I am an analytical introvert by nature, and over the last few years, I have let myself become somewhat socially isolated, partly by choice, partly by laziness, partly by circumstance. The pandemic, of course, exacerbates that condition. Even without it, though, I tend not to reach out to people to go out and do things. I do my own thing, often online, or with my family. It’s “easy” to do nothing to arrange social events when you’re an analytical introvert. It’s my default mode.
With the impact of Covid, I’ve been reading a few posts online about social connectivity, and how for many people, their network has changed over the years as they aged. At one point, it was likely their class list at school. Or a sports team they were on. Maybe later it was an address book, or perhaps an email list or contact list. But in the same vein that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and saw it expand, many people use their social media contacts as their “network” for friends. It is often a “social calendar” tool by default.
On one site, they had the equivalent of a “social connectivity” test and while it didn’t seem very scientific, and was just as likely to lead to spamming, I liked some of the ideas built into it and decided to use my FaceBook friends list as my data set to look back at my social “connectedness” in the last two years.
This isn’t a big data set as I am, as I said, an analytical introvert. I rarely “add” people as friends on Facebook lightly, and I’ve usually kept it to around 100 for most of the years I’ve used it. Recently, I’ve “let” it creep up a bit more and it nows stand at a whopping 126 people. Now, for the test of “social connectedness”, let’s triage those numbers.
If you want to play along, I recommend going to FB, clicking on your own profile, looking at your long list of FB friends, highlighting the whole list, and pasting it into an editor or email or notepad. Then, search and replace the word FRIENDS with “” (i.e., nothing) to get rid of it, and then do the same with the word “FRIEND” (they both show up twice for every entry, this just cleans things a bit). If you want to get really aggressive, you could eliminate multiple spaces and hard returns too, but not really worth it. When you’re done, you’ll have a long list of your FB friends with a bunch of extra spacing and formatting around them, but that’s okay, you’ll be editing soon enough. Alternatively, you could just go through the categories below to see the types of people you “eliminate”, and then just count the ones who still fit, just a lot harder to do that mentally.
A. Eliminate family members
Your family may be wonderful people, you may even be friends with them, but they are not “friends” in the normal sense. So they don’t “count” towards your social node total.
For me, twenty-eight people on the FB list are family. I see them sporadically, stay in touch, but for “my side” of the family, I usually see them once or maybe twice a year. I have a brother who I actually like (not all family members like each other, you know, it’s not a law) and he lives in town, but I still only see him maybe once or twice a year. I do better on Andrea’s side of the family, but there is a family cottage that everyone goes to regularly so it’s easier to see them then. Regardless, I have to take them off the potential “nodes” list.
B. Eliminate work-only friends
The research is mixed on this area, as many people’s identity is tied to their workplace and the people who are part of their crew. Teammates. Except it is a giant red flag for most social psychologists, not as definitively bad, but as an area that has to be triaged ruthlessly.
If they are “work friends” and you don’t do anything outside of work with them (no common hobbies, get-togethers, outings, online gaming, whatever), then they don’t count. Going for beers after work doesn’t count either if it was the whole team. And just to be really BRUTAL, you have to also eliminate anyone where you only see them in an “activity” context like church or volunteering, and you never do anything with them outside that context (it is just replacing work with non-paid work or a community friend). Same with sports teams. If you don’t socialize with them separately, and after game drinks doesn’t count, then they’re off. The one exception is if it is a friend who you joined that activity with i.e. you and a friend joined a book club, or a sports team, and so that is your “outing” together. You can still count them.
For me, this is a brutal purge. Thirty-five people on my list are “work friends” or “community friends” and while I like them enough to overcome my normal desire to keep my FB list small (hehehe), I’ve never done anything outside of work or that community with them. Maybe lunch at work. At most, we’ve chatted online occasionally. Just no real connection to trigger getting together except work or the community event, I suppose.
C. Eliminate accounts that are inactive, celebrities, commercial accounts, or internet-only friends
I thought this one seemed like a strange category until I started to read through some of the examples. And realized that I do have some.
Three of them are legacy FB accounts for friends who have died. Just the other day, I posted on one for her birthday, just noting for her family that I miss my friend. I didn’t know her real well, we met online a long time ago playing trivia. I never met her in person although I did meet her daughter once. Still miss her.
Ten more are various kinds of internet friends or friends of friends who I’ve met online for various personal and professional reasons, but I’ve never “done” anything with them. Most of them I’ve never even met. Another fourteen are people I met in person and whom I regularly interact with online, but I probably won’t see them anytime soon. We’re basically internet buddies, but that is about it, perhaps by mutual neglect. We’re friendly, hard to say we’re the type who do things together. Another three or so were commercial-style accounts of writers that I follow.
D. Eliminate any accounts of friends who do not live in the same city
Before you freak out to say, “But they’re my best friends!”, you are allowed to keep them in your “social bubble” for the test, but only if they can pass an extra test. Have you seen them in-person in the last two years? Doesn’t matter why not, doesn’t matter if they moved to Timbuktu, they are basically people you cannot call up on a moment’s notice and do something with, nor have you scheduled anything with them recently. You may reconnect, you may connect every four years, you may see them at reunions or funerals, but they don’t count for the test.
Well, crap. I have twenty-one people that we used to do stuff with who have all moved out of Ottawa in recent years, either temporarily or permanent, or they just simply live in other cities already. Some of them I would see if they lived in town, they were close enough friends that they were at our small wedding, but I haven’t seen them in person in the last two years. Sigh.
E. Triage what remains
The theory is that what remains is your “core” group of friends. They are not ALL automatically in your social connectedness bubble, they’re just your core group of likely nodes.
The second last triage is to first group any of them who are “couples”. If you regularly see them separately, you can count them separately, but if you almost always see them together, it is a single “social node”.
And the final triage? Similarly to D above, you eliminate ANYONE that you haven’t done something social with in the last two years. In-person. Not just a phone call, you actually have to have seen them in-person. If you want to adjust for COVID, go back 27 months. And sorry, major group events like weddings and funerals DO NOT COUNT. Group parties where you saw 20 people DO NOT COUNT. Or at least, they count, but only for 1 node (perhaps a couple).
F. Count how many nodes you have left
For me, it leaves about nine people in total, not including a few spouses that I’m not friends with on FB, and about 7-8 nodes. All of them I have seen in the last two years and actually did something with them. Most of the time it was meal-related, admittedly, but I’ll lie to myself and say that is purely to ease scheduling, everyone has to eat.
But you know what? I’m surprised it is that high. My original estimate was about four to five. When I analyse it more closely, I see why. 4-5 of the nodes are “me” nodes, and 4-5 are “inherited” nodes from my wife’s nodes. I get an extra little “bump” in my numbers by being married to someone more social than I.
If I am converting categories correctly, the normal scale is:
Analytical introverts (“blues”) –> 1-5 nodes;
Intuitive introverts (“greens”) –> 5-10 nodes (although if they count family, it often goes to 15, and longer duration interactions);
Analytical extroverts (“reds”) –> 10-20 nodes (they lose a lot in the work/community-only friends list);
Intuitive extroverts (“yellows”) –> 25+ per year (although many encounters are short, like coffee dates);
I have no idea if that list has any accuracy whatsoever. It’s using several sources together, not any one “pure” test. But I like the fact it is giving ranges for the types, not saying “everyone should have 22 nodes”. It recognizes that blues tend to have few, but that’s okay. If they have too many, they might get stressed, if they have too few, they’re isolated. Greens might be stressed if they only have 2-3 or more than 10; similarly for reds. Yellows can get depressed if they drop below 20. They just don’t get the positive energy to keep going, apparently. There is obviously more to it than that, since you could have 3 nodes that you have seen 20 times each this year or you could have 3 nodes you only saw once each in the last two years, averaging 8 months between interactions…a very different dynamic. I do tend to hibernate over the winter.
But I find the idea interesting as I near retirement, and that is often the source of the articles (helping people plan for retirement). Because many of those other categories will fall away, leaving your immediate social nodes.
I’m happy to see that all of my “core nodes” will indeed survive retirement. But I also need to nurture them too, to be grateful they are in my life, and the time we share.
If you have been reading my previous posts, you know that I finally committed to weight loss, and I made the decision on my birthday back in June (#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Part 1, the decision). I’ve always struggled to even commit, and yet something changed this year that allowed me to go all-in. It is my one and only official goal for the year, and in fact, I won’t be setting any more goals until this one is accomplished. No retreat, no surrender, no partial success. Total success or I don’t declare victory and allow myself to move on to anything else.
