look over those years and reconsider the impacts. I had a very controlling and aggressive father. He had a nasty habit of squeezing me and my brother’s hands until the knuckles moved around and hurt as a means of ensuring compliance. Like many other things, I didn’t at all appreciate the significance of what it truly meant.
My father didn’t work for many of my childhood years. Instead my mother had to provide for us, including working nights. I have many memories of him taking me and my brothers out of the house so she could sleep. Generally, these outings involved a fair amount of sugar or empty calories. Quite often we would go to a grocery store and get cookies, bread and soda. Other times he would take us to McDonald’s. I have many memories of having their pancakes during these outings. These moments were fun at the time, but I have a very different understanding of them now.
Over time, I began to grow a bit of extra weight. I remember my father bullying me over it. He would take me outside and have me jog, but then grab my stomach and exclaim “this is what you have to get rid of!”. Later he would then lecture me that running while fat is only going to hurt your joints. Despite all this, he did eventually join the military and had to spend time away from home. Many of my childhood troubles gradually faded away after he was out of the picture, including the weight. I became a very active pre-teen and ended up in very good shape by grade 9.
Being in such good shape, I certainly grew into having quite the ego. I was having loads of fun biking and swimming, and developed quite the invincibility complex. For much of my teenage years, I didn’t really think that I could get obese again. Part of this was because I was active enough that I truly never had to give any thought to what I was eating. I was proud of being capable and took it for granted. I really enjoyed biking and swimming. Since I could bike from home to a beach nearby I would go very regularly and even bring friends. I was notorious for hosting regular beach parties during the summer and I ended up building quite a close-knit group of friends that I had met all over town. Being a natural extrovert it was incredibly satisfying to bring cool interesting people I met to meet each other.
It didn’t last terribly long, because in Ontario, gym class is only mandatory until grade 10. While I was still active outside of gym class, that too gradually faded over the years, and I finished high school much heavier. I remember when I started putting on weight this time, it was schoolmates who would be the ones making comments. I also had a relative out-of-the blue ask me if I was depressed. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary and perspective to explain what I was feeling or why. All I knew was that I had an outsized appetite compared to other kids, but always attributed it to my activity level. In hindsight, there was a constant nagging desire to feel “normal” despite glaring signs things were not normal.
After some drama, my parents finally split. This was the beginning of many years of a long and drawn out stressful saga. When I tried to explain it to others, the idea of a messy divorce dragging on for years sounded bizarre. At the time, I felt completely unable to get people to understand the stressors and pressures enduring it placed on me. This was strange to me at that point, but with information I have now it makes a lot more sense. Growing up, I couldn’t comprehend why my father who had so little to do with my life at that point, would always suddenly choose to involve himself out of the blue. He would do absolutely deranged things like stalk my friends and message them on Facebook saying bizarre things. One day he even showed up at one of my beach parties. That in itself is quite the story, but my twin brother thankfully spoke to the lifeguards and got the police to remove him.
It’s outside the scope of this post to explain, but from my early teens I was absolutely certain that my father had to be out of my life. Much of these years were constant frustration from seeing him given the benefit of the doubt. He was absolutely excellent at appearances when the situation called for it, he would often be in his military uniform on these engagements. Over the years, after more and more nonsense I only became much more certain over time that being distant was the right call. Despite my twin brother attempting to mend bridges, he too would experience things that showed me my resolve was justified. Even now, I know so much more that makes me incredibly grateful I was so stubborn about it from the beginning.
But no matter how strong I was, this took a toll on me. It interfered with my school life, causing stress in other areas. As I grew more insecure I began to distance myself from the community I had put together slowly but gradually. I genuinely underestimated the impact that not having a guiding loving father in my formative years would have on me. Without a real focus on activity, I let life changes get in the way of maintaining a high activity level and often relied on fast food for comfort. In many ways I see that I was replicating those experiences with bread and soda with my twin brother as we would chat over large amounts of fast food. This was one of many things I left unexamined until quite recently.
One such outlet for this nagging desire was to play video games late into the night. As a child I would stay up late talking to my twin brother (much to our parents dismay). But later when we had our own rooms I would stay up very late playing video games. While this on its own isn’t unusual for a millennial teenager, my problems were rarely in kind but rather degree. In hindsight I believe I was using revenge bedtime procrastination to hold on to some independence outside of my life that felt very out of my control. Onling gaming was also a great surrogate activity to fool myself into thinking I could still be social while retreating from the world. This really was the beginning of leaning in to my worst coping mechanisms for problems I didn’t understand.
While being overweight as a teen was a source of insecurity, it was nowhere near as challenging as things would get as I grew larger. When entering early adulthood, I was desperate to prove that I could seize control over my life and fix everything, but this was foolish when I didn’t even comprehend the scale of my own self-deception. Often I would get well-meaning approaches from strangers trying to offer advice. Some even had their own experiences with obesity. My mental response was always the same “that’s nice but I can’t do it”.
