Lose Weight Slow

I’ve struggled with my weight my whole life.

Well, “struggled” is less than completely truthful: With the exception of a few freak seasons of teenagerness or collegiate poverty, I’ve been flabby and overweight my whole life and have offered little in the way of resistance.

It’s been my good luck that this fact has never been the central dilemma I’ve faced at any given time. I was never shunned or made fun of. But I was the kind of kid who didn’t take his shirt off at the pool, and I suspect I’ll never forget the time I heard my middle school friends sniggering about the poolside shenanigans of a different fat kid in our class. I wondered: Do they say that crap about me?

I have dreaded scales since I can remember, so this chapter will be a bit thin on numbers. I remember a wonderful moment in college when I couldn’t afford to eat anything but quinoa and Yuengling. This coincided with being carless for the first time since turning 16 and having to walk up a significant hill once a day to get to school. I think I got down to about 180. I’m tall—6’2”—and have never been especially strong. The most sustained muscle-building exercise I did between 1980 and 2017 was stacking kegs of beer working at a brewery—an exercise which coincided with drinking a lot of beer at a brewery. So even when I was new in that job and still “trim” from the starving college days (normal for my height, according to the NIH, is between 148 and 193 pounds) I didn’t have any muscle.

In the hard times we subsisted on eggs and poetry. (And whisky and corn dogs, and Red Hook and bean dip and—God, it’s all so horrible—coffee and “cheese rice”.)

For a time at the brewery, when A. and I were both getting paid and had a monthly mortgage payment in three figures, I made and brought with me every morning to work a sausage, egg and cheese english muffin. Every morning. Unsurprisingly, I started inflating.

Graduating to an office job as an academic department chair for a few years put this process on overdrive. I was allergic to exercise, sat down almost all day, drove around everywhere, ate pretty damn well—ballooned.

On the last day of August in 2017 I visited a doctor because I had some ear pain. I can’t remember much about the ear pain incident but I do recall that he told me I was 236 pounds. That translated to a body mass index of 32.03 and a technical classification of obese.

2017 was a singularly eventful year for A. and me. This would have been right around the time we were getting the pictures developed from our trip to Ireland. I was discomfited by the soft, shambling, messy American captured on the film. I’d just segued from the academic gig to one standing in a coffee shop again all day and was daily exposed to a public who needed to not mind me being around. If the Ireland pictures were an accurate barometer, no one knew how to look at me in the graceful way I’d fine-tuned over the years in my own mirrors. (We all have ways of making collaborators of our mirrors, no? Other people’s mirrors are assholes.)

Not long after this doctor’s visit I did something wild and joined Gold’s Gym. The trainer tasked with showing me around and suggesting workouts said, “What do you hope to accomplish here?”

I said, “I want to lose 30 pounds.”

“Boom,” she said.

Reader, five years later, I have done this.

Five years is a very long time to lose 30 pounds, you say?

Yes it is, but I have done it without sacrificing anything I like.

Anyway, the book’s called Slowness.

So I tooled around for awhile at the gym trying not to make too big a fool of myself. Figuring out how to use what machines for why, when. Enduring embarrassing confrontations with my reflection. Finding out what I liked and didn’t like. Acquiring gym etiquette the only way a solo novice can: tiny triumphs, grievous humiliations.

I liked/hated Gold’s: liked the community, the size and comprehensiveness, its availability and proximity to my house; hated the ubiquitous unchangeable televisions and background music. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was doing and wanted to do while, say, ensconced between headphones walking briskly uphill on a treadmill.

The best way to lose weight, I saw, to just have it melt right the hell off you and fast, was to be left by your wife or girlfriend. To so many guys I knew this happened. I liked what this implied about our cozying den-tendencies—how, once we’ve hooked up, we are eager to drop pretenses and pile on pounds—but let’s be honest, that’s probably not a first choice.

And dieting was, on its face, unthinkable.

I’d lost a stone or so now and then by eating more consciously while initiating brief spates of increased activity, but it had never been sustainable. Or, it had cost me too much to desire to sustain. In the final analysis, I was always asking myself Is it worth it?, and always the weight returned.