I had a pretty good idea of what my inventory would look like in advance, having looked at some of the bits before, but it was still stark to see it all laid out:
DRAW FACTORS (motivations to change)
DRAG FACTORS (resistors to change)
Social costs(awareness of being different, interactions with women, limited social circle, losing interest in sports with others, Canada Fitness Test, shuttle run, friendly fire injuries) -> anticipatedsocial benefits(undo sports negativity, more active for golf / archery / bowling, walking, kayaking)
Lifestyle and opportunity costs(choice of hobbies, interactions at family events, not swimming, not hiking in Hawaii or Newfoundland, not tobogganing, shopping for a new car, worrying about the size of a bathroom, furniture choices, taking showers instead of baths, not bicycling or kayaking, shopping for and choices of clothing) –> anticipated lifestyle benefits(more active, activities with Jacob and Andrea, clothing)
Mental health costs(body image, depression, old comforts / unhealthy cycles, impacts at work, derision from medical professionals) –> anticipated mental health benefits (better self-image, sense of accomplishment)
Financial costs(eating out, clothing premiums, furniture choices, scooter and bicycle costs) –> anticipated financial benefits (savings on eating out)
Medical costs(death, back pain, swelling in legs, knee pain, feet, large butt and stomach, digestive issues, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, tension headaches, double chin –> anticipated medical benefits (improved quality of life, reduced meds, eliminate sleep apnea, healthy back, better foot care, better knees, improved digestion, lower blood pressure, single chin)
Fear of change(can eat whatever I want, convenience of choice)
Fear of failure (if you fail, you have a REAL problem to deal with, not just potential one)
Fear of success (if you succeed, old excuses look facile, it was JUST YOU, plus loss of your normal get-out-of-doing-stuff-free excuse)
Fear of conflict (war with my body – physical, emotional, psychological)
Fear of fear itself (loss of normal comforts i.e., food)
But even though I had my inventory, I was a bit puzzled. Why could I commit this year when I couldn’t commit before? While the draw factors SEEM like they should outweigh (literally) the drag factors, they never did. I was stuck. Inert. Like I was on a teeter-totter with my fear and I on one side, and the various draw factors stuck up in the air on the other side wondering how they could move the teeter totter downward and raise me up. The fear was just too heavy, as was I.
Yet on my birthday, for the first time, I was ready to commit. I could see a path forward. I felt confident in committing. Something had changed. And I have an idea what it is, but it sounds pedestrian. Silly even.
I had taken a retirement course.
That’s it. As part of my 50by50 goals, one of them was to take the big retirement course that is recommended for public servants. It is a special course tailored to our unique situation for years of service, pensions, etc. And most people, I think, take it before they retire. Some experts recommend taking it twice — once near the start of your career, and once when you are a few years away. I am 7 years from my pumpkin date of when I *can* leave with a reduced pension but no penalty. So Andrea and I took the course, and it was relatively great. Six half-day sessions over three days:
General overview of finances and retirement
Legal aspects of retirement and aging
Health and retirement
Financial planning: Part 1
Financial planning: Part 2
Psychology and retirement
I’ll blog about that experience later, but it is the a combination of part 6 and part 3 (psychology and health) that got the circuits in my brain whirring.
The two sessions weren’t very good, in my view. For the psychology side, a social worker basically talked about aspects of the change from work to home, losing an identity for some people, still needing social interactions, etc. But there was no real frame or solution to it. It was all very generic. I agree that there are whole swaths of issues there, and that you’d better plan for them if you want to transition well. I even have an idea for a series of blogs based on further research I did, as I think there is a better frame for it than what she presented; I was actually quite disappointed by it, and without being professionally trained, I think I could have explained the psych side of personality and handling change a lot better than she did. We’ll find out when I try to blog about it, I guess. 🙂 But at the core, the idea of “planning for the psychology of retirement” was delivered as a small nugget that everyone could think about, and I did.
The health one was not really about retirement, and perhaps that is why it helped. Sounds weird, I know, but stay with me. The presentation basically was about health in general, at any point in your life. I liked the presenter, a doctor in the military. The overall premise was to look at your current health (i.e, “health is the slowest possible rate at which one can die”), estimate your life expectancy to help inform your financial planning, think about what it means to possibly live to 100, and then think about the largest factors limiting that life expectancy.
Huh.
I had never really thought about living to 100. My father died at 69, my mother at 84. Most of the surrounding family for the two of them only made it to their 60s and 70s…strange that my mother lived to a greater age than most of them. And while I don’t have a lot of the lifestyle factors they had, I do carry around a lot of extra weight and have some health issues already. Even a couple of health scares, even though they turned out to be something else.
I guess if I was being really honest with myself, I thought 75 to 85 was a likely range, and 80 would be my wishful thinking number based on everything. But part of the presentation was about what it would look like if I was into my late 80s or 90s and still active. What kind of “active” would it be?
As I said, her presentation was more general than specific to retirement, and it talked mostly about health for anyone at any age. Based on the Ontario Health Study, she listed the five biggest limits on life expectancy:
Exercise — How active are you?
Tobacco — Do you use any?
Diet — What do you eat?
Alcohol — How much do you drink?
Stress — How to you choose to react to life?
The premise is that if you ignore all five, you’ll likely drop 20 years earlier than normal. If you miss 2-3, somewhere around 7 years. The accuracy of the forecast wasn’t that important to my thinking process though. I carry a fair amount of stress, but I have decent support networks and relatively healthy solutions to dealing with extreme moments. Call it half-covered, although probably better than some and worse than others. I have no alcohol or tobacco, which is a plus.
Which leaves diet and exercise. Well, it’s not like I didn’t already know that, right? I know my inventory, and have known it for a long time, even before I actually wrote it down for my journey. I mean, seriously, it’s not like fat people don’t know that they should get exercise and eat healthy. We didn’t wake up one day and say, “Oh? I didn’t know that, let me suddenly change my life to do that.”
Now, if you’re reading all that and thinking, “So what?”, then you read it correctly. Being reminded to do this by a doctor in a generic presentation didn’t really change anything. Or did it?
Excitement
After the course finished, I started doing some more reading on the psychology and the idea of broad “planning for retirement”. And something special happened. I started to get excited about retirement in a way that I haven’t been excited about anything in a while. It’s within “spitting distance” so to speak, a light at the end of the tunnel and I’m looking forward to retirement, thinking about some small things I need to do now to get ready, and really digging deep to imagine what I want retirement to look like when I get there. The finances are relatively taken care of, so what’s left? The psychology of how I adjust and the types of things I’ll want to do.
Writing.
Walking and taking photos.
Kayaking.
Working out.
Golfing.
Astronomy.
Travel.
And the lightbulb came on. I had handled all the financial aspects of planning for retirement. I was ready for the psych elements, and I know what I’m willing to do regarding further “work” after retirement, if at all, and what doesn’t interest me. But I wasn’t ready for the health aspects.
I’m not ready for kayaking and working out, golfing, hiking regularly. Even some of the things I want to do on astronomy would be easier if I was smaller (like sleeping overnight in the back of the car after a night of observing). I’m not ready now, and I only have 7 years to actually get ready. And my excitement started to drop. How could I be excited if when I got there I was going to have to suddenly work on dropping weight and working out, just to transition again to what I wanted to be doing? I’d be wasting the first two years of my retirement.
And the truth bomb was suddenly clear, with slightly better phrasing:
I wasn’t making the right or sufficient health investments for my retirement.
Well, fudge. That doesn’t work for me. I’m am READY to retire NOW. I can’t wait 7 years, do whichever jobs between now and then, but telling myself, “Oh, yeah, when you get there, you’ll have another 2 years of work on your body to really be ready.” Screw that plan. I’m getting ready NOW.
Tipping the scales in my favour
I did the retirement course back in the winter, and I made the commitment in June. Between the two, I finished reading Kottler’s book. I did a lot of reading about retirement. I was approaching 50. I was envisioning the two scenarios for my retirement, and I really didn’t like the one. I might even be tempted to say I *feared* the second one. But what tipped the scales and made me ready to commit?
The self-directed introspection and inventory over the years that made me ready to face my demons?
Reading Kottler’s book?
Taking the retirement course?
Further reading about psychology in retirement?
The excitement about retirement?
The fear of scenario 2 in retirement, let alone scenario 3 with huge health problems?
I don’t know, and maybe it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I could use all of it. When I made my decision on my birthday to commit to losing weight, and to only have that one goal, I had the rudimentary outline of a plan, based mainly on Kottler’s book (Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” – Chapter 14 – Why Changes Don’t Often Last) and some other research I’ve done about AA-type programs.
The Plan
There are six parts to my plan, and I’ve got a good handle on the first three.
Find the right motivation to commit –> √ History, overall health, and planning for retirement
Commit wholeheartedly in order to carry through –> √ Public commitment, singular focus, scary bits, professional help, and rigorous monitoring
The remaining three are an ongoing part of my journey:
Substituting better or different habits to replace the previous ones even if just to use the time differently;
Building in consistent rewards to gamify the journey (which also ties into the rigorous monitoring);
Changing the narrative of my journey to reinforce the change and oppose relapses.
I feel pretty good about my plan, and the various elements. I’ve been working on it a long time, in a sense. And it addresses most of my issues.
But they say that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and I’ll have to adjust as I go. No excuses, no surrender, no retreat. War is hell, and make no mistake, I have declared war on my body, and it is fighting back with everything it has. And if I’m not willing to go through that hell, I won’t reach the metaphorical Elysian Fields for my retirement.