As I entered the workforce, I was incredibly grateful to finally be making enough to live independently with my twin brother. I finally felt like I had the breathing room to build the life I wanted. The independence I craved for so long was finally mine. For the first time in a long time I felt like I could move on from my family troubles. This optimism was still muted by an undercurrent of denial. Even though I still hadn’t truly examined my eating habits, I had hope that things would begin to resolve themselves as they had in the past. I was still able to bike around to places, and spent some time having friends over which was really nice. I felt
I underestimated how my habits would worsen while working security. I became quite the stereotypical “obese security guard”. Shift work, with the occasional overnights took my bad eating habits and made them a great deal worse. Instead of fast food being an occasional splurge it became my normal way of eating. While things seemed reasonable at the start, eventually I would be clearing out enough food for a party over the course of an overnight shift. In an attempt to carve out more time for myself, I supported an idea pitched by a co-worker to adopt a schedule of only 12 hour shifts. This greatly condensed the logistics of working shifts, but I chose to take the overnight portion of the schedule. In hindsight this was a terrible idea.
If I had a better understanding of how to properly manage poor sleep, I think it’s something that could have worked out better. But in practice what ended up happening is that I added unexamined sleep troubles on top of my unexamined eating troubles. Part of this was a foolish idea that trading my present health for comfort in the future was something that would work out. Later, I finally began to understand that my size was beginning to limit me. One of the hardest moments was when I got on a bike and collapsed the front tire, having to carry it all the way home in sadness and shame. I would experiment with buying bikes that could carry me at a larger size, but that only worked so long.
This was where the maladaptive patterns really began to fly in. I had to work to keep my independence, so health didn’t seem like a high priority even then. I figured as long as I fueled myself with enough calories and caffeine to keep pushing, I could fix things after I purchased more ‘breathing room’ in the future. At some point, that opportunity did come. I was introduced to the “keto diet” and researched it as much as I could. Once I had a grasp of my plan and determined to turn things around, I started biking and doing keto. For a time, this worked really well.
With a stronger bike and armed with a plan, was energized. I would bike to work and back occasionally, reaching over 30km on those days. This was incredibly fun and I really felt like I was going to fix everything. The problem is that unlike during my childhood, I wasn’t confident enough to commute by bike during the Winter. One winter I stopped biking, and by the Spring I was no longer biking to work. The more I think about it, the reason this didn’t ultimately work out is because I failed to properly prioritize my health and focus on really understanding it. I was still looking for simple solutions to what was already a very complicated problem. The fact is, most people you tell about your problems will also give you simple answers. I am now beginning to recognize how changing serious problems is dependent on resolving other problems as well. For this entire time, I was so preoccupied with getting through the week that the idea I needed to take better care of myself felt unimportant. I was too afraid of admitting weakness that I became very weak in the long run.
Doing keto I lost 80lbs in some time under a year. It was a lot of fun, and quite gratifying. It felt great to continue not examining the roots of my eating habits and instead made progress with a “simple fix”. Sadly, this was cut abruptly short as I suffered a stroke that took half of my vision. This was quite the ordeal. Over the next few years, I would recover a quarter of my vision back but I am still worse off from it. The event and aftermath itself were incredibly stressful and I was uncertain of what to even do about it. I had a near-death experience that could have radically transformed my life in other ways, but I was scared. My primary thought during that time was “I don’t want things to change”. I wanted to keep working security and I wanted to stay independent no matter what it took.
In hindsight, I’m convinced now more than ever that the desire for things not to change is a very sophisticated cloak for denial. Even worse, many it’s clear that what I most feared was being forced to reexamine my life. If I had truly taken this event for what it was, I could have taken the opportunity to examine the problems that caught up with me almost a decade later. But that’s not the road I took. The truth was, it wasn’t clear at the beginning if it would happen again. I was in so much mental and emotional pain over the ordeal that I truly couldn’t handle thinking at all. I spend years under the fear that there would be a more fatal repetition, feeling powerless to make meaningful changes.
I was finally at the stage where I felt I had no choice but to ignore my problems and numb myself to their consequences. Tuning out the pain, sadness, and fear was a whole lot easier than facing it directly. I quit keto because I was concerned based off information shared with me that it may had been the cause of my stroke. That’s far from certain, but it was how I saw it. I regained all the weight and then some. This time, the feelings of guilt, shame, and horror were all too difficult to face. During this time I convinced myself that because of the stroke, if anything stresses me out, I should simply avoid thinking about it. This of course exacerbated by inability to tackle my problems head-on.
