Lose Weight, Fast!

Where I begin a... something... about eating..

First Things First:

This is an initial entry of something I’m working on which may live only here on Substack, and it’s called “Lose Weight, Fast!”

I will make this first entry for all subscribers, but later entries will be for paid subscribers.  Or partially for all, and everything - of course - for paid (as I learn how to do that!)   Also, I’ll be editing as I go.   There will be revisions.  I’d love your comments.

Lose Weight, Fast!

Introduction to the Introduction

     The title is a joke my husband, Michael, came up with when I mused about writing a book about my Low-Carb Lifestyle.  (That’s right, it’s a style.  A style of life!)

     It was meant as a crass diet-book attention grabber title.  The first lines of the book would pithily explain that the book wasn’t about weight loss.  Much less about losing weight quickly.  It wasn’t even about losing weight through fasting. 

     For the record, weight is simply an indicator of other things and is NOT, I repeat – is NOT necessarily an indicator of health.  Lots of large people are perfectly healthy.  Many thin people are metabolically unhealthy.  So, losing weight is not the goal.  Besides which, there are many reasons for a person to be large, and many are completely out of their control, so do not discriminate against large people, people!

     Anyway, this is not that book (Lose Weight, Fast!) but it’s all the things I want to say about what I’ve learned and experienced on this topic.   And since, between Michael and me, that title was always hanging around, I’m keeping it. 

Lose Weight, Fast!  

Introduction

“There is nothing more tedious than someone telling you about their diet.”

                                         Julia Sweeney (all her life up ‘til now)

     A year ago, I weighed 25% more than I do now.  I did not set out to lose weight.  What happened was that I finally got scared.  I was scared to death.  More specifically, I was scared of my own death.  Not of being dead, of which I have no fear.  I happen to believe in Death -- as in: it’s over, there’s no you anymore.   What I fear is what happens right before you’re dead.      

      A year ago, I was watching my mother decline rapidly.   She had diabetes and dementia, along with painful problems like diabetic foot ulcers.  Oh, and the MRSA Superbug, an awful type of staph infection.  (My mother always said, “Julie, MRSA is everywhere, everyone has it!”  Like freckles.)   Meanwhile, I had gotten a score of 6.5 on my A1c.  That’s an indicator of average blood sugar over 3 months.  It meant that I, myself, had diabetes. 

    There were other health-related things going on with me a year ago.  None of them very big, but they added up.   For example, I had suddenly felt a disquieting and disturbing new arrhythmia in my heartbeat, at one point even going to the Emergency Room at UCLA.  They found my heart in good working order.  Still, the net cost to me was $1000 for that visit.  (I feel there’s a joke in there about getting the bill and being so upset that I actually get arrhythmia, but I’ll spare you.)

     There were more things, too.  An odd and terrifying thing was happening to me occasionally in the middle of the night. It felt like my brain’s engine was powering down.  More like powering off.  I felt I could hear it, whirring itself downward into a terrifying heavy silence.  I would wake, panting, gasping for air.  

     Also, I sometimes had night terrors.  I would, infrequently, wake up screaming. My husband would have to shake me awake.  It was terrifying, and terrifying mostly because there was a part of me that was detached and watching it all happen.  I would look at Michael: why are you shaking me like that?  And think: who is screaming right now?   But another part of me was, obviously, screaming.  This did not happen often. Maybe twice a year. Still, disquieting. (And not quiet!)

     I thought the cause of the night terrors was my highly creative brain creating hellish nightmares.  But it also happened the night Trump was elected President in 2016.  The nightmare had become real.   But c’mon, who didn’t wake up screaming that night? 

     I diagnosed myself as having sleep apnea, and possibly the worst kind of sleep apnea, the one that isn’t related to obstructed breathing.  There’s another type of apnea where your brain just stops telling you to breathe.  I had tests for this when I was living in Chicago, and the results were – no apnea.  In a word: pnea.

    As all these minor things were happening, nothing made me stop and rethink anything. But then, on May 2, 2022, in Los Angeles, where I had been living for a few years, I went in for a routine colonoscopy at UCLA.  The nurse who prepared me for the procedure looked at a computer screen with my data and said, flatly, “So -- you’re obese and you have diabetes.” 

     “Barely obese!”, I said, in an exaggerated tone. With a comic smirk. 

An awkward silence ensued.   

     “And hardly diabetic at all.” I murmured. Almost inaudibly.   

     I did not like that nurse.  But, I have to admit, her pointed judgmental tone had an impact.  