Okay, right. There is one giant obstacle still standing in my way, hopefully the last vestige of shame that remains hidden in the dark. Next week is about the scariest part of the journey. Onward.
People usually assume that if you have a goal that you’re not achieving, even though it should be achievable in theory, then there are only three things stopping you from achieving it:
You’re lazy;
You’re procrastinating; and/or,
It’s not really that important to you.
However, for those who have done some reading on cognitive behaviour therapy, change, addiction, etc., there are often three other things that hold you back:
Triggers / old patterns of behaviour that cause you to backslide;
Lack of support / inadequate resources to achieve the goal on your own; and/or,
Benefits from the old situation that sabotage your commitment and progress.
I’ve said previously that I have wanted to commit to losing weight as a goal but have never felt able to do so realistically — sure, I could have committed, but I didn’t think it would be anything other than a paper commitment. I wasn’t psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, physically, or spiritually ready to make the changes needed. And if I don’t see a probability or even a good possibility of success, I don’t waste my time committing to such a goal as one of my annual goals.
In my previous post (#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Part 3, the costs of being fat), I published the first half of my inventory — the costs of being fat throughout my life and hence the underlying motivations to change. But reading Kottler’s book on Change, I realized that the other side of the coin was equally important…what are the benefits of being fat that I would be giving up? It’s a radical concept, isn’t it? That there could be anything good about it.
The example that led me to it was the idea of the guy with anger management issues. Kottler described a guy who frequently was “angry” at work, unreasonable in his reactions, and it caused him grief with coworkers, his boss, HR, etc. Clear costs that should/could motivate change. And yet there was a benefit to him — because he was prone to strong outbursts, and could get angry, people let him have his way. It was a source of power for him, both in being able to express himself stronger than others did, but also to have his views carry the day, just because others wanted to avoid conflict with him. It made him a work-place bully to always win. Which gave him a lot of satisfaction, i.e. to win. And if someone called him on it, he could always blame his temper as the problem, not him.
Alternatively, you can approach it as the fact that losing weight is a multi-billion dollar industry and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions (literally and figuratively). So why not? If it is just food and eating and willpower, why isn’t there a solution and why are people always trying different techniques to bust their belly? Because there are other things going on “besides food and eating” (I’m paraphrasing a Psychology Today article).
But I confess that I don’t find the various headings above from the classic literature on the psychology of being fat very helpful. I think instead that resistance simply comes down to varying forms of the most debilitating counter-energy known to man.
Fear.
Fear of change. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of intimacy. Fear of loneliness. Fear of conflict.
Fear.
Fear of change
The biggest fear, and this may be one of the few that is universal for fat people, is a fear of change. Regardless of whether you succeed or fail in your goal, something will change. You try “x” and it doesn’t work; or you try “y” and it does. Now you have to keep doing “y” and not do “x”. But that isn’t very definitive, is it? Let’s be specific about something that I can do while fat that I won’t be able to do later.
How about eat whatever I want? Not everything I want, that’s just stupid, but if I am at a family dinner, and someone has made a nice turkey, with mashed potatoes, carrots, gravy, buns, etc., that’s something I’m going to enjoy because I don’t have it very often. Once or twice a year, we have a big meal like that. So I can indulge myself with seconds of potatoes and turkey, maybe even thirds. Without feeling like, “OMG, how many carbs is that? how many calories?”. I don’t go insane and eat a whole gallon of chocolate ice cream, but I didn’t worry too much if I want a slightly larger helping of something. I enjoyed food the way some people enjoy a new bottle of wine. They might indulge a bit more a few times a year, and I did.
If I go out to a restaurant, I can order almost anything on the menu without worrying about my waistline because I wasn’t worrying about my waistline before I went. Sure, I might worry about heartburn, or avoiding really spicy foods because I like a mouth that isn’t on fire, but I’m not whipping out my phone to check how many calories there are in a Big Mac and what I should eat instead. If I want fries with my dinner, I would have fries. If I was running late for somewhere, and there was a fast food truck, BAM, I’ve got a place to eat. I don’t have to run around and find someone that has salad instead of fries.
Food, in short, is simpler when you’re fat and not trying to change it. If you’re at a friend’s place and he asks if you want something to drink, you don’t have to worry that they don’t have any diet soda. You have what’s available and you’re not asking for a menu of choices. You take what’s there, and say thank you. And do so without looking like a high-maintenance diva.
Food is a source of enjoyment, not a chore. Yeah, yeah, you can say, “Oh, no, eating like a bird is fun, you just have to choose tasty birdseed” (or whatever food metaphor you prefer), but the reality is that it is not as much fun or enjoyable as eating whatever you want. On the other hand, death isn’t fun either, but we’re talking things that hold you back, not the balancing act, that comes later.
Fear of failure
Every fat person has said, in some form or another, “Oh, I’ll do that when I’ve lost weight.” More subconsciously, less obviously, what they’re saying is that “I don’t have to do that because I’m fat, and you can’t blame me for not doing it because I’m fat”. Being fat excuses you from a lot of responsibilities. But you always have the “potential” to lose weight and change, as long as you never try. I’ve always believed I *could* do it, eventually, just “not right now”.
But if you try, and fail, then you’ve got a REAL psychological problem. You CAN’T change in that scenario. This is it, this is your life, and you ate your way into this mess. Sure, lots of other things might be going on, including mental health, physical disability, whatever, but you did it, you gained the weight. And you will feel trapped with no light at the end of the tunnel because you always told yourself you could undo it, but now you’ve tried and you’ve failed. You’re stuck.
Fear of success
Equally, you’re afraid of success. That sounds whacked, doesn’t it? You commit to losing weight, you lose the weight, but you’re afraid of the result? Absolutely.
Because it means, by definition, the only thing making you fat was personal choice. After all, you changed your choices and lost the weight. Ergo, it was all your fault to begin with. That is a huge fear. You can’t blame your parents. You can’t blame your metabolism. You can’t blame your partner who bakes every week. You can’t blame the soft drink company. Or the potato chip company. Or the delicious look of a Dairy Queen cone, dipped in chocolate, frosting mist coming off it as it cools, with the proper swirl on top. Sigh.
It’s. Just. You.
And more importantly, or perhaps just more whacked, post loss, you would then have no excuse not to do stuff. I mentioned previously that I feel intimidated in groups when they start doing sports, and I frequently vote with my feet to not participate. And people will nod, and say to themselves, “I get it, no problem, I understand your reluctance”. But if I lose the weight, and I still don’t want to do the socially physical stuff, then I’ll just be an introverted jerk who apparently just doesn’t like people.
But the excuse of being fat is an all powerful internal voice. “Paul, you don’t have to go hiking, it’s too hard for you, do something smaller. Paul, you don’t have to go kayaking, you’re over the weight limit and it will just capsize. Paul, you don’t have to give up your snowblower and just use a shovel, that’s a heart attack waiting to happen.”
If I lose the weight, I lose my excuses to avoid doing things I don’t want to do. I don’t want to shovel the snow, I just want to use my snowblower for the really small driveway that I have. And when it dies, I’ll buy another one. Because fat me would need it. Thin me will likely still buy it, but feel like a lazy ass when I do.
While this sounds like a cop-out, I don’t mean it that way. This is one of the biggest elements of a change, i.e. what are you giving up? And your brain isn’t itemizing this type of thing in a long list of “pros and cons”, it just niggles at you in the background, a small internal voice that stops you from changing because change might be bad. You lose your buffer zone.
There is nothing more scary though for fat people than losing the weight excuse when it comes to unsuccessful dating. It is a huge “saviour” of your ego to think other people are just shallow and can’t see the “real you”. That if you lost the weight, they’d all come flocking to your door. But what if you lose the weight and they don’t? If you’re single, and getting older, being fat is a great excuse for why you don’t have someone in your life. But if you lose that excuse, at some point, you’d kind of have to accept that it might be you. I’m not saying that is true, I’m saying it is the lessons learned from people who lost the weight, and expected their whole life would change for the better. Instead, they found out that weight was only part of who they were, and they are then just starting the journey of change … they had changed their body, but not their mind and soul.
It works similarly for friendship. Some people tell themselves that their friends are TRUE friends because they are friends with them even when they’re fat. They’ve seen other people who have dropped them as friends, only hanging out with attractive thin people. If they lose the weight, they worry that they won’t know if someone likes them for them or how they look (don’t get me started on just how messed up this is as an excuse, I’m just saying it happens).
Usually, the solution is to focus on what being fat means to someone…a source / tool to help with safety, anger, withdrawal? And then substitute other things in place of being fat / eating unhealthy foods / living unhealthy that still meets that need. Not unlike there being different sources of carbs or proteins, there are different tools to allow you to withdraw if need be that are not likely to kill you in 20 years.