Prior to 2020, I moved from security to a daytime job at Canadian Blood Services. I felt optimistic about making better changes. Making more money helped me feel like I had more room to properly invest in making better choices. Without actually taking the time to learn what I needed to, it was hard to overcome my ingrained sense of hopelessness. I could certainly make changes and re-prioritize what to eat, but I couldn’t shake the compulsions that were driving me at that point. Despite all this, working at CBS meant a great deal to me. It felt like an honor to be part of an organization working to make people’s lives better. It was both an opportunity to work on my technical skills and do meaningful work. Ironically, this often helped me ignore what I was doing to myself.
Eventually, my mother suggested joining a weight-loss clinic that she found helpful for herself. I decided to give it a try. They generally take people and recommend a variant of keto to them which seems to work for a lot of people. Despite keto being familiar, and me being willing to try it, adherence was a problem. Each session I would explain that it was incredibly difficult for me to stick to the diet. Which was perplexing to me because I had done it successfully before. What was different this time around was that I was no longer mobile enough to exercise and eating habits were in much worse shape. When I took the time to explain the emotional and lifestyle factors that were pushing me to eat and I was outright told “we can’t help you, you should try therapy” which felt like an outright rejection. Convinced I was truly beyond hope, I gave that up and languished further for a time.
Eventually, my twin brother also got a job nearby the office. It was great to regularly drive in together and chat about things. I signed up at a nearby fitness facility (a massive complex with a pool, gym, and other activities) to start getting more exercise. When I went in to sign up, the employee (owner?) clearly had some sympathy for me and gave me a significant discount on the membership. It was an incredibly kind gesture that has not been forgotten. Just a few short months later, the sociological event known as the “pandemic” began as offices announced they were instituting work from home policies. Even if I would have worked up the effort to make it to the facility, the damage was already done. It seems a wave of cancellations prompted them to shut down their facility. As such, when the Covid Crisis began I felt even more certain that I was never going to be able to turn things around no matter what I try.
Working remotely certainly helped me in many ways. I went for walks, sometimes spent time cooking better meals, but eventually that faded. I was consumed with despair over the fact that I knew the measures were doing more harm than good, and I wholeheartedly believe it was intended. My trust in the medical system as a whole was already very low, but this entire saga helped me write it off entirely. Of course, I was not able to “rise above” and make better decisions, eventually the convenience of food delivery apps took over. It is hard to describe my circumstances as anything other than merely giving up on an already dire situation.
On a daily basis I would wake up for work, order a large amount of fast food and drink over 6L of diet soda each day. During this time I let my insatiable hunger dominate my life. I was scared, I felt hopeless, and I felt angry. During lockdowns I had very few healthy outlets for any of this. It was already beginning to be difficult to walk at all, much less for enough time to actually feel any better. Despite working remotely, I was eventually terminated for refusing the “solution” the medical system was coercing people to take after being allowed to cause havoc on society. I worked at Canadian Blood Services long enough to gain a modicum of understanding over medical ethics. The fact that employers were being empowered to force medical products on the general public was a line I couldn’t cross.
It was fascinating and horrifying to meet so many people at “covid dissident” local meetups and encounter many people with similar emotional problems I had. This was an important opportunity, because it helped me see what I wasn’t seeing. Getting to know other people working to shine a light on what was wrong about the covid years has helped me a great deal. I’ve come across many trustworthy people who have given me guidance, and information that has been pivotal in my quest to solve these problems. Not everyone in ‘alternative heath’ is a great person, but the best people are in ‘alternative health’. As I came to learn more, I became cautiously optimistic that it was still possible to reverse my situation. I still had, and continue to have doubts and fears, but I now have a lot more hope.
It was only after the generous support of my loved ones, and a great deal of learning about myself and health that truly turned the tide. Throughout 2023 I noticed my mobility descending into making me all-but-bed-ridden. The love of my life did the difficult and super-human task of patiently pushing me to keep walking despite how incredibly difficult it was. This helped maintain the little amount of mobility I had. During this time, my younger brother confronted me with who my father really was. It was incredibly painful, but my entire life began to finally make sense. I was no longer capable of avoiding my feelings when all the anger and sadness from my youth was relived in an incredibly painful moment of understanding. My life was turned upside down, but when I looked it was turned right way up.
Inspired in part by my younger brother’s strength, and the generous support from friends and loved ones, I realized I had been backed into the corner of the life I lived. As I slowly began to bring together the resolve to take on this mission, I began exploring more ways to improve my many problems. With a wider understanding of my troubles, I recognized I had more to tackle than just weight. I had to improve mobility, tackle my emotions, gain control over eating, become more active, and learn to manage my weight. Last year, (2024) was the most challenging but rewarding year I’ve likely had ever.
The point of laying all this out isn’t to place blame. I could put it all on me, my father, or even society at large. A more nuanced position would be to mix it up in a way that sounded nice. The truth of the matter is that blame is irrelevant at this stage. I think it’s important to understand, but to use that understanding to make rational decisions. It is my responsibility to take care of my body as well as I can and I aim to learn how to do this as well as I can.