Sitting and writing with a beer or glass of wine to hand was an integral part of my life. Running was probably the single most awful thing a person could do. I was leery of Atkins and Keto and Paleo, wasn’t going to count calories, didn’t want to become a creature of the body any more than was absolutely necessary. I was committed to an array of habits that tended toward the sedentary and had been a powerfully habitual person since the beginning.

What I needed to do was engender new habits; to trick myself into liking healthy ones.

Probably the awfulest thing a person can do. Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash

After signing up I forced myself to go every weekday. A pattern emerged. I wouldn’t do the squats the introducing trainer had suggested, because fuck squats. They reminded me too intensely of the “gut check” days we used to have in middle school gym class, administered twice a semester by the former Marines my Baptist educators employed to drive weakness from the bodies of their budding male evangelists. In fact I wasn’t going to do anything that sucked. That was Priority #1. The only other priority was to do things that worked and to get used to them.

It became clear over the course of a prolonged orientation that you could do a little bit here and a little bit there and feel nice and sore the next day without going all G.I. Jane.

I was lucky too because I enjoy—have always enjoyed—sweating. I’m aware that this is a potentially polarizing detail. It’s tied in my memory to afternoons in Austin spent driving from a bookstore where I worked to a minor league baseball stadium where I worked as a parking lot attendant for a few hours a day when the team was in town. I drove a black, four-cylinder Ford Ranger, a compact truck that was sapped almost entirely of motile force whenever you turned on the air conditioner. I learned to leave it off and sweated so much en route to the ballpark that I didn’t mind standing on the asphalt amid the wash of Texas summer sun it reflected. A friendly man who coordinated the attendants drove around dispensing icy cold bottles of water. He had a bushy white beard and was named Tom and was the first example I recall meeting of the seemingly universal truth that everyone is friendly at the ballpark. I’d take two 20-ouncers, drain one, pour the other completely over my head and be perfectly dry in five minutes—my hand to god. So I like wallowing in heat. (I’ve never actually been in a sauna. That experience and most of Dickens I’m saving for the future, though I suppose I shouldn’t try tackling both at once.¹) And probably given my body composition at the time (one part IPA, one part carnitas, etc.) I was predisposed to sweat, with the result that even a brisk uphill walk on the treadmill wrung quantities of healthful loss from me. There were definitely times I was the person you dreaded sharing the stretching room with. I can only say I’m sorry about that, and it’s gotten a lot better.

That first year I decided to incentivize myself with the promise of taking December off. December was sacrosanct: 31 days of patriotically necessitated consumption bristling with A-list holidays; Tchaikovsky, Vince Guaraldi, Ed Hochuli; the one time you were notionally forgiven for eggnog. And that December was gorgeous, everything I wanted it to be. If I’d shed any weight at all the previous couple months I gained it back, and more, and loved every second.

For 2018 I resolved to work out eleven months. A weekly regimen developed involving a few different weightlifting machines and a few different cardio, the treadmill topping the playbill. I listened to audiobooks mostly, sometimes music—but it’s maybe worth mentioning that I wasn’t often doing anything so physically intensive as to require a good beat. I walked uphill at a 15-minute-mile pace and did it for an hour. Sometimes I walked way uphill at a slightly slower pace and sweated my ass off. Probably because I was kind of joyfully involved in a self-improvement project I thought a lot about the concept of advice.

I’ve long been suspect of advice and people who feel qualified to dispense it. Who are any of us to offer up our own life-maps as life-maps to total strangers? Couldn’t we be doing more damage than good? Just who do we think we are? Doesn’t everyone have to figure it out for themselves? and so on. But around this time, slinging my large soft body into rowing machines and the like, ramping the ‘mill up to its highest degree out of pure ignorance, having oodles of spare minutes to occupy with thought, I conceived of this small and shining chestnut: Do it before you know how hard it is.