Fear of conflict
Make no mistake, my commitment to change represents huge conflict. I have declared war on my body. Not just the physical side, the emotional and psychological side too. Over the last few weeks, as I’ve started blogging, my whole psyche is in active revolt. Every self-sabotaging behaviour is popping up to try and defeat me. There are some days, or perhaps times within a day rather than whole days, where I’m barely keeping it together. I picked up a drink the one day downstairs at work and was back at my desk, sipping away, and suddenly realized that the person had given me a Coke, not a diet Coke. And I just about lost my sh**. I felt so demoralized, I crashed. Angry, afraid, ashamed, and it was all about some stupid f***ing drink. Except, of course, it’s not. I’m unravelling 40 years of bad body health, and as I do, some of the psych stuff comes up. I’m not freaking out at the bottle of Coke, I’m freaking out about the last 40 years of eating and letting myself do it. Because food was a source of comfort to me. And a way to insulate myself from the world, literally an extra layer of protection. Something I didn’t worry about, and now I have to in order to accomplish my goal.
Emotionally, I’m a wreck. I’ve watched a few shows on TV in the last 2 months, and emotional scenes — weddings, funerals, hugging kids — are wiping me out every time. I’ve got tears running every damn time. You know the phrase, “I’m not crying. You’re crying.”? Nope, it’s me.
I’ve mentioned before that I have a big scary post coming up. Next week I talk about what changed to overcome this balancing act between the forces propelling me forward and the resistors holding me back. That post will be fine, actually a fun one to contemplate. But the one after that is scary as hell for me. Bigger than just blogging about stuff. And the other day, I found myself thinking of other topics I could write about in the future related to my journey, and I was like, “oh, oh, oh, there’s a GOOD one, I should do that before the scary one”. Not because I need to do it then, but just because I was trying to delay things. I’ve already delayed it enough. I could have gone with it when I started, but I wasn’t ready. So my inner voice said, “No, bore them with the rabbit hole full of your stupid-ass brain farts first because then they’ll already know you’re crazy, and it will postpone it for several weeks in the meantime”.
And I’m going through this battle even though I’m not doing this alone. I have professional support, both on the physical and mental side, plus emotional resources to draw upon. And I’m still at war.
It is a war between two sides of my life. The forward looking, do what’s good for me, rational side vs. the side that is now saying “leave me the f*** alone, you douchebag, we had a deal…you eat what you want, and I don’t mess with your head.” Well, the deal’s off, and it is definitely messing with my head. Even with all my forces marshaled against it.
It’s one of the reasons I’m blogging about the journey. Fear hides in the shadows, it can’t stand the harsh light of day. And while it is fighting back, I am hoping it will lose its power long enough for me to break the chains that are holding me in place.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
I may have nothing else to fear but fear itself, but it has consistently kicked my ass over the last 40 years. If you read through the above list, it doesn’t sound like equal weight to the costs that should motivate me to change. Yet for 40 years, it has held me in its grip, unable to reliably commit to a new way of life.
Will alone wasn’t enough. Combatting dysfunctional beliefs and excuses wasn’t enough.
I needed something new to tip the balance. I found it in a very unlikely source.
In my previous post (#50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Part 2, draw vs. drag), I talked about how I’m framing my approach to change as as a constant battle between the draw forces that “pull me forward” and make me want to make the change, and the drag forces that “hold me back” and stay the way I am. As I noted, the forces drawing people forward are often easy to see…they are the current costs that they want to eliminate and the future benefits that they want to achieve. At first, there’s nothing particularly magical or amazing in there, but I did want to review them as part of my inventory. Yet, as I started to look at the costs, I realized that there was a deeper option…could I catalog a bunch of the costs that I have incurred throughout my life?
Not a pleasant task, if you think about it. I’m basically going to go through and identify all the times in my life where being fat was harmful to my happiness. Wow. That is a deep well of sadness and pain. But addicts do it to help them see how their addiction is hurting them and to propel their rehab efforts (Step 4 to make a “searching and fearless” inventory of ourselves and Step 5 to admit to the exact nature of our wrongs…of course I’m adapting it to weight loss, but you get the gist).
It’s not meant to be fun, it’s meant to be a psychological cleansing and identification exercise to make you realize the true cost of your choices. But let’s get ‘er done, and to help me organize my thoughts, I’m going to use five broad headings I’ve pulled from a bunch of different articles about the pros (yes there are some) and cons of being fat, which are:
Social costs;
Lifestyle and opportunity costs;
Mental health costs;
Financial costs;
Medical problems
A. Social Costs
This is a pretty broad category, but I’ll see if I can make it work. Up until I was about 7 years old, I don’t think I was any more “roly poly” than any other kid. I can remember in elementary school being one of the fastest kids on the playground in early grades, although that may just be an observational / ego-centricity bias. I noticed the same bias in Jacob…he felt he was the fastest kid for a couple of years even though he clearly wasn’t due to his leg issues. But I do remember when I was in about Grade 2, I could no longer keep up with the fastest kid. I am not sure it was because I was fat, I don’t specifically remember that I was at that time, but it might be the first time I saw a result of how I was “different” from other kids.
By grade 6, it was clearly apparent. While other kids were establishing social relationships with the opposite sex (and maybe the same sex, I never noticed), girls wanted nothing to do with me. Friendship was obviously okay, but not dating. Two in total were at least willing to consider it, in that I was invited to a birthday party of one and there was joking about “2 minutes in the closet” with one of them willing to do it with me (we didn’t, mostly as I had no idea what it was really about, too embarrassed) and one was willing to dance with me shyly in Grade 8.
Somewhere between age 16 and 18, I think, I passed the 200 pound mark. I can remember being just under for a very long time and feeling embarrassed by it. I could say to myself “At least I’m not over 200!”, but it wasn’t very reassuring. I bought a home gym, but I didn’t really have any place to keep it. I tried forcefitting it into my small bedroom, but with an desk, bed, wardrobe, stereo and bookshelf, it wasn’t very convenient trying to reposition stuff anytime I wanted to use it. Equally for an exercise bike, which was uncomfortable and not much fun, plus I made a huge racket through the floorboards and my parents (gently) complained about the noise. They didn’t really understand that it was me trying to lose weight for the first time, and I wasn’t comfortable talking about it.
I didn’t have a huge social circle in high school, and I went through the standard experiences of most fat kids…some not too bad, some embarrassing, more being ignored and shut out of social situations, some of which was financial (some of the kids had a lot more money and dressed way nicer than I did) and some of which was just social awkwardness (introversion combined with being embarrassed by my weight). My weight stopped me from doing a lot of things other people were doing…sports, dancing at parties, even talking to pretty girls or any girls really. My brother didn’t help much, contributing to my social pariah status by looking through my yearbook (he was 22, they were in high school) and calling the pretty ones to ask out on dates. It’s not much fun having the prettiest girl come up to you and halls to talk to you and find out the reason why is to complain your brother is a creep. Nice.
Not a fun time for me. Gym class was the worst, and I only did it for two years in high school. I think it was made worse by the fact that in some ways, I actually enjoyed some of the sports. I liked throwing the football when we had to do passing drill tests, or shooting hoops from a free throw line. I just wasn’t very good at it, but I liked it. But not being good at it is the death knell when combined with social awkwardness and being fat, and I let my interest wane, even though the only thing I really hated in the class were the fitness tests in elementary school and high school.
In elementary school, it was the Canada Fitness test (I think that was the name?) where you could do a series of six exercises and based on how you did, you could get a bronze, silver, gold or award of excellence for the group. Not surprisingly, I sucked at all of the six exercises. Situps were painful, but nobody was great at them. Standing long jump was the same for most people, so no big deal there. A 50 yard dash and 300 yard run were no big deal, even if I wasn’t very fast at them. But the other two were just dread-inducing.
The flexed arm hang was straight out embarrassing. If you don’t remember it, you basically did a pull up with your hands curled towards you until your eyes were level with the bar i.e. flexed arms. And you hung there until your eyes dropped below the bar. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was something like a minute to qualify for any of the good levels. I seem to recall that I could do about 10 seconds. I was just too heavy for my arm strength. I can remember a guy in grade 7 really trying to encourage me, Tony DeNoble. He could tell that I didn’t want to do it, not even try, and he was there doing the best he could to support me. I appreciated the gesture but external motivation like that has never helped me, it just doesn’t work. I feel more like it is just adding a witness to my failure. It is one of the most embarrassing moments from any of my “fitness attempts” in elementary school. I can see why subsequent analysis and evaluations of the programs revealed that they weren’t very motivating and in fact tended to “facilitate self-debasement and destructive eating and exercise practices” in girls who were overweight. It wasn’t that positive for fat 13 year old boys either.