In case you’re not aware, I’m already making radical progress turning this situation around. I’ve lost almost 110lbs at the time of writing. I’m feeling much more confident I can continue to approach a healthy body weight. This time really feels different from previous attempts. My head is clearer, I have direction, knowledge, and an appreciation for the stakes. I feel extremely lucky to be able to take on this gratifying journey. I feel compelled to share not just the progress, but the process. This project has been all about me trying to document my experiences turning this massive problem around as best I understand it. I believe that people not only need examples that this can be turned around, but also to put into perspective how challenging it actually is.
I am excited to be healthy and capable for the first time in my adult life. In truth, I am a little scared of looking unrecognizable to myself. While I have no great attachment to how my body currently looks, I’m quite apprehensive about not being able to predict how it will change my appearance. It is certain, that going from over 570lbs to a healthy body weight will be a massive improvement. I’m looking forward to all the things I’ll be able to do again.
📉 Weight Tracker | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Weight | Current Weight | Weight Lost | Goal Weight |
| 574 | 466.3 | 109.7 | 15% BF |
| Last updated: 2025-01-24 | |||
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2025-01-24 08:00:00
I went on a walk to soak in some sunshine despite the cold. Feel free to listen to me ramble on as I go on a walk. I touch on my recent wins in my weight loss journey, and zoom all the way out to the wild conspiracies I consider. These recordings are primarily recorded for my own benefit, so only a light amount of editing is done.
I’ve hit a new low! I’m thrilled to be under 470lbs. It’s wild to think it wasn’t that long ago I was over 500. Looking back on my charts it looks like I’ve successfully been able to ’lock-in’ and be fully back-on-track despite Winter being difficult. I am optimistic that I can successfully lose more weight this month than last December.
Looking at the long-term chart, it really seems like I’m back to being somewhat in line with the progress I’ve been making since the start. While maintaining 1lb per day is not within reach yet, I’m hoping to return to it this Summer! I’m more confident than before that I can make the best of the nicer weather once it returns.
Yesterday was a roller-coaster & whirlwind at once. A very busy day and a very challenging day, but I realized that I was no longer letting stress determine my apatite. I felt like I could hold off without eating that day. Short of a limited amount of peanuts I was able to endure the day and get to sleep at night, I feel like I succeeded. I’m in no rush to make this a regular occurrence, but it’s gratifying to feel more control over my hunger and impulses.
I’ve started tracking food with a FOSS Android app called Energize. I like how it gives you macro-nutrient targets and interesting micro-nutrient reports. I hope to make regular use of it! Being able to tack protein & fiber easier is great!
I acquired a smartphone-free fitness wearable. It’s a simple watch with a pedometer and some timer functions. I’m hoping to use it to focus on getting a good amount of steps on a regular basis. The alarm function on it doesn’t wake me up, but I’m hoping it eventually does. Eventually, I hope to use some of the parts I have lying around and build my own heart-rate monitor, but I’ll admit I’ve struggled to prioritize that little side-project.
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2025-01-22 08:00:00
I’ve recorded an update for January. I share some of my recent thoughts and challenges. It’s been a rough Winter, even a bit rougher than I expected. I am glad I am continuing to lose weight and make progress despite recent frustrations and setbacks. I’ve recorded this as a totally off-the-cuff vlog and have hardly done any editing. So if you’re into listening to me rant about my situation, you’re absolutely welcome to!
What I would like to know is if there are any questions I should answer. I feel like I take many aspects of my situation for granted and there may be things you’re curious about that I could explain. If you have any questions about my journey, or even getting big I’ll be happy to follow up.
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2025-01-15 08:00:00
I’ve recorded two walks recently, but neither of them are really worth publishing. I spent hours basically just complaining about hard this all is. It’s been good being outside more, but I’ve had a very negative disposition recently. I am uncertain that I should even publish this. This post is being written not for sympathy, but so that I can clearly articulate my present challenges to reference in the future.
In short, things are getting to me. A couple of recent challenges and setbacks have really got me down. My scale broke, which puts previous weigh-ins in doubt and required me to rush to get a new one. I’ve been dissatisfied with what I’ve been able to accomplish in a given day/week. The next few months are also filled with uncertainty, and it is stressing me significantly. In addition to all this, January isn’t looking to be as successful as I had hoped.
I first noticed a problem with my scale where depending on how I was leaning on it, the weight would vary by 10-20 pounds. I had hoped simply being consistent would work in the long run. Unfortunately one day the scale just simply stopped working and would then only report 16.x lbs regardless of what was done with it. With a new scale I weigh’d in at 476.4lbs 99.6 lbs down from my highest recorded weight. The good news is that previous weigh-ins were not as distorted as I had feared.