    I thought that because I’ve always been an active (some might say annoyingly active) person, I would escape the problems that were supposedly associated with extra weight.  I exercised a lot: I lifted weights, I’m a lifelong long walker, I swim regularly (I’d been a lifeguard and swim instructor for years), I’m a flexible yoga aficionado, and I’m a fidgety person in general.  Overall, I am game for doing anything that requires physical effort.  I thought all those great things about me added up to exoneration of excess weight.  (If there even was anything wrong with excess weight!)   

     I was convinced by anti-diet philosophy.  Dieting didn’t work.   I believed I wouldn’t have to endure the downside of being large, besides being large.  And I didn’t mind being large.

     I’d just spent over 4 years working hard not to go on a diet.  Over my adulthood, I had lost and gained the same 20 pounds over and over again and gained it all back plus more.  Over the pandemic, I gained 20 more.  I had listened with religious commitment to the Food Psychology Podcast with Christy Harrison, along with reading and listening to her book, Anti-Diet.  I signed up for her Intuitive Eating class. 

      Christy Harrison makes great arguments about diet and wellness culture and how misleading and horrible it all is.  She argues convincingly that dieting makes people get fatter over the long term, fatter than they’d be if they never tried to diet at all.  I think she’s right.  I also think she’s very wrong.  I’ll get into all that.  

     At the same time, the science about fasting was fascinating to me, and I had tried calorie-restriction, or intermittent fasting, a few times.  It was hard.  It was too hard.  I couldn’t seem to do it regularly enough to make a difference.  Just the idea of fasting made me uncontrollably hungry.  Just writing about it right now makes me want to get a snack.

     A year ago, my mother’s dementia was dominating my life. I had just filmed my last one-person-show in Spokane, WA (March of 2022.)   When I filmed that show, I was probably at my highest all-time weight.  I didn’t care. I embraced my larger self and genuinely felt great about how I looked in the show.  I had enormous energy and I generally like the look of large women.  Now I was clearly one myself. Yay.

     My mother’s dementia was dominating my life because she was becoming increasingly detached from reality.  She lived in an assisted living facility, Emilie Court, in Spokane.  My phone number was the first one called when my mother did or tried to do things that were, ahem, crazy.  Examples: 1. She often tried to leave in the middle of the night, to go meet my father for a drink (he died in 2004) or to go on a car ride with my brother Bill (who died in 2012).  2.) She cancelled her own stellar health insurance and signed up for a new health insurance made possible by former President Trump’s lenient new laws for entrepreneurs who wanted into the insurance game. (I found that the president of said new insurance is currently under indictment for fraud.) It took me 6 months of work to get her back on her old insurance.  3. She tried to take all the money she had access to, to buy silver coins.  (I had to make sure she had no access to money.)  4. She asked to be taken back to the condominium she used to own because she felt sure she was going to win the Publisher’s Clearing House Lottery and she wanted to be there when they knocked on the door.  She was sure she was going to win because she had entered the lottery many times, she had bought thousands of dollars worth of Publisher’s Clearing House merchandise (most of which she never opened) and she had subscribed to so many magazines, the stuff I suppose they were “clearing.”  For many magazines she had multiple subscriptions.  I mean, who doesn’t want to have four copies of Women’s Day coming to them every month?   Personally, I think Publisher’s Clearing House is a clearing house for the phone numbers of seniors with dementia.

     The facility she was in did not have specialized memory-care.  The administrators were beginning to gently pressure me to move my mother to a different facility with more appropriate care.  That was going to be traumatic for my mother, and expensive. Extremely expensive.  My mother was rapidly running out of money.  My brother and sister and I were constantly on the phone trying to figure out how much we could pay each month when her money dried up.   We talked about which of us could care for her in our home.   My sister and brother both work full-time, besides the fact that my sister lives on Shikoku Island in Japan.  I’m semi-retired, and currently live in Los Angeles, but I knew that if my mother moved in with me, she increased her chance of being murdered.  By me.

     As her guardian, I could not ethically let her live with me.

     Between the constant calls from Emilie Court asking me to talk my mother down from a crazy desire to breakout of the facility and the fear of debt to help my mother live, I hadn’t slept through the night in months.  Maybe years.

     So, the day after my colonoscopy (all was well) on May 3, 2022, my husband and I boarded a plane from Los Angeles to Columbus, to attend our daughter’s graduation from college at The Ohio State University.  I downloaded an audio book to listen to along the way.  Because of that snarky nurse’s remark about my obesity and diabetes, I decided to download Dr. Jason Fung’s The Diabetes Code.  The audiobook is twelve hours long.  We were to fly to Houston and change planes for Columbus.  Flights were delayed and cancelled. What should have been an eight-hour total experience turned into thirty-six hours of travel with an unexpected stop at O’Hare, in Chicago.  The point is, I listened to The Diabetes Code in one long go.  I knew carbs weren’t good, but I thought it just meant sugar, like candy bars and cake. I didn’t realize it meant so much more: fruit, bread, rice, beans, and on and on. It’s complicated and I want to tell you more.