In high school, we added the shuttle run. We had done it in elementary school, and while challenging, it paled against the flexed arm hang. But when I was in Grade 9, the shuttle run was absolutely soul-crushing. It doesn’t look like it is that hard. You start in a prone position, with 8 blocks laid out in equal distances the length of the gym, call them spots 1-8 with your nose at the starting line being spot 0. When the “race” starts, and it was sort of a race with about six of us going at the same time across the gym, we had to get up from our prone position, run to the first block (spot 1), and bring it back to home (spot 0); do the same with block 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8; and then return them all from home to spots 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. You couldn’t just throw the block when you came back, you had to place it on the home line to ensure you were bending each time. So out and bend, back and bend, out and bend, back and bend. If you’re good at math, and I was / am, you basically run the length of the gym 4.5 times picking up the blocks and 4.5 times putting them block. So nine double lengths in total. I vaguely remember those in shape pushing themselves and getting it done in about 5 minutes, and dropping. It would take me over 10 and I would want to puke when I was done. And even though I couldn’t even come close to any sort of “viable” time, I still had to try as if I could. It was part of your grade.
Like I said, I wasn’t abysmal at everything, I could throw a football or do basketball / volleyball / badminton, but the fitness test? Just an opportunity to see I was the worst in any class I was in.
We also did a outdoor running test. I don’t remember it being part of the official test, maybe it was just our teacher’s choice. We didn’t have any sort of outdoor athletic field, so we would do x-country running on city streets. At the time, I felt it was some sort of huge achievement marathon. One that I couldn’t do very well, but at least I wasn’t always last. We would start off at the police station on Water Street and run to Parkhill Road, then cross the bridge to the railroad tracks, back along the railroad tracks to a pedestrian bridge, and the back up London Street to Water Street. Some kids could do it in 6-8 minutes. It would take me closer to 12-15, and some of the class would end up walking near the end. I always tried at least to run it. As I said, it seemed like some huge distance. I just checked MapMyRun — it’s a bit over 2 km.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t active. My friends, brother and I would build treeforts, roam all over the city, play football, hockey, soccer a bit, baseball, lots of stuff. I was just fat. I didn’t really know why, or know the links to diet choices over diet volume. I wasn’t eating only junk food, for example. One of my friends practically lived on junk food, never gained an ounce. Asshole. 🙂
But no matter what else was going on in a given week, I could win contests or get straight As in any subject, if I failed in some fitness test or sports attempt, I was mentally done for the week. It was all I remembered for the week. Yay, I was smart, whoopee f***. And I really had no idea about how to change any of it. Or role models to emulate. There was a weight room at work, but it was only used by the wrestling team. I was interested, but no one else was really welcome, nor was it anything anyone encouraged. The only “motivation” options in gym class was to stop being a fat ass and work harder. I don’t mean that as harsh as it sounds, just that there was certainly no enlightened view as to the idea that 80% of your weight is derived from diet and 20% from physical activity.
And what was I eating at home? Potatoes, meat, bread. Lots of carbs, some basic veggies but even those were mostly starchy. Not a great set of choices for me, even if I didn’t know it.
Elementary, high school, and university was mostly a sh** show for interactions with women. My social isolation grew as I became fatter. I had my first “date” when I was 18, and we were together for almost 4 years. It was one of the first times I ever felt “comfortable” with someone. Any previous interaction with girls of a romantic nature were almost always of the “hell no” variety (even if they were polite about it).
It wasn’t until I was almost 25 or so that it wasn’t as big an issue. No pun intended. I just started to find women who didn’t care about it, or at least weren’t repulsed by it and gave it a shot to get to know me. But I was pretty immune to some of it by then anyway. I knew what I was looking for, and even if there were times when I was lonely for intimacy, I had a lot of female friends at least. I had a couple of negative experiences from people online back in the day when they saw my picture, including one who bluntly said, “You look fat” based on a headshot. I wasn’t trying to date them or anything, it was just trivia game sites and people would share pics of themselves (it was pre-avatar days), but I stopped sharing real photos and only shared pics of frogs.
Only one women comes to mind as someone that I would have liked to date but who wasn’t interested in me because of my weight. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was in there. We got past it, and one time when I was feeling a bit pathetic, I talked with her about my concerns about my weight, and lamented how some people reacted. I was probably being passive-aggressive, but that was not really my intent. I was just trying to work through some of it in my head. And I made a passing remark that if I did lose the weight, I would not want to date anyone that I knew before that point i.e. if they knew me when I was fat, and didn’t want to date me, I would not want to date such a shallow person if afterwards I lost the weight. She lost her shit. She was really pissed at me for saying that she was shallow, which as I said, was not exactly my intent, I was more noting that if I did manage to lose weight, I would “need” to meet new people, start fresh. We stopped being friends a bit later, only in part related to that, but it was also the last time I ever discussed my weight with someone other than my wife, my mother, or a medical practitioner in the last 20 years (at least until this year).
Lots of other silly social costs come to mind, little one-offs. Standing next to a pregnant woman and an 8-year-old girl shyly asking me when MY baby was coming. One-off comments from various people, mostly girls, through-out my life, including being called pig for a short while by a group of 3 mean girls in elementary school (although I think I deserved it at the time, I wasn’t very nice to one of them either, the closest I come to having regrets in life). A comment from my mother when I was about 40, out of the blue, that I should do neck exercises to get rid of my double / triple chin.
With a bit of work, I could come up with more examples, but those are probably the main ones. And as I said earlier, I would say they were mostly earlier in my life, or at least that I noticed them more then, maybe not so much later.
B. Lifestyle and Opportunity Costs
I mentioned above that my experience with sports was mostly negative in high school, or at least that the negative experiences were far stronger than the positive ones. And over time, I stopped playing. In theory, I love the idea of some simple intramural sports leagues, even if my interest is more in non-team events generally…bowling or golf, for example. But I haven’t pursued many of them. I just stopped doing them, and it shows up in my lifestyle. I became less active over time, partly weight and partly age. Many of my interests are sedentary pursuits — reading, watching TV, writing. Not very active choices. And for the most part, they’re relatively mild hidden costs, not worth enumerating very much more than I have already said.
Yet there have been a few times where my weight has impinged upon things that I want to do but don’t feel comfortable doing with others or am afraid to do just generally.
Andrea has a family cottage, and while I joked about it in my wedding speech (My wedding speech about Panda Astronomy), there was truth in there that all of her cousins are really quite sporty and active. All the way from adventure racing to ultimate, swimming to rowing. It is, I confess, highly intimidating. I don’t want to do those things with others who are all good at it and where I’m not. Even if they’re not all super thin anymore, they are all reasonably fit. I am not. And I certainly don’t want it to be obvious that I suck at something because I’m fat. It’s just not fun for me. Every year they do something called the Malcolm Olympics and while it is far from active sports, I usually vote with my feet and avoid it. I feel conspicuous. Uncomfortable. I don’t mean they’re judging me, they’re wonderful people, I just don’t want to be seen doing it. I don’t feel comfortable with myself. Which also means while my wife and son would love me to part of the festivities, I’m not. Because I suck at it and have no confidence. I’m just going to feel miserable if I do something really bad because of my weight. Even when they’re all in the water just splashing around on a hot day, I pass because I don’t want to take my shirt off to go in the water nor wear it in because I’m obviously ashamed to have my body be seen by someone I know. So I just don’t participate.
On our honeymoon, there was an option to do a hike across the volcano floor. It wasn’t like Andrea was begging to do it, I don’t even know if she would have considered it, but although it sounded kind of cool, it wasn’t even an option. I can’t handle the heat or the exertion to do that in the heat. While not directly a result of my weight, I do have high blood pressure (which is strongly weight-related), and I can’t handle the heat well. On the same trip, we hiked up a small trail to the summit, and if I was in better shape, I would have liked to hike down to the cove on the other side. Andrea could have easily made it but I knew I couldn’t. It was too much for me, I was too out of shape. So we didn’t.
We went to Newfoundland a couple of years ago, and while hiking in Gros Morne, there was a long trail down to an inland fjord. Andrea wanted to go, and in most circumstances, people would just do it. It wasn’t a huge hike, a few km in total, and relatively good wide access road to go on. But we had Jacob with us, a stroller, no hats, and no water or snacks. I was worried it was too far for me, and if I had to push Jacob back in the stroller too, this was going to turn risky really fast. So I put my foot down and said no way. If she wanted to go, we had to go back and get our stuff from the car to do it properly. It couldn’t be spontaneous. And I was pissed off that I had to explain why I couldn’t just “go”, like she could.
In winter, Jacob and Andrea go tobogganing, something I quite enjoy when I go. I feel like a kid. But walking up and down the hill is difficult for me and I feel self-conscious that I am so big generally and even more so in my winter clothes. I feel like the Stay Puff marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. I’m old, I’m big, I feel conspicuous. So I often don’t go. It depends on my mental energy that week if I can muster enough positive confidence to do it.
It is the type of missed experience that has been one of the motivating factors for me, nudging me forward on my commitment. The fact that there are certain things that Jacob and Andrea do together and I haven’t gone with them because I feel it is too much for me and/or that I won’t enjoy it because of my size. The last time I went on a water slide, I got stopped half-way down because I was just too big and had to inch and inch and inch forward quite a way. I looked like a beached whale and felt like it.