I had hoped to be much further along halfway into January, but I have been finding keeping portion sizes low very challenging. I experimented with trying to have peanuts for their own benefits, but it seems like they are too calorie dense to consider. I’m finding it harder and harder to manage hunger as the stress ramps up. The only consolation I have is that I am sure to be below what I started this month with, but unfortunately not by that much. I am still eating significantly better than I was before, but I am finding maintaining good habits particularly challenging lately.
I am frustrated and disappointed in myself. I feel worn down and panicky. My sleep is back to the ’normal’ terrible rotation, and I’ve lost dozens of hours attempting to correct this. I really hate Winter, and it’s wearing me thin. The hardest part about losing weight is that failing to lose weight is just as hard as successfully doing it. If anything, failing to lose is much harder because of the frustration, guilt, and sadness associated with mistakes.
I don’t feel helpless, I know I can continue to make progress, but I am incredibly disheartened. I was wildly optimistic about what I would be able to accomplish this Winter and I’m saddened that it feels like everything I try is working less and less. I am constantly wrestling with despair over the potentiality of reversing course.
Despite making a huge amount of progress, I am still very much in the same trap as before. Being able to do a couple more things makes the things I am currently unable to do so hard to bear. I am disheartened by the fact that my options remain incredibly limited by my size and mobility. It tears me apart that I am still quite far away from being “a functional human being”. It sounds harsh, but I am very aware of the fact that I am not even functional enough that I could be able to work a part time job IRL.
I feel broken, I feel worthless, I feel scared. I know that it will end, but it wears heavily on my heart.
Time is one of the most difficult pressures I have nowadays. I am significantly less functional (wording that generously) during the daytime. The major progress on sleep habits have entirely receded putting me in a situation where getting even the simplest of productive things done feels insurmountable again. It is a bitter reminder that my problems are not limited to weight management. Time is once again an incredibly scarce resource and until I improve my sleep routine, it will remain so.
I am capable of enduring moderate setbacks and failures without becoming too disheartened, but their accumulation over time is something that I can hardly bear. Occasionally, I consider glimpses of where I could have been if I had been more capable and made less mistakes, and feel dread and sadness.While I have a great deal to be thankful for, I struggle to evade harsh judgement of myself. It is the things that I am thankful for that often make dealing with failures so much more difficult.
I am beginning to feel the familiar icy feeling of shame and regret congealing over my mind. The numbness previously erected to avoid facing those feelings is something I am starting to feel drawn to. It is hard enough to fail to succeed at what is so important, is it really so important that I feel these emotions on top of it? It’s never been more clear to me how avoiding these difficult feelings is one of the early steps towards regressing to ‘old habits’. I think I am starting to understand how fully experiencing the torrent of negative emotions can lead to finding hope and optimism on the other side. By wrestling with my fears and regrets I am not avoiding the root cause, the desire to change my circumstances. I hope that sometime soon, I may feel revitalized in taking this on. For the moment, things are cold and grim.
I cannot permit myself to end this on a negative note, so I am going to share a couple of things that are going well.
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2025-01-09 08:00:00
I hope you enjoy listening to this ‘walk with me’ recording. I am glad to be back in gear doing this. If you appreciate my off-the-cuff ramblings about my situation and reflections on things, you can look forward to a lot more this year. of course, I struggle to stay ‘on topic’ so you can expect me to drift from topic to topic.
I have an ambitious target for 2025. If I was able to lose 100lbs through part of 2024, I’m hoping I can manage to lose 200 in 2025. This would take me 80% of the way to an optimal body weight. I’m prepared to throw everything I can at reaching that. I feel in an entirely different situation from last year. No longer shackled by doubt, hopelessness, and fear, I feel wholly equipped to do the best I can to make radical progress this year.
This morning, (the recording is from the day before) I listened to How to Track Calories Kindly by Mike Pridgen. He makes the case that you shouldn’t aim to lose weight quickly, repeating the conventional advice that losing as fast as you can is a recipe for backsliding as you put the weight back on.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I believe I am in a unique circumstance. I am not merely aiming to lose 20, 50, or even 100 pounds to return to a healthy weight, I have an incredibly long journey ahead of me no matter what I do. Mike is absolutely correct that it is very easy to make short-term desperate changes that ultimately lead to relapse. I wholeheartedly believe he is right to encourage people prioritize methodical and consistent weight loss over speed itself.
But not only do I have a long way to go, I also have the luxury of time. My other half is generously assigning this journey as my “full time job” and so unlike many others with other responsibilities, I can ensure that this is my top priority. Through this process, I am still learning what I can and can’t accomplish at the stage, and what I may be able to accomplish soon. Despite the rapid pace of weight loss I am aiming for, I am confident that I am building lasting habits that will help me to keep the weight off.
Becoming mobile again is exciting and wonderful. I have no desire to celebrate this in moderation. I want every step I’m able to take to be what drives me to make a thousand more. I have been confined by this size for too long, and I owe it to the love of my life to give it the best shot possible. I believe getting excited about exercise, learning to cook, and wrestling with obstacles to my health head-on puts me in a unique position to build an entirely different life by the end of it.
