Fit2Fat2Fit (3 page)

Part of that arrogance (or, if it's your generation, wisdom) is the knowledge that you have opportunities to change. For my generation, one of those opportunities was gender stereotyping. When I was growing up, it was a societal assumption that I would like cars, dirt, and playing cops and robbers, while my wife was supposed to adore princesses and playing dress-up.

As I grew up on “boy stereotypes,” I was surrounded by a black-and-white world. Every time I played a game, we had to choose sides. Sports, cops and robbers, and G-I Joes—all these enforced the idea that there was a good side and a bad side. Maybe we were programmed into these activities because past generations thought that men had the emotional depth of a teacup, and therefore tried to put things in an easy-to-understand format—akin to females of early tribes telling their husbands, “Go. Hunt. Kill animal. Make family happy.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, girl stereotypes ranged into shades of gray. No one won when playing dress-up. There wasn't a wrestling competition between Barbie dolls for control of the pink convertible.

Growing up, while I had three sisters in my life, it was my seven brothers who had the more dominant impact on me. Growing up in a large family, I was constantly in the shadow of what my brothers were accomplishing, usually in team or individual sports. The genesis of my obsession with health, exercise, and fitness grew from there. And as I excelled at sports, one of the traditional boy stereotypes began to take hold: in any game, there was a winner and a loser; there were those who tried harder and those who accepted failure.

As I grew older and more and more obsessed with my own and others' health, this black-and-white worldview only strengthened. I began to understand how much of my own fitness was within my control. I extended that view to others, assuming that those who weren't in shape had voluntarily chosen not to exercise their own control. The world was divided among the motivated and the lazy, the fit and the fat.

True to my boy stereotypes of good vs. bad, I saw the problem as rooted in three main failures (which I'll get to in a minute) of those struggling with their weight. I didn't sit on street corners and scoff at every passerby with a muffin top. It was subtler than that: shaking my head at the line of cars circling a fast-food restaurant, or sighing audibly when an overweight parent at the park was too out of shape to lift his or her child at the playground.

So what were the three failures? First, I was convinced that people used genetics or similar excuses as a crutch. For example, I would hear people at the gym say, “I'm big-boned” or “I was raised to be a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy,” literally throwing in the towel. I, on the other hand, was convinced that being healthy was a choice of lifestyle. Being overweight wasn't about how you were raised, or having your family body type working against you. You either wanted to be healthy, or you didn't.

Second, I believed that food and health addictions were also a choice. Habits can be created or broken. After all, I had trained my own body to be addicted to workouts and spinach shakes. If I could do that, you could step away from the french fries, pizza, and ice cream. It frustrated me that people threw their well-being away for a Whopper. It frightened me that for some people a plate of garlic fries or a couple of pints were worth the higher chances of heart disease, stroke, heart attack, and diabetes.

Beyond those stereotypes of failure was a third. It was the one that annoyed me, as a personal trainer, the most. I saw overweight people as taking laziness to the extreme. They tended to have a level of comfort with being overweight. If nothing else, they got used to being sedentary and having an unrestricted diet. The problem had to be compounding itself: they chose to be fat, then they chose to stay fat.

This was one of the reasons that I went into personal training—if they couldn't help themselves, I would do it for them. Unfortunately, I was locked into this mind-set and couldn't see another side. The bigger picture was lost on me, and it would take some tough lessons before I realized I needed a better understanding of those who struggled with weight. How could I help people as a trainer if I didn't understand where they were coming from? If it wasn't as easy as a simple choice, what was it?

My approach worked for me in the sense that it kept me in good shape, encouraged my wife to do the same, and positioned me to raise my two children with the belief that being healthy was a state of mind—one that anyone could control. But this all-or-nothing mentality that sustained me failed to work as a training tool. I simply wasn't having the kind of impact I had hoped for when I started out as a personal trainer. My clients were making progress, but the big lightbulb—the life-changing effect—remained elusive.

My experience with James punctuated this ongoing struggle. Our inability to work together to achieve his goals affected me in a more profound way than any personal training struggles I'd had before. Maybe it was the fact that he was my wife's relative. Maybe I just cared more because I knew him as a person, a friend, and a fellow parent and knew that this was really a matter of life or death.

But as I continued to step away from the experience with James, the moments that stuck with me weren't related to my own missteps at trying to get him to change his lifestyle. Instead, I kept replaying how he had acted, and how an initially successful partnership had devolved into an awkward breakup in the middle of a gym. It was the things he'd said, and perhaps more importantly, everything that he'd left unsaid. For every moment that I told my wife that James didn't get it, I pictured him conveying the same to his wife. And I caught myself multiple times wondering who had it “right” all along.

Suddenly the world wasn't all black and white anymore. I was seeing shades of off-white, charcoal, and everything in between.

