The Dead Weight

Come follow me at Stunt Eating.

Season three starts this Friday. Come back then for the new site.

Here are some final numbers in regards to the fad-diet diet I did on Revival of the Faddist and the no-diet diet I did on The Dead Weight.

I did fad diets on and off for about 200 days and lost 54 pounds.

I did “no” diet for about 250 days and lost 50 pounds.

So, what’s next?

What’s next is “Season 3.”

I like the ideas of blogs with ends. Most blogs just go on and on. I like the idea of a blog being a self-contained unit. I kind of think of them as seasons of a TV show. Revival of the Faddist, was season 1. This blog, The Dead Weight, was season 2. In May I will be starting season 3 with a new site which will be the final site in my weight loss trilogy. I feel I’ve worked on two sites devoted to both ends of the dieting spectrum and now it’s time to take what I learned and use it to finally complete my weight loss project. This will probably take another 9 months to a year, I’m guessing.

I will be posting an update here once things are ready but in May everything will transition to the as-yet-unnamed new site.

In the meantime, if you enjoy this site and you haven’t read Revival of the Faddist, I’ve picked out some of my favorite posts or posts that I got the most feedback on.

The Essential Revival of the Faddist

1. The First Post – An introduction to everything and an explanation of why I’m jealous of 1000 pound people.

2. The Ghetto 48-Hour Miracle Diet – In the summary of my experience on the Hollywood 48-hour miracle diet I give the recipe for my home made version (which I’ve heard from a few people worked just as well).

3. The Master Cleanse – I talk about my history with the incredibly moronic Master Cleanse.

4. The Graham Diet – Where I test out the efficacy of Sylvester Graham’s (inventor of the Graham Cracker) diet to curb sexual urges.

5. The Fate Diet aka The Dipshit-Proof Diet – My improvement on the internet sensation “Idiot-Proof Diet.”

When I first started this site I talked about a previous diet I had been on. Well, I had blogged about that diet too. While this site was a non-diet diet, that site was a fad-diet diet. You can read all about it at Revival of the Faddist.

The story about both of those sites is told there in Connecting the Dots Parts I and II.

Part III of this story is still to come.

That’s right. I had my last weigh-in last night. Well, my last weigh-in on this blog at least. But not the last in the course of my weight loss.  I’m going to make some changes in regards to how much I post, when I post and what I post about so I’m going to change things up. This is all going to make sense in a few days time, but for now you’ll just have to go with me on this.

I started this site on June 1st weighing 316 pounds.

I stepped on the scale last night weighing 266 pounds.

Total weight lost since day 1: 50 pounds.

That seems like a good milestone to end the official weight-loss portion of this blog on.

But come back later this week and in the following weeks to see what the next chapter is in my weight loss journey.

Good christ, I just googled “weight loss journey” to see how hackneyed a phrase it was and it came up over half a million times. I need to be more original than that.

Time to hit the thesaurus.

[flip, flip, flip]

Aha, here we go.

Come back later this week and in the following weeks to see what the next chapter is in my weight loss peregrination.

This is off topic.

 I’ve always had issues with getting up in the morning. I mean, I know everybody does. Or most everybody I associate with does. Occasionally I’ll meet someone who tells me they wake up at 4:30 every day to swim laps or go for a jog. My disgust for these people is overwhelming. They might as well tell me, “Everyday I get a mason jar and put a hamster inside then seal it and watch him suffocate.” All I can think is: you animal.

Losing weight, while it hasn’t been necessarily a super fast process for me, has been relatively easy. I do put thought into it and there is an aspect of it being challenging, but it has been very do-able for me. On the other hand, I’ve spent years trying to find a way to make getting up in the morning easier for me and I haven’t had much luck. If you read anything about it you’ll get simpleminded tips of non-information like, “Go to bed earlier.” Oh, really? You think? That’s great news because I had been sitting in a rocking chair sticking a fondue fork into my thigh for hours trying to stay up until 2:30 every night.