I still think Mike’s podcast is incredibly helpful and would wholeheartedly recommend it to others. We all have different circumstances, lifestyles, and attitudes. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this journey is that how incredibly personal it is. Nothing I can say will have any concrete meaning to anyone else beyond what may or may not be helpful in their situation. I love how Mike articulates that the goal isn’t to reach arbitrary targets, but to be the best you can be.
I’m becoming a huge fan of Mike’s work and If it sounds like something you’re interested in, I would encourage you to take a look.
Scale go down
I was initially very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to lose weight at all this Winter. In hindsight, I’m doing still quite successfully if I use December as a barometer for how it’s going. My single goal for January is to ensure that I lose more weight through this month than December.
Home gym
One of the concerns for this Winter I had was what I would do if I felt it was too cold to go outside. I wanted to be able to exercise from home to at least maintain some progress. Currently I have my trusty kettlebell and an exercise mat. I’ve started a new routine that involves a variety of kettlebell exercises. Hoping to make small gains this way to keep my base level of exercise above a minimum.
Reading
I blitz’d through Casey Means’ Good Energy around new years, but I’m eager to read even more regularly. The hope is to read a great many books this year. I made a stop at a thrift store and I got two new books! The Case Against Sugar and Food Politics. These books are directly related to my goal of wanting to have a much better handle on nutrition, in addition to understanding the broader context of what has happened to people.
Swimming
Glad to have gotten back to the pool for the second time this Winter. I’m finding it very difficult to accomplish on top of my personal training sessions. I miss swimming a great deal and I’m looking forward to doing more of it as I push myself to be outside more and more.
Sleep
Ever since Winter has started I’ve really felt my sleep habits fall off a cliff. I feel like the progress made improving my circadian rhythm was entirely erased by the reduced amount of natural sunlight in the days.
Vitamins
I’ve made the mistake of not being as diligent as I should be on maintaining fibre and micronutrient intake. It’s unfortunately pretty easy to feel the difference. I have to come up with a mechanism to stay focused on more than just calories & protein intake.
Stress
One of the things I’ve noticed is that I’ve found managing stress a lot more difficult this Winter. I’ve gotten a difficult reminder that my stress eating compulsions are not entirely conquered. It was a bizarre nightmare of gorging on chocolate after spending a day feeling higher-than-usual cravings for fast food. I am thrilled that this incident didn’t bring me down into caving, which I consider a victory.
Documenting
I need to spend more time recording what this journey is like. I’ve struggled to record videos of me doing things and struggling with how I’m feeling. The point isn’t really to publish these, but to keep those for reference in the future.
Programming
I’ve totally failed to continue working on my programming learning project. This is a source of some shame and disappointment. I’m starting to feel intimidated to touch it again, but I know I’ll be a lot happier once I begin make progress.
I’m wishing everyone reading this an excellent 2025 and beyond. Feel free to reach out or share what you find helpful with others. I’m excited for the year ahead!
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2025-01-04 08:00:00
This is a response to a post titled ‘Why can’t I stop eating?’ I wrote last Fall. I outlined many of my challenges with eating terribly. My situation is radically (but not entirely) different now, and I felt like it is a good time for an update. I wrote that post because at the time, I was highly skeptical I could make meaningful progress on that front. It’s a bit funny to me in hindsight, only 6 months later things are very different. I’ll be sharing my progress and reflections in this post.
One of the realizations I had during this process was that habits and compulsions are different creatures. As I understand it, habits are deliberately curated behaviors, and compulsions are when you yield control to impulses and drives from the body. To me, this is an important distinction because habits have to be maintained, where as compulsions need to be managed. A habit can go away without deliberate effort to keep it, whereas compulsions will haunt you until you confront them.
For many people, eating is just one of many things they do during their life. In my case, my life has revolved around eating. Meaning that from the moment I wake up, to the moment I pass out to sleep, I am constantly thinking, planning, and negotiating about what I will eat next. In some ways, this was because throughout my career I felt enormous pressure and felt I needed to be constantly fueled to carry out what I could accomplish. I taught myself that my productivity was directly related to the level of C&C (calories & caffeine) I’ve consumed recently.
… While I’ve been far from successful in putting it into practice, my best understanding at the moment is that overcoming compulsive eating requires confronting the causes directly. The causes can be boredom, stress, pain (emotional or physical) which are all chronic problems someone in my situation will inevitably experience. Those in that situation with me will understand how tightly intertwined compulsive eating is with emotional eating.