So I vote with my feet and don’t do some things that I would actually like to be able to at least consider. Even on vacation in Mexico, I sent Andrea off with Jacob for certain things where I felt I would be conspicuously over-sized.
There are also some odds and ends that I don’t know how to classify. Noticing that some new cars are just not good options for me because I am oversized for the small driver’s seat; fitting myself into economy class on an airplane and holding my arms in so I’m not encroaching on the person beside me; once visiting someone with a little nook of a bathroom and I actually had to wedge myself in very uncomfortably into the nook to use the toilet; going to visit someone and worrying about the furniture they offer me because I would be mortified if I broke it just by sitting on it (fat people spend a lot of time estimating the strength of furniture visiting); my office chair at work has extra reinforced wheels that we ordered 10 years ago and that has followed me around since I split the default plastic ones within 3 months; buying step stools or ladders that have low weight limits and having to buy bigger heavier ones; wanting to take a bath in a big tub but only having small tubs that are not very satisfying; liking bicycling but going is painful even with padded seat and padded shorts, just too much weight pressing down on too small an area, even after making sure the bicycle is strong enough for someone my size (most people don’t even realize that most sports equipment comes with weight limits); or not going kayaking (for example) because the typical kayak weight limits are way below my weight and will just flip too easily (wrong centre of gravity)…I’d actually even like to own kayaks for the three of us and go on weekends for light paddles, but not happening soon.
Oddly enough, I wrote most of this post and left out one very big area in this section…clothes. I hate shopping for clothes, I hate picking out clothes from my closet, I hate deciding what to wear anywhere. I would much prefer to stay in white cotton sport socks (good breathability for my destroyed feet) with supportive running shoes, comfortable track pants, a polo shirt or T-shirt, and super large briefs. I don’t want to wear a dress shirt, or dress pants, or even khakis for anything casual. I just don’t think I look good in them, or more pointedly, I don’t feel that I look good in anything. Comfort is a much bigger issue than that, and while some people may enjoy shopping for clothes for hours (I kind of like doing it with women i.e. helping them choose things to try), my clothes shopping usually lasts about 8 minutes. I go in, find something that fits, buy multiple colours of the same size, and leave. It’s a transaction, pure and simple, and I leave. I haven’t talked about sizes or measurements yet, but I did have one bad experience once, although maybe bad isn’t the right term. Sobering perhaps. We were talking with some friends, and they mentioned the difficulty the guy has with getting pants the right size for him because he’s so tall. In passing, he mentioned the sizes. I don’t know if I reacted outwardly, but it was a bit jarring. His waist and inseam were the exact inverse of my waist and inseam…I felt like the horizontal version of him, as fat as he is tall. But generally speaking, clothes are pretty low on my list of fun activities. It was a bit better when I switched to shopping at the Big and Tall store, partly as the Tall shirts were long enough to go over my belly and still tuck in my pants. True story, just not a happy one. And don’t get me started on seeing some particular clothing item that I would like, but that doesn’t come in my size. I am hoping, honestly hoping, that when I reach my goal, I`ll look forward to clothes more, even simple jeans that don`t require the same “husky size” mental experience as when I was an early teenager.
C. Mental health costs
It doesn’t take much to see in the examples above how some of it has affected me and my mental state. Some of it directly, some indirectly. Some of it just body image, some of it confidence shattering. Even as I write these blogs, I am caught on a point between describing myself as overweight or obese or large, or using the phrase I feel is more appropriately harsh — just plain fat. I can’t couch my self-criticism in flowery terms, not if I’m being honest with myself. I don’t see myself anymore as simply overweight. I see myself as fat. Another factor helping tip the scales in favour of change.
I have struggled with depression at times, perhaps even just general loneliness in my life. And some of it was likely related to my weight, which is a vicious cycle if food is a source of comfort, as it is for me. Whenever I was unhappy about something when I was a kid, my mom would give me my favorite meal or make my favorite dessert. Comfort was not hugs and snuggles, it was food. Take ice cream for example.
It has been a huge source of joy, an innocent pleasure, in my life and as a cruel source of motivation, I am denying myself any ice cream until I achieve my goal. I can deal with just about everything else involved, but the psychological comfort that ice cream has given me over the years is huge. I would go get ice cream with friends when school overwhelmed me when I was out west at law school. I would celebrate with friends when something went well. Some people choose drugs or alcohol, but for me, it’s just simple ice cream. I’m the manager who instituted Laura Secord staff meetings to get us out of the office for something fun once in awhile. I’m not talking the stereotype of curling up with a carton of ice cream and working through it when I’m depressed, I mean simply going for a cone or a bowl or a sundae from time to time. But it is my Kryptonite, and if I am to succeed in my goal, I cannot let ice cream be the reason I fail.
In my research, I saw lots of people talking about the loss of respect of others at work, or that certain people just won’t hire fat people i.e. the workplace rejects you. I don’t feel I’ve experienced that, although perhaps I have in a different sense. Being fat, I don’t look like some GQ model in a suit. I just look like a dressed up schlub. If you’re thinking of saying, “But wait, you can do x or y and you’ll look great”, maybe you think that is true. But *I* don’t. I don’t like suits and I don’t wear them ever if I can avoid it. I succeed at work for two reasons — I’m good at my job and I’m not a raving asshole. Some days I slip on both. 🙂 But I am never going to be the guy that someone meets and thinks, “Wow, he’s impressive looking, looks very put together, the natural leader”. I know several people who are, and I see how people react to them, even though in many respects, they are far inferior to me in their experience and abilities. Yet they’re chosen to lead certain things. Is that weight-related? My introversion? My boss is just an idiot? Who knows. But suffice it to say that there are times where being thin would have been a good work-related asset. I don’t worry about it, but I have noticed it from time to time.
Another area that people frequently complain about is derision from medical professionals. Even recently, on a friend’s FB feed, I saw one of her friends lamenting (maybe ranting) that it would be nice if a doctor would just see her as a patient to discuss what’s wrong with her rather than assuming that everything is because she’s overweight. I can relate slightly to that with general practitioners in that everyone wants to talk about that and even sometimes only that, even if that is not why I’m there. Equally, though, some people in the U.S. have noted doctors even refusing to treat fat people i.e. “I won’t even see you if you don’t lose 20 pounds first” as a tough-love approach. Yes, we all agree they’re assholes. But it isn’t about them, it’s about the person who receives that reaction.
I haven’t had any experiences on that level, but I can think of one where their reaction to my weight completely pissed me off. I went in for a sleep test to see if I was grinding my teeth, and if so, was it interfering with my sleep. The doctor reviewed a basic questionnaire that I filled out, looked at it for less than 2 minutes, and declared that I had weight-based sleep apnea, obviously severe. What he was basing this on was not so much the questionnaire as the fact that I was obviously fat. And he basically confirmed as much as weight was the obvious factor for most people and he hadn’t met anyone who was very overweight and didn’t have it. Then when I went for the test, the girl took one look at me and basically declared I had it. I didn’t say anything at the time, but at the break in the night where they switch from monitoring unassisted breathing to giving you a mask, she was quite rude when I was reacting to how hard I found it with the full face mask (I was almost having a panic attack that I couldn’t breathe). Her attitude was basically, “Suck it up, fatty, you got yourself into this mess and you’ll live with it now for the rest of your life.” If it wasn’t for the fact that it was partly true, we would have done a dance in the Hospital’s boardroom for a few years.
In short, yep, it f***s you up mentally. And that isn’t even touching the sh** that holds you back (tune in next week to see how REALLY messed up it makes you!).
D. Financial costs
If you’re naïve, you probably think that the financial costs of being fat are something about food i.e. you eat too much. No, that’s not actually the problem. Sure, you eat more processed stuff than most, but a lot of the processed stuff is actually cheaper in the short run. It’s one of the reasons financially strapped people are eating KD or ramen noodles.
In my case, though, I tended to eat out a lot, a trend that has gone on for a long time. It’s a really complicated psych issue, and I’ll deal with it in terms of things holding me back, but eating out adds up, obviously. Even when I was dating, I liked eating out and I would usually pay or at least try to do so. Just felt appropriate since I was the one always proposing it.
Clothing sometimes is more expensive though. A shirt that is $x for a large or extra large often comes with a small surcharge to get it in 2XL or 3XL, if they even have it at all. Similarly with pants, underwear, undershirts.
The research suggests extra costs for lost wages, life insurance, direct medical costs, or productivity losses, but those seem more private-sector-related costs or American. There are probably some increases in gasoline costs (driving more places than walking), or short-term disability / absenteeism (I have taken some mental health days, and I suspect some were related to weight and depression).
I mentioned above buying certain furniture (ladders, stepstools) with higher weight limits and they were frequently more expensive too. I also bought myself a scooter this year, but given my size, I couldn’t buy just any old scooter, I needed one rated for much heavier people. I found one, but it was about twice the price.
There are other costs, but I feel most of them are hidden. Yet financial is not often a strong incentive / motivating factor for me anyway. There are numerous things where I will opt for convenience over cost, free over being reimbursed with hassles.