And in that more nuanced perspective, a vision developed. I envisioned James and me staring at each other at opposite ends of a long trail on a tall mountain. It was as if I were at the summit, staring down, puzzled by why he couldn't climb up. I had proven that the climb was possible, taken the required steps, and found victory. But for the first time in my life, after having spent so many hours trying to convince others that they could climb the mountain, I switched my perspective. I was the navigator, and I was supposed to guide them around the pitfalls on their path—but did I really know how to traverse the mountain? I had been fit for as long as I could remember—in other words, standing at the summit. If the start of my trail was at the top of the mountain, enjoying the view, how could I understand what it was like for people to find their way from the bottom?

This was the problem: if I couldn't direct from the top, I'd have to go down the mountain myself and prove to everyone just how easy it was to make it all the way back. I found myself in my kitchen thinking about the next steps for my own life, and trying to figure out how I could continue to incorporate fitness into my own activities while helping as many people as I could. If I had learned one lesson from my experience with James, it was that staying the course wasn't going to work. I needed a game-changer.

If I were to truly understand my clients, and show people how to get and stay fit after being overweight, it was clear that I had to understand myself first. I couldn't rely on any diet book, health magazine, or nutritionist to fill in the blanks and tell me what I was missing. What I missed went far deeper than that. After all, our view of even the tallest mountain depends on where we're standing.

The thought of purposefully getting out of shape flashed briefly in my mind. Then, as the minutes passed, it settled in as if to stay. The thought was a scary one. If you railed against smoking your entire life, how insane would it sound if you turned around and decided to explore the depths of a common chain-smoker?

But there was something powerful, almost intoxicating, about the thought of becoming fat. Individuals who avoid any semblance of being overweight staff the profession of personal training. They view extra pounds as a curse and a weakness. If I could gain weight, and force myself to confront all of my assumptions, the results could only be positive, both for me and for those around me. At the very least, I'd have my time in the sun—I could say that I had experienced what it was like to be overweight, and hopefully reach my audience. At most, I could experience the stereotypical polar opposites that our society deals with on a daily basis. I could be both fat and fit—and hopefully find out what helped and hindered those challenged in finding health.

So, standing in the middle of my kitchen, I decided that this was my best hope to potentially understand weight-loss struggles. I would purposefully gain weight for an entire year, stop exercising, and become a patron at fast-food restaurants across the western United States. After a year, I would turn around and reinvent my own meal plans, workout routines, and general approach to health. In the end, I hoped that I would have a better grasp of what it takes to lose weight and find health.

This was my personal challenge: I would gain the weight, and I would then lose it as quickly as it had packed on. Shockingly (okay, maybe not), Lynn didn't see my idea in the same light. As I explained my grand plans to her that evening, she looked like she was in the latest episode of
Punk'd
. That was the only possible explanation for her husband—the one who made a big deal out of her skipping a workout here and there—“wanting to let himself go.”

I was persistent, though. Early in the conversation, she kept bringing up concerns. Her tone was similar to how you'd sound if you tried to logically explain to your child why he couldn't own an elephant for a pet—patient, yet clearly exasperated that any explanation was necessary. But as I continued to push, I could hear her questions and comments change.

Lynn started by wondering if gaining weight for a year was the proper approach, questioning not just the timing but the concept. Then she suggested that a six-month journey to fat, followed by a six-month journey to fit, might be more realistic. And with that shift in perspective, I knew that I had won—and trust me, it's a big deal when the male in a marriage can claim victory.

Over the course of a couple of months, my resolve to pack on the pounds grew, and so did my wife's support. We started to call the journey Fit2Fat2Fit and explored having a website that would chart my progress. We agreed that interested individuals should be able to monitor the physical effects of processed foods and no exercise; and if we could get followers to try to change their health on their own after seeing those effects, all the better.

The approach was simple. I would stop following my meal plans and would instead embrace the typical American diet. In addition, I would cease exercising entirely and would purposefully avoid physical exertion whenever possible (or within, ahem, reason—right, sweetie?).

I would do a weekly weigh-in for the website and would write an ongoing blog, putting into words what it was like to lose the body I had worked so tirelessly to perfect and maintain.

My Favorite Quotes

“Let's change the way we eat
,

Let's change the way we live
,

Let's change the way we treat each other.”

—Tupac

“Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.”

—Will Rogers

“Nothing tastes as good as healthy feels.”

—Unknown

As a fun side project, I'd post a weekly food poll for my followers (if there were any) to vote on. Through the polls, these followers could determine which extreme food challenge I would participate in, assigning an overeating target that I would try to meet. The goal was to show how much my appetite had expanded over time and to entertain the few poor souls who had stumbled upon my website.

I also decided to share my meal plans and workout routines (once I was working the pounds off) with any followers I would have after six months of overindulgence. My goal was to have others join me on the journey back to fit. I wanted us to traverse the mountain together. Knowing that I probably would have lost even my wife's interest, I hoped that someone out there would embrace the sacrifice I was making in the name of research!

As we started to develop the website, my wife brought up one reality I had overlooked—I'd have to tell the parents. If not, they would worry that I had developed a thyroid condition, or that my competitive side had gotten the best of me and I was in some weird competition with my wife (who was pregnant with our second child at the time), wanting to “win” the race to add as many pounds as possible in less than a year.

My Top 10 Food Addictions

Mountain Dew