A bad food habit would be choosing to eat at a particular fast food place regularly. A compulsion would be a sudden all-pervasive feeling that one needs to eat as much as possible as quickly as possible. By understanding compulsions and habits separately it becomes easier to manage both. Habits that are actually bad can be replaced, and compulsions can be anticipated and planned for. You can build good habits without making much progress on your compulsions, but I’ve found that many good habits help a great deal.
Meal prep and exercise are both great activities that can radically help managing compulsions. I’ve found the stress-relief effects of exercise effectively mandatory for making the progress I have. When it comes to tackling compulsions, I’ve found that anything that lets off the pressure even a small bit can make a huge difference. The hardest part is raising your own tolerance to discomfort. When using food as a crutch to bear other pains, it can be difficult to have enough tolerance left over to put down the compulsion to excessively eat.
To begin understand what I felt was wrong with me, I took the effort to define what a “good relationship with food” meant to me.
Not consuming more calories than required
Since the goal was to lose weight, I would ideally need to keep total calories below the total energy required to operate throughout the day.
Acquiring all required nutrients
Harder than it sounds! I still don’t quite have a good grasp of what’s critical. At the moment, I treat this as a reminder to prioritize nutrient density in what one does eat.
Hydration
Getting enough water is crucially important. Insufficient water intake can be a limiting factor on weight loss. Hydration quality matters too. Oddly enough, I’ve been surprised at how much getting some electrolytes in a day can make a huge difference on alertness waking up.
Eating (more/mostly) food prepared yourself
I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning to cook. It’s been absolutely invaluable in gaining confidence and building a better relationship with food. The satisfaction from making a excellent meal is an unfamiliar but incredibly welcome feeling. They don’t always turn out how I’d like, but I’ve learned a great deal taking it on. If you start small, learning to cook is a great exercise in micro-dosing failure.
One of the problems I felt trapped with last year was emotionally-driven eating. That stress, anxiety or frustration was enough to make me want to really “pig out” to regain some level of temporary comfort.
Since adding strength training to my routine, I’ve noticed a huge reduction in emotional eating. The combination of the healthy stress release, and unfortunately the consistent pain both have improved my ability to withstand compulsions to over-indulge. While I’ve noticed things have changed for the better in big ways, I’m far from done. It is very easy for me to not maintain activity and then feel the overwhelming desire to cave in.
I’ve had an excellent conversation with a great canadian hero, Patrick Phillips about this. who told me “If you’re soothing the pain, you should sooth the pain.”. At the start, I counter-productively took this as a license to continue eating to my feelings. Now I have a more nuanced opinion on what that means. He put me on the path to taking on my negative feelings head on, and was a great help.
It may come as a surprise to some, but I’ve only recently been aware of how much chronic emotional pain I’ve been in. The side-effect of numbing yourself with self-destructive coping mechanisms for years is that you can completely forget why you have them. Eventually, all you remember is that you’re stressed out all the time but can’t really pinpoint things that aren’t too obvious.
If there’s one “hard line” I’ll draw, it’s that addressing the causes of emotional pain is essential. Not everything can be fixed, but understanding and facing your pain can give you a lot more power over it. It’s absolutely worth the time to recognize the degree your own numbness to anger, despair, regret, or whatever else. When one has walled themselves off from their own feelings, beginning to feel is overwhelming. It’s far from an easy task.
The great news is that it doesn’t have to be done alone. When overwhelmed with feeling the wounds of emotional pain for the first time in a long time, connecting with others is invaluable. This is because just as one begins to truly feel their pain, the numbness begins to fade. As that numbness leaves, it’s so much easier to actually connect with people, as you’re no longer distancing yourself from them with projection and indifference. It’s an opportunity to truly get to know yourself and others on a deeper level. While I would never wish this kind of numbness on anyone, I sincerely hope that those afflicted with it get to appreciate the kindness and comfort possible from their loved ones, God, and even strangers.
There’s an important line to draw between emotional eating, and the highly addictive traits of various foods. The strategies for tackling these problems are very different despite having many commonalities. I believe that that “food addiction” is a bit of a misnomer, as one is not addicted to all kinds of foods, but very specific signals often from highly/ultra-processed products.
When one eats fast food or other meals that require no preparation, it’s almost impossible to avoid various addictions. Apparently vegetable oil itself can be addictive, to say nothing about sugar. Many explain food addiction in a simple way: your brain interprets food as a reward, and numbing that reward center requires more and more to be satiated. I’ve been told by those close to me that I have a classic addict’s reaction to large amounts of greasy/sugary/fatty food. I’m told that I “become a different person” and that I light up instantly the moment I realize I’m going to have that hit.
This is inherently a difficult thing to tackle directly. While I’ve been able to quit caffeine ‘cold-turkey’, there is no way I could do the same with food even if it was conceivably possible. This is where I imagine the best bet is to manage the addiction by pushing that effort into preparing food if one is mobile and capable enough. Personally, I still struggle to even comprehend that I don’t need as much food as I want.