     Looking back, I see that it was the beginning of a whole new life.  You always wish for that.  You have an insight into yourself, or get new information, or get old information in a new way that makes it land deeply in your psyche.  You think your life is probably changed forever.  But it almost never is.      But this time, it was.  My life was utterly changed from the moment I finished The Diabetes Code.

     That I could be writing this, less than a year from that day, and weigh 50 pounds less than I did, is astonishing.  The weight slid off effortlessly.  I have not woken up from a nightmare in over a year.  (Okay, that could be from other things changing, but maybe it’s related.)  I have more energy and ability to concentrate.  I have the calm of knowing that I am doing everything I can to spare my own loved ones from the dementia that is highly correlative with high blood sugar, which I have – or had.  I have peace of mind knowing I’m doing what I think is the best thing to do to prevent both cancer and dementia. 

     Mostly I fear dementia.  You know, in the movies and in books, dementia is often portrayed as a childlike, innocent state.  But it’s not.  Or it’s mostly not that way.  Imagine waking up and not knowing where you were, and strangers walking into your room and some of them insisting that they are your own children.  It’s a real nightmare.  It’s highly agitating.  It’s not the way I want to go. Or want anybody else to go.

     You don’t want everyone’s dominant emotion when you die to be relief. 

     Most importantly, I didn’t know about the connection between dementia and diabetes.  I ask people all the time about it and almost no one knows that connection.  Also, the common wisdom about diet is way off, and living in Los Angeles, I hear the crazy all the time.  I want to write about that too.  I want to try to elegantly explain what I have learned about nutrition and highly processed foods and carbohydrates and fats and proteins.

     At the same time, I have to throw in this caveat.  Nutrition is highly individual.  Each of us has very specific nutritional responses and needs and it takes a lot of experimentation and awareness to know what’s best for you.  So, I guess I’m saying that I’m going to write about how I changed my own life by adopting a Low-carb Lifestyle.  My A1c is now out of pre-diabetes range, my triglycerides are low.  I am not on any medications.

      I also feel much better overall.  I didn’t even know I felt bad before.  I must say this with a certain caution.  When someone wants to convince others (or themselves) about something, it’s common to unconsciously exaggerate how things were before, in order to emphasize and enhance how great they are now.  (Or vice versa.)  I am well aware of this, but I must say, I feel so fucking much better than I did.  I guess I think using the word fucking may convince you. 

      Okay!   Yes.  Fuck yes! I may be high from a new way of life that seems to be working.  Yes, I may change what I think, go back to eating lots of carbs.   I guess time will tell.   But honestly, I would be highly shocked if I ever changed my Low-Carb Lifestyle.

      When I stopped believing in God, many people said, “Oh, you’ll go back. Someday you will need God, and you will go back to believing in Him.”  What could I say?  I knew that wouldn’t happen.  I mean, unless I had some kind of stroke that dramatically affected my critical thinking skills. 

     So, I predict that this change of what I choose to eat is permanent.  I can’t imagine eating the way I used to. That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally have higher-carb meals.  I do.  Joining in and eating under certain circumstances is something I want to make exceptions for.  And I will. But, after I do, I get right back on the horse.

       And horse, for me is the right analogy.  Every other eating program I’ve been on, I felt there was this Horse of Hunger inside me, and that horse was locked in a pen, waiting to break free.  Maybe I think that because of the phrase, Hungry as a Horse. But then there’s the phrase, “I could eat a horse.” Now, I feel I’m beating a dead horse.

The point is, my personal Horse of Hunger would eventually break free. That horse would run and run and run, meaning I would be eating and eating my way back up to my old weight, and beyond: over hill and dale, into the sunset.

       Now, I do not feel that horse is behind a gate.  I feel the horse is me and I am the horse and we go everywhere together.  We’re friends, me and the horse.  We are one.

     Excuse me while I weep for a moment.  But honestly, it’s true.

  I believe I was addicted to carbs, and after I wasn’t addicted anymore, the cravings went away and haven’t returned.  My taste buds seem to have transformed.   I like foods now that I didn’t like before:  kimchi, sauerkraut, bitter greens, cheese omelettes.  Yes, isn’t that amazing? 

      I want to tell you all about it.