Obviously if you’re staying up late there’s a reason for it. But the bigger issue is that having a hard time waking up in the morning is not always a matter of how much sleep you had the night before. We’ve all had the experience of getting a few hours of sleep and waking up and feeling great, or sleeping for 12 hours and only getting up begrudgingly. I don’t know why this is. You read about a sleep cycle and how it’s easier to get up at certain point along that cycle, and I’m sure that plays a part in it. But I have a feeling it’s not as easy as saying “My sleep cycle is 3.5 hours, so if wake up after 7 hours I’ll be perfectly refreshed.” I have a feeling your cycle can vary from night to night depending on how long you’ve been awake, what you’ve eaten, how much exercise you got and things like that.

So maybe if I got up and went to bed at the exact same time every day and ate a similar type and amount of food every day and got a similar amount of exercise every day, then maybe I would be able to pinpoint the exact amount of sleep I need to make getting up in the morning the most pleasurable. But that always seems like a backwards way to live your life.

What I’ve always wanted were tips that made getting up easier regardless of how much sleep you had or things like that. Something like, “Swallow a tablespoon of cod liver oil before bed and you’ll wake up refreshed.” Unfortunately, I never really found anything like that. But I’ve stumbled across something that has worked really well for me the past few weeks so it may help someone else. It’s not something super clever like the cod liver oil thing would be, but I think it has made getting up for me about 50% less dreadful in the morning. And the tip is simply this: set your alarm for a half hour earlier than you need to get up in the morning. For example, I need to wake up around 8:30 every morning in order to get the things done which I need to get done and leave for work on time. So, for years I’ve set my alarm for 8:30 as that seems to make the most sense. I usually go to bed between 1 and 3 am so I get anywhere between 5 1/2 to 7 1/2 hours of sleep. As an experiment, a few weeks ago I set my alarm for 8 o’clock and I found it was easier getting up in the morning. My first thought was that I was catching the right part of my sleep cycle, but since the amount of time I was sleeping still varied by two hours, that couldn’t be it. But there was no denying  that it was significantly easier.

Here’s my theory as to why it works, and although this is off topic you’ll recognize the same thinking that runs through my posts on weight loss. Theoretically, getting up at 8 should be harder than getting up at 8:30 given that I haven’t changed the time I go to bed at all. But there’s some part of my brain — and maybe this means I’m weakminded that I fall for my own psychological tricks — that says, “I must have no problem getting up at 8, because if I did I wouldn’t have decided to wake up at 8 when I could just as easily have set the alarm for 8:30.” just by setting the alarm earlier than you need to, you are subconciously implying to yourself that you’re more than capable of getting up at that time.

There are two keys to making this work. First, is that you can’t just set your alarm clock a half hour earlier in order to press the snooze button for 30 minutes. Whatever you set it for is the time you get up. The second thing is that you can’t fill that half hour with things to do. I’m not telling you to get up early and journal or salute the sun or anything like that. The reason this works is because you’re getting up early unnecessarily. If you fill that time with something to do, then you’re not getting up early for the hell of it, you’re getting up early to work on your screenplay, or whatever, and you’ll hate getting up again because you’re getting up for some reason.

All I do with that extra half hour is putter around a bit. Take a little more time getting ready. Perhaps cook some breakfast, watch some Sportscenter. And I’m being completely honest when I tell you that it has made getting up much easier for me.

Losing weight, getting up in the morning — these things are frequently issues of mind over matter. By making things unnecessarily difficult to yourself you’re saying, “Hey, I’m a superstar. I find this so easy I’m making it challenging for the sport of it.” And the reptilian part of your brain that usually gets in your way gets fooled. Or at least mine does.

Sorry for the unplanned break last week. As you probably know, last Tuesday was a very exciting day. And although I’m not African-American myself, the events of that day left me feeling proud of my black brothers and sisters and hopeful in a way that transcends race.

Of course what I’m referring to is the antics of Joelle and Carla on The Biggest Loser. It’s classic stuff.

There is a mindset that I’ve been trying to codify. It’s an idea that has kind of existed in the back of my mind for a while now and I think it has helped me as far as not veering too far off course.