E. Medical problems
The biggest medical problem is death. That hasn’t happened yet, so I guess I’m good so far!
Actually, on the serious side, few people would ever die of being overweight — they die of complications of being overweight…their heart gives out from working so hard, they fall and hurt themselves, the weight presses down on organs and causes liver, spleen, kidney or pancreas failures. Breathing becomes difficult, heart disease is rampant, and the big one that hits is diabetes.
Most of those have never presented problems for me, and although one is recently applicable, I’ll deal with that as part of the journey story. It isn’t part of my inventory of problems because it hadn’t happened to me yet, when I did the inventory. I also don’t have kidney stones or gall stones, haven`t needed my hip replaced, and as far as I know, haven’t developed extra body odor issues.
However, for a bunch of the other symptoms, I can tick the box “yes”. Back pain is prevalent with those overweight, which is a combination of carrying the extra weight on your skeletal frame and the challenges of finding a comfortable way to sit. When I was younger, I had lower back spasms that drove me nuts. If I did some simple yoga, cat/camel stretches, I could mostly prevent them, but then my back would be fine for awhile, I’d forget about it, and BAM! I’d have spasms. Massage helped, but not permanently. These days it is more ribs that go out and upper back…the more weight I put on, the harder it is to “self-adjust” through yoga, and even massage doesn’t release enough. I’ve had to add a chiropractor in recent years.
For my legs, I have had swelling in the calves, but after wearing compression socks for a week, it mostly rectified itself. It still swells from time to time, but nothing I can’t tolerate. My knees haven’t had any giant issues, but they do get sore if I over-do it on stairs or hiking, or make the mistake of trying to run on pavement. The action just slams my leg into the back of my kneecap and I’m hobbling for days. I have some really good knee supports, just fabric ones that slip over, and I take them almost everywhere I go now, just in case. I’m terrified of being laid up with a larger knee problem over time as it will take a long time to heal and likely knock me completely out of commission. Where it does affect me is simply kneeling on the floor or doing stuff with Jacob. When you go to get up, the normal way is to put one foot up and then rise…but when you do that, for a moment, you put ALL of your weight on one knee. When I do that, my knee screams at me. I much prefer if I can be next to a chair or couch and use my arms to take the weight off as I rise. I just worry I`m going to hurt it somehow. They`re fine, but I worry.
But I have to confess that my feet are a disaster. Back when I was 19, I got an ingrown toenail on my right foot. That might not at first seem like it is weight-related, but it is. It isn’t that my toenails grow in naturally, it is, ashamedly, because my feet are overgrown / fat, and thus encroach on my toenail area. I asked about it recently and the surgeon basically said the solution would be to sculpt the toes and remove tissue so they wouldn’t encroach. Umm, no thanks. I’ll survive. When it happened, we removed the toenail and let the new one grow back in. Unfortunately, it surprisingly (or not surprisingly, now that I understand why) grew right back into the same groove and got infected again. So we removed it permanently and destroyed the nailbed. Except apparently the surgeon was a hack and left part of the nailbed on one side. Which means I still get partial toenail growth and part just calloused toe. Yep, it seems gross to me too. Most people think it is nothing really, if they see it, but it freaks me out at times.
But beyond that, most people end up with broken-down feet either with fallen arches or something equally serious, or almost universally, dry, cracked feet with circulation problems. I don’t have any circulation problems, everything still works fine in that regard. But my feet dry out, crack, and the skin splits. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem for most people, but when the skin splits on someone my size, it SPLITS and opens a small painful crack. Almost like an open callus. It can be quite painful to walk on, so I’ve often resorted to bandaids to cushion the spot, while applying cream to ease the open crack. It’s not super serious although it could lead to infection. But one of the reasons people often develop larger problems is one of simple physics. They can’t reach their feet to maintain good foot care.
I’m not as bad off as some people, but it’s a challenge. I don’t cut my toenails as often as I used to, often waiting for them to make it worth it. Not egregiously so, and pedicurists wouldn’t be quivering in fear, but I do feel self-conscious about them at times. If I go for a massage, I almost always leave my socks on and I’d rather they not touch my feet at all. I rarely wear sandals, and definitely prefer supportive running shoes.
My butt is the size of Montana, there’s not much to say about that. It’s just big. But if you connect it with my stomach, then we have digestive issues. I have acid reflux, and while not necessarily weight-related, it does get worse the more I weigh. I take a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) that controls the reflux and there are some potential long-term impacts to taking meds of this sort, but the ST alternative is heart burn every night.
The first time it hit, I ended up at the hospital. No, really, I did. Look at the situation — my family has a history of heart disease, I’m overweight, and I was experiencing a sudden onset of chest pain. You don’t need Doogie Howser to figure out the likelihood of problems there. Turned out that a simple lovely pink cocktail of reflux meds got rid of everything. The benefit of PPIs is that they work and are covered by insurance; the alternatives are over-the-counter meds with fewer side-effects but can add up in cost. I’m hoping with the weight loss that I might be able to lose them entirely, but that’s a bit wishful thinking at this point.
However, between the extra weight and the reflux, my digestive system is in a bit of flux on any given day. Some days it looks like minor Irritated Bowel Syndrome, and I spend way too much time in my life wondering where bathrooms are if I’m in a new place. My mother had a similar problem, and knew where all the bathrooms were in various parts of Peterborough. There are some places that I go to, i.e. some plazas or malls, over other options simply because I know they have nice clean bathrooms. Sears at Carlingwood? It was a good refuge if I needed it while shopping, never busy, etc. I’ve avoided hikes or long walks or even short walks on certain days just because I wasn’t confident of my digestive system cooperating. It’s a pain in the … well, you get it. It’s definitely a weight-related cost. And definitely something I’m hoping will improve with a different diet and weight.
Blood pressure issues are almost guaranteed. About 8 years ago, I was in the middle of a cold and took some decongestant. I got a few really bad headaches, and my ear was pounding. While I was at the walk-in clinic for something else, I asked if maybe I had an ear infection. She checked me out and said no, it was my blood pressure. Did I know it was high (no) and did I want to know what it actually was (yes)? Turned out I was 165 over 105-110 (can’t quite remember). For those who are not familiar with blood pressure stats, that is serious stroke territory. I got a prescription to bring it down, went to my regular doctor to get the dosages worked out, and have been taking them ever since.
In a sense, the BP causes me no real acute problems, or at least not ones that are easy to pinpoint since it is under control. I do have some tension headaches, but I had those before I had high BP too. However, with the high BP, the real problem is that I can’t take decongestants — it jacks your BP, which is why mine was so high the first time. With the dosage set properly on my BP meds, I average 120/85, which is fine. The one constraint is that I can’t drink any alcohol with the meds I’m on. Boo hoo. I never drank much anyway, and eliminating it is not something I particularly miss. I don’t like beer or wine, so missing out on occasional harder stuff isn’t much of a cost to me. I can have a sip to toast someone at a wedding, but honestly, even if it wasn’t for the meds, I wouldn’t be drinking much more than a sip of it anyway. It’s just not a big deal for me.
Last and in some ways least, is a bit cosmetic. I have a double chin. If I’m feeling particularly harsh some days, I’d say bordering on a triple chin. There’s a reason why I don’t look in the mirror very often. The image I have in my head of what I look like is quite different from the person I see now. And I’m worried when I lose the weight that I’m going to have flabby, sagging skin in places I really don’t want it. My neck, my arms, my stomach, my legs, my ass. For some, maybe that’s a nice problem to have, but some people tone evenly as they drop weight, others not so much. I don’t know what it will look like but I’m not optimistic that it won’t be a disgusting side-effect. But if I need plastic surgery to leave the house, so be it. I have to lose the weight, regardless of what my epidermis layer wants to do.
Expected benefits
The expected benefits are relatively short in comparison to the above, partly because the first thing to say is “eliminate the above costs”:
Social costs: I can’t do much about these, almost all of those are in the past and have already been incurred and paid. I can try to undo some of the negativity I have about sports, although I suspect that is more likely to be things like golf, bowling, archery rather than the intramural sports of my youth. It seems like so much work to try those. Is it bad that I’m strangely attracted to lawn bowling? Hell, I’m only 50. I suppose I could try pickle ball sometime. I would LOVE to go walking like my father-in-law does every morning. Maybe not at 6:00 a.m., but I’d love in retirement to go walking on a different trail several times a week with my camera or perhaps some music buds. Plus I’d like to go kayaking. And the stuff on dating / relationships is irrelevant as my wife loves me in my current form, although of course she’d like me to be healthier.
Lifestyle and opportunity costs: As I mentioned above, there are numerous things that I opted out of because I wasn’t comfortable participating given my size and weight. Will that change? I don’t know. I’m still an analytical introvert that hates being around large numbers of people for any length of time, but at least I won’t be blocked by self-esteem issues. I’m hoping to benefit from things with Andrea and Jacob that I say no to now. And I’m hoping to be able to buy some clothes off the rack without worrying that it won’t come in my size.