This is an audacity of ignorance argument. Once you’re seasoned it’s hard to start anything because you know how destabilizing any venture could be and how easily it might fail. But you hopefully only acquired that knowledge by heedlessly rushing in when you were younger. That’s what youth and ignorance are for; that’s how they evolve into maturity and experience. Ideally, a person would succeed once or twice at a project their peers might have believed they had no business succeeding at, and then go on to apply the do it before you know how hard it is gumption to grander and more adult enterprises. Write that book. Run for that vacant seat. Start that business. The belief that the world is resistant and unyielding is self-perpetuating: If enough people think that way, nothing ever changes.

But I simultaneously became entranced by this koan-like follow-up: Like all good advice, it wasn’t always good advice. It would’ve been inadvisable for me to try and found a religion in college rather than the literary magazine I did in fact start. When I was a kid, trying to build a boat with which to make a transatlantic passage would’ve been a worse idea than trying to build a wooden dinosaur machine out of that sapling I cut down in our backyard.

Maturity hovered in the possibility space defined by these two interacting parameters.

Again I took December off, this time after working out regularly throughout the preceding months. Even though my regimen was significantly less rigorous than what most of the gym regulars were putting themselves through, those 31 days fell upon me like manna from heaven.

The next year, 2019, I settled into a routine of taking a 5 mile walk 5 days a week. When it was cold I did this at the gym. When it wasn’t I did it around our nice hilly neighborhood, usually engaging an audiobook or ballgame. Occasionally, when developing or stuck in a plot for a new novel, I’d leave the headphones behind and let my mind wander above my feet and record rambling voice memos. I got to know my neighborhood very well and found a lot of trees to worship. One of my favorite things, when listening to a baseball game, was taking the headphones off for the commercial breaks, plunging my consciousness from long gnarled sessions of tension into the peripatetic forest-bath of the quiet neighborhood walk.

I’d still go to Gold’s for the muscle stuff. I didn’t seem to be losing any weight.

For a time I became convinced I was accidentally dosing myself with my elder cat’s thyroid medication.

We’d stopped making a point of stocking ice cream in the freezer, so it isn’t 100% true that I sacrificed nothing during this process. But I didn’t miss it too much. Unlike sex, dessert gets better the less often you have it.

I started going to the pool that summer for the first time in my adult life. Swimming is awesome, and what could beat bouts of supine laziness in abundant sunlight?

At the grocery store one day after leaving the pool I ran into a customer from my coffee shop I hadn’t seen in some time. She said: “You have lost a lot of weight!”

I privately thought it was mostly the tan she was reacting to, but it sure felt good to hear.

I became a sniper of my friends’ scales, weighing myself during bathroom breaks on convivial Saturday nights. There did appear to be a downward trend, but the devices themselves seemed erratic and were often pooh-poohed as such by their owners. (But could the owners be trusted?)

That year I relaxed a little in December but didn’t take the whole month off. Many days I found I just wanted to exercise.

When COVID came we canceled our gym memberships. The MapMyWalk app on my phone shows a record of year-round walks and hikes. We bought a workout bench and some weights in April and a treadmill in November. I started skipping breakfast on days I went to work. I’d get a little nauseous reliably around 9 AM but a glass of water would see me through. I worked out all through December.

My wife’s family celebrates a made-up holiday every year called Celebranza. One of the rules of Celebranza is that you’re not supposed to say the name aloud except for on the day itself. One of the only other rules is that you must have three different chip-dips on hand. At one time we donned sombreros and special outfits of colorful clothes, but none of that aged particularly well. In 2021, Celebranza descended on Lawrence, Kansas, where A.’s little sister had planted a flag along with her wife and several of their friends from home. A lot of those Kansans were athletic types. Their abstemious toned-bellied athleticism contrasted vastly with our inert Velveeta-infused drinkyness, and we all agreed after the fact that something needed to change. As we were going to be together again shortly for Thanksgiving in Asheville, I suggested that we sign up for the Turkey Trot 5k. And because I was mortified at the prospect of being humiliated by my brother-in-law, I started training.

I still distinctly remember the first time I was tasked with running a mile. It was that Baptist school, and I don’t know how long it took but I can tell you it wasn’t half running and it wasn’t ten or probably even fifteen minutes. All I can say for myself is that the bigger kid took longer and I watched him straggle across the line with a fraught mixture of pity, relief, embarrassment and fear.