Here’s the thing, I think when trying to lose weight, one has to come up with a new way to view hunger and temptation. Giving into these is what’s going to keep you fat, but I don’t think they can be avoided either. Sure, there are diets that say you don’t have to ever be hungry, but that’s only because they let you eat as much lettuce and wild rice as you want. So what you lose in hunger you end up gaining in temptation because eating a lot of some low calorie options isn’t mentally satisfying, even if you do manage to satisfy your gut. So how do we look at hunger and temptation in a way that is beneficial?

Oscar Wilde once wrote a letter while he was in prison that was published after he died under the title De Profundis [From the Depths].  Here’s a paragraph I always liked from it. If you’re the type of person who has no interest in reading a paragraph from Oscar Wilde, at least read the bold sentence.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one’s character. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame – each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.

So, in the interest of making everything that happens to me good for me, here is how I think of hunger and temptation when I’m faced with one or the other. Instead of viewing  them as some indication of my own weakness or lack of commitment, I instead think of them as byproducts of my success. The only reason you’re feeling hunger or craving a cheesesteak is because you are on the right path. I don’t mean that you should starve yourself, but any normal person can exist on three reasonably-sized meals a day. So if you get super hungry between lunch and dinner, that’s okay. If you are craving a half-gallon of chocolate ice-cream, that’s okay too. The only reason you’re craving it is because you’re successfully avoiding it. You know who doesn’t crave chocolate ice-cream? The person who just consumed a container of chocolate ice cream.

I adopted this way of thinking months ago and have found it very helpful. I still get hungry, but now I welcome it. In fact, if I don’t get a little hungry I kind of miss it. It’s not that it’s a pleasant sensation really, but it’s an unpleasant sensation that I know signifies progress. It’s like using Listerine. After 10 seconds your mouth starts to burn a little, but you hold it in as best you can because you interpret that discomfort as germs being killed (whether that’s true or not). Between-meal hunger, or temptation to eat the whole pizza rather than two slices is a little bit of Listerine on your gut. Feel the burn.

I started watching the new season of The Biggest Loser last week. Nothing much differentiated it from any other episode of The Biggest Loser I’ve ever seen except that somebody’s grandpa passed out. Oh, and this season’s group is particularly robust. One of them hoisted herself up onto a set of parallel bars which quickly turned into parabola bars. I know there is something horribly hypocritical about having weight to lose and making fun of fat people, but I can’t help myself. And I figure if I do reach my goal weight at some point in the future I will have lost my window to make fun of fat people. Then I’d just be a jerk. But now calling someone fat is self-deprecating in a way. It’s our N-word, fat people, enjoy that perk.

There’s another fat person show on Lifetime. I’m not much of a Lifetime Network watcher, due mostly to my possession of a penis and scrotum sack, but this show looks particularly uninteresting. Has anyone watched this DietTribe thing? The cast looks like the fat Facts of Life. In fact, if it’s not too late they should change the name to The Fats of Life. And have a theme song like:

You take the pizza
You take the hoagie
You take them both and then you have
Your afternoon snack, your afternoon snack

How are your New Year’s resolutions going? What? You F’d up already? Well, there’s always next year.

I used to think that the type of people who make New Year’s resolutions are really devoted to self-improvement and have a plan for themselves. These people know about setting goals and are committing themselves to achieving them. But I don’t believe that anymore. I mean seriously, a year? That’s the unit of time measurement you’re going to make your plans around? Seems unnecessarily long. Why stop at a year? Why not make New Decade resolutions? That’s nine less times you’ll have to resolve to do anything. You can be like,

My resolution for 2010 was to quit smoking, but then in February I got drunk at my brother’s wedding and borrowed a few smokes from my uncle and started up again. Well… I guess I’ll try again in 2020.

People often say things like, “New Year’s Eve is for amateurs.” People who say that tend to be people who think there is something cool about “going pro” at getting drunk and having a miserable evening surrounded by strangers. But while I don’t agree it’s for amateurs in that sense, I do think it’s true that New Year’s is a time for amateurs in regards to people making changes in their lives. Nobody who really is committed to making a change waits around for some arbitrary start date. Every time some fat broad in my office says, “I start my new diet on Monday!” What I hear is, “I pretend to start my new diet on Monday.”

So if you’re pissed at yourself for screwing up your New Year’s resolutions already, drop it.

Just start over and start now.