There’s some debate if cannabis is actually addictive. Drawing a distinction (above my pay-grade) between physical and behavioral addiction. When it comes to the addictive properties of various fast-foods and processed products, I don’t have particularly strong feelings on where that line is. What is clear, that a process of weaning off it, or going “no-contact” is what’s required to overcome dependency on terrible foods.
I’m often told that judging foods as “good or bad” is itself an eating disorder. At least at the time of writing this, I wholeheartedly disagree. I am convinced that if we see food as a tool for nutrition we can objectively make decisions about which foods are good and bad. By defining the purpose of eating as nourishing the body, you can easily rate nutrient-dense foods over what some people call “empty calories”. I really don’t see the harm of perceiving an energy dense but nutritionally lacking product as paying a huge opportunity cost compared to foods that do provide valuable nutrients.
Now, it’s possible that these lines get more blurry when one approaches a healthy body weight. At my size, my body is not lacking energy at all, so my preferences are focused on that. Not everybody is going to be in the same lifestyle situation. For example there are people on the other side of the spectrum who need to gain mass rather than lose it. All I can say is that experience is totally alien to me so I can’t speak to that.
I have found changing what I regularly eat along these lines very helpful for reducing any feelings of being ‘addicted to food’. I gradually came to understand that I didn’t need all the calories my body was screaming for, and that when prioritizing nutrition I felt a great deal better. I still have to be incredibly careful with portions though. I still have a very warped perception of what is “needed” vs what I need to reach my goals.
The biggest change since I wrote that post is that I no longer feel helpless. Learning to cook and making significant mobility gains have radically transformed my life and confidence. Clearly it is showing, because I got a comment from somebody recently; “Wow, I didn’t expect such a cynical take from you Gabriel, I thought you were a ‘whitepilled’ normie”. My response was “I am whitepilled! Losing almost 100lbs will absolutely do that to you! But don’t mistake my pleasant demeanor for ignorance.”
I’ve noticed a great deal of learned helplessness in my situation. I can only guess, but I believe this is the greatest contributor to people becoming bed-ridden for the rest of their lives. The more weight you gain the harder it becomes to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. For example, even now that I’ve made big strides towards becoming more mobile: I still agonize over the resistance of simple things like standing, getting up from sitting or lying down, and walking.
While I won’t deny to being quite lazy. A great deal of my efficiency is the embodiment of “If you want something done the easy way, find a lazy person to do it.” I believe this learned helplessness is what causes people to being trapped into a state of [perceived?] laziness.
You’re not going to think to run around and take on all kinds of activities when simple tasks like going up stairs, walking, or carrying things feel almost entirely out of reach. It is horrifying to think about how things that once only seemed out of reach eventually fade into being actually out of reach.
Overcoming helplessness, just like getting into it is a ‘gradually, then all at once’ phenomenon. Any small actions you can take to build up your mobility, autonomy, or even creativity will absolutely pay huge dividends in the long run. What’s clear to me is that all these major factors are related. Helplessness can cause emotional difficulties, which can drive emotionally eating terrible foods, which can then drive addiction to them. As somebody who has been in this situation, I wish I could be able to properly describe the pure terror of being in it. Every day feels like an endless nightmare you’re just working to avoid as much as possible. It’s not at all an easy situation to fix.
What’s worth reiterating, is that I am not some superhuman iron-willed guy who ‘just happened’ to suddenly overcome it all. It took a great deal of time and effort on my part, yes, but it took more than just what I had. Based on what has worked for me I am wholeheartedly convinced that anyone can make the same kind of transformation with the right support, education, and time. Turning it all around is very complex and a very difficult task. I am frustrated that people treat Ozembic (and other GLP-1 agonists) as the individual ’taking the easy way out’. I would go as far as to say it is society that is taking the easy way out by pushing these drugs on people.
One of the greatest, but most tragic lessons I have learned during this time is how much can be achieved if we really worked to support each other more. Even relatively small gestures can make a massive difference for the right person. Yes, discipline and individual effort is absolutely required to make this process work, but giving up on people isn’t what good people do. I say this, because this is applicable to a lot more than just weight loss. I have a much deeper understanding of what caring for one’s loved ones really means, and how far one should go for them.
I am immensely grateful for the progress I’ve made already. I had a great deal of support and assistance along the way. I am humbled by the investment that my other half is making in me by assisting me focus on this journey as my top priority. My goal is to reward that investment with as much effort as I can muster. I am incredibly blessed and I hope that sharing what I have learned can help someone. I am now a pound away from being down 100lbs. It really feels like my journey is only beginning to get really exciting. There are difficult moments, but I’m beginning to feel “higher highs” as all the changes start to harmonize.
📉 Weight Tracker | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Weight | Current Weight | Weight Lost | Goal Weight |
| 574 | 466.3 | 109.7 | 15% BF |
| Last updated: 2025-01-24 | |||
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