What could be more awful than running? I’ve never been able to quite believe those dramatic endings of movies involving spontaneous half marathons from guys in blue jeans or suits.

Nevertheless, my dad, no stranger to pride, was proud of nothing more than what he called his “steel pistons.” He might never have been happier than in his tiny patriotic shorts running circles around Lake Austin. So I at least knew that the endeavor lay, hard as it was for me to imagine, within the domain of the possible.

I did my first 5k on the treadmill on October 5th, 2021. I was 41-years old. When I texted him about it, my dad responded:

> Right on time.

Seven weeks later, early on a frigid Thanksgiving morning, I set out among the thousands, headphones on. Once the mass had shifted enough ahead for me to get running I set the playlist I’d built to shuffle (having at long last discovered an exercise that required a beat). The first song to come on was “Dani’s Blues” by the band Bop English. Reader, find this song. My body is covered in goosebumps just thinking about that moment.

One of the most wonderful things a person can do. Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash

Slowness isn’t for everyone. Its recipes for building wealth and getting in shape will be rightfully scoffed at and ignored by plenty of people who are congenitally less slothful than myself. But for the congenitally slothful, slowness does real work. It’s necessary however to go into it with an expectation of essentially glacial progress. We’re talking about a very long montage here. You’ll be disappointed if you’re in the market for constant social reinforcement because the people you see most often won’t notice the change. Even you won’t notice the change.

I can think of three men I know off the top of my head who’ve lost between 50 and 100 pounds in a series of months by going hard on specialty diets. What I’ve done is paltry in comparison, but it’s worked for me. I mistrust any diet that forbids the eating of fruit. I might have had the discipline to lose a bushel of weight but I wouldn’t have had the discipline to keep it off. I wanted to change rather than curb my appetites, and that’s slow work.

I got used to daily exercise by slowly working my way into it.

My regimen changed regularly and slowly. It got me out of the house and into nature. It abetted my sports fandom and audiobook habit and wilderbuddhism. It helped me as a writer.

By preparing the soil, I chanced into the odd surprising shoot of innovation. Once you’re doing something habitually, you’ll every now and then blip into an anomalous extreme, like a pitcher throwing a perfect game or a gene mutating after a trillion replications. Once, in my early twenties, competing in a “National Novel Writing Month” November, I spent sixteen hours at my chair typing. I had about that many beers and two and a half pots of coffee and probably more than a pack of cigarettes and at the end of the day I was panting and a little green. (I basically finished my twenties panting and a little green.) In my late thirties and early forties I started squeezing five miles into an hour on the treadmill.

Once, at the gym, I jogged for 55 consecutive minutes because an old guy in the row in front of me was doing it.

When my team was in the playoffs, I’d walk 10 miles around the neighborhood, decompressing with autumnal forest-bathing between innings.

Not long after running my first official 5k, I started doing 10ks in my gym at home. It turns out that, once you get to around 45 minutes, another twenty doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Not if your playlist’s good enough.

We added an exercise bike to that gym this year. You can’t put your laptop on it to work like you can the treadmill, but you can read on it with magnificent ease, and from either spot the tv, of course, is visible.

I’m oscillating around 209. This is still overweight according to the NIH, but I’ve swapped in a bunch of muscle for fat on that frame—nothing silly, I’m not Michelin Man over here—and muscle weighs more than fat.

I’ve started exercising on Saturdays now too.

I’m in the best shape of my life. It’s been a joy getting here, and I’m excited to see what the future has in store.

End Note—4.15.25

I’m running a 5k most every single day now and spending all told about 20 hours a week in the gym. This has happened with utter gradualness punctuated by occasional large leaps. I did in fact run a half-marathon, though I vowed right away at the end to never do so again. The dumbbell weights, sets and reps have all increased. The beer intake has ratcheted down naturally. Last week I bought a scale and at first didn’t understand what I was seeing because the number started with a 1.

1. I have since rectified this situation, spending an hour at a combo sauna / cold plunge concept with a friend. I may do it again, but I’d need to do it alone and have the entire space to myself. There’s just so, much, sweat.