Mental health costs: The ship has sailed on the past, and I’ve dealt with some of them. But it also ingrained certain patterns of behaviour that might be harder to break for self-esteem and confidence in areas that I normally shun. I guess I’m hoping to avoid future deadweight loss.
Financial costs: This is probably the easiest in some ways…I’m not eating out as often as I used to, which alters the food and entertainment costs considerably. I might buy some exercise equipment or join a gym, but it’s still way cheaper than my previous expenses.
Medical problems: Well, I might not be able to avoid death, but I might push it off farther, and in the meantime, my overall quality of life will improve. At the moment, I’m on four different meds, and I’d like to get off all of them. I’d even love to see if my sleep apnea drops enough not to require a sleep machine. Better health for my back, better foot care, less pressure on my knees, an improved digestive system, lower blood pressure, less externalities (double chins, etc.). It`s an embarrassment of possible riches.
End result
Being overweight has had a big impact on my life, but that is not news. Lots of times while writing this, or even thinking about the inventory, I thought, “Oh what about THAT, don’t forget THAT”. It’s hard to feel like it’s all manageable when you see it so starkly presented, and I know that even this list is a bit of a snapshot, it’s not everything.
And yet…it’s not enough. The forces against me, when balanced with these in favour, left me in an uneasy and dysfunctional equilibrium. I wasn’t experiencing any particularly acute costs, and I didn’t have any pull factor to change “now” vs. “sometime”.
Yet, in the end, one new factor appeared to pull me forward, one that is partly related to the above, but in a new and compelling way. In the post after next week’s one on the forces against, I’ll talk about what put me over the top and made me ready to tackle my weight problems this year.
Welcome to my new blog feature that I might start sarcastically calling Weightloss Wednesdays. I will likely blog about my weight journey on Wednesdays, and if it motivates me to find a catchy name, so be it. Because today’s post is all about motivation.
As I move forward on my new goal i.e. losing weight, I mentioned that “something had happened” that allowed me to commit to weight loss in a way that I had never been able to do before. Before I get to that, I have to give a bit of context to show how I arrived at that “something”.
I have been heavily interested in the concept of “personal change” ever since I took five years off from dating to figure myself out aka get my head on straight. Yet while I am really good at field-stripping my psyche down to its component parts and reassembling on the fly, and even better at setting goals and sticking to them for a year, I’ve been stuck on this one big goal for several years. I’ve wanted to do it but didn’t feel like I could commit to it successfully. So I frequently read stories and tips about setting big goals, monitoring them, analysing them for obstacles to success etc. And when my wife had her graduation ceremony for her Masters of Education, the guest speaker / honored was Jeffrey Kottler. He was inspiring to hear, and his topic was about change…so after the ceremony, I bought and read his book called Change. I’ve even done some blogging about it (Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” – Chapter 1 and other chapters).
I was really looking for any secret tips or tricks to help me achieve “lasting sustainable change”. Unfortunately, as expected, there are no magic bullets or one-size-fits-all solutions. In fact, Kottler argues that we often don’t have any idea why one person makes a change that sticks and another makes the same change and relapses. But there are some common themes.
For example, lots of people have made lasting change because they underwent a traumatic “bottoming out”. Maybe the drug addict who loses his family or the alcoholic who winds up broke and homeless. Some sort of THIS SHIT IS REAL impact where they see the costs of their addiction and it shocks them into changing. For people who are fat, it’s often a heart attack. A life changing, chest grabbing incident that says, “Fix your life NOW, while you still have it.” I didn’t have that type of event. And even if I did, it might not have been sufficient. To the naïve, who think it is just something you decide to do and then you do it, aka Nike’s marketing slogan, they are often shocked, surprised and mystified when someone who, for example, is a heavy smoker, has a bad diet, and poor lifestyle doesn`t suddenly miraculously find the motivation after a heart attack to change their whole life around in a day. Or if they do, they can’t stick with it over time. For the uninitiated, they think it’s as simple as snapping your fingers and the decision is made. And if you don’t do it, it’s because you’re lazy or stupid. After all, you total up the costs and benefits and it is clear math — you need to make the change.
Except your psyche doesn’t work like a mathematical formula. It doesn’t take your current situation and subtract 10 points for a heart attack, and add 8 for stopping smoking, 3 for altering your diet, and 2 more for adjusting your lifestyle and decide that for the extra 3 bonus points, you should change everything to have more “utility” or “benefit”.
In April, Ms. Walker and other fat people were, in a sense, vindicated by the findings of experts at a conference called by the National Institutes of Health.
The group looked at data on success rates of weight loss programs and concluded that diets, including expensive commercial diet plans, have an abysmal success rate in long term, with virtually all dieters regaining the weight they had lost.
The panel wrote, “There is increasing physiological, biochemical, and genetic evidence that overweight is not a simple disorder of willpower, as is sometimes implied, but is a complex disorder of energy metabolism.
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. And don’t forget the psych stuff.
Understanding draw and drag on motivation, NOT on life
If you combine another of Kottler’s themes about forces at play with some of the findings on addiction research, you see that there are actually four forces, not the simple two (costs and benefits). I am using slightly different wording and approach from Kottler and the addiction research, but the resulting paradigm resonated with me, so this is how I approached my new goal. Most people tend to think of bad things as dragging them down (so-called costs) and good things (so-called benefits) as drawing them forward. Yet in the world of motivation, i.e. the key area that was holding me back psychologically, the terms are more normatively neutral. Some “benefits” can hold you back, and some “costs” can speed you up.
In my current situation, there are the obvious costs to my existing lifestyle. After all, there’s a reason I want to change. These are usually negative factors in my life, and their inherent negativity should motivate me to change. For most people, these are the typical primary costs of remaining in one’s current lifestyle and not making a change, and they are easily identified. Most popular press articles will point to them. They basically act as primary “draw” factors propelling me forward.
In my future situation, I will hopefully see a bunch of benefits. Some of them, as I said, will simply be the benefits from erasing the previous negativity, plus any secondary benefits that are produced at the same time. Like with the costs of the old, they will act as “draw factors” propelling me forward. In the end, it is this category more than any others that allowed me to change. A new secondary benefit, if you will, that I will talk about with respect to draw factors later. A mental change that made the difference for me.
Yet there are also drag factors. The first type is one of the biggest insights that I gleaned from Kottler’s book, the idea that your current situation has benefits. There are benefits to me of being fat. There are benefits to the person with anger management problems. There are benefits to the alcoholic of drinking. And these benefits will be “lost” when that changes. As such, they act as forces to resist change, resistance that will slow your change, or in some cases, prevent you from making any change whatsoever. An amazing concept…and one that is not well understood by huge numbers of so-called experts in the diet industry, even when they talk about motivations. There is actually very few that talk about the benefits you are giving up by changing, yet with many people, they are deeply rooted and hidden. And unless exposed to the light, they can act to sabotage any progress you will ever try to make. So they act as drag coefficients on your rate of change.
Finally, any “new” situation that you create comes with not only the good / benefits, but also the bad / costs of the new world. In an ideal situation, the new situation is paradise, but it rarely is. Many of the downsides will be the flip side of other elements above, but they also often fall into simple obvious categories too. Time. Money. Effort to change. Choice, as you focus on one thing and other things drift. But these costs also often go unheralded. And if they are demarked, they are often lumped under “no pain, no gain”. It’s simply the cost of doing business to accomplish your goal. But again, unless exposed to the light, they can sit in the dark as niggling rationalizations of why NOT to do something, acting as drag on your progress.
Two draws, two drags. It’s a bit simplistic to summarize this way, but I’ve come to believe that true change, sustainable change, can ONLY happen when the two draws outweigh the two drags on a permanent basis.
That is VERY hard for me to say. I have always believed, quite strongly, that freedom of choice and the set of your mind are enough to overcome anything. That even if the draws were not enough to overcome the drag on their own, you could CHOOSE to consciously commit to the goal and overcome that drag. And on some small issues, conscious awareness and commitment does often tip the balance. A so-called “X” factor that can change the whole equation.
But I’ve begun to admit to myself that eventually all equations balance out. And that “choice” that you added to the one side to tip the scales can start to wane, and if you haven’t accomplished the goal yet (i.e. most dieters who’ve tried losing weight), the drag forces will slowly wear away at your progress until you’re back where you started with some sort of skewed equilibrium. Your weight yo-yos, or you relapse, or you just plain slip and then stop trying.
In addiction scenarios, one of the ways that people can overcome this slippage is through a rigorous, detailed, candid inventory. I was / am not looking forward to this stage, anymore than I was looking forward to blogging about my weight.
But I need to muster all my mental forces towards the goal. I can’t hide behind timidness, or euphemisms, or even hidden forces that will slow my progress. I need candour with myself about what I’m doing and what it is costing me against what it is benefiting me. I need to itemize the drag forces and mitigate them, and identify the draw forces and embrace them.
And while it may be raw and unsettling to think about and blog about, it doesn’t scare me. It’s just emotional and mental homework. And I’m good at homework.
