How did I get here?

Posted August 4th, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider

I’ve got a great life. I grew up in a very happy home with awesome parents and five wonderful siblings with whom I got along just fine. When I was 26, I married the most wonderful girl in the whole wide world, and five years later she inexplicably still loves me like crazy. We have a beautiful daughter and an adorable son, to go along with countless good friends and just enough great ones. I can’t imagine being happier.

But I sure can imagine being healthier, and while that in and of itself wouldn’t make me happier … well, let’s just say the peace of mind that comes from knowing you won’t leave your wife a young widow will be a wonderful thing.

Like most overweight people, my life has been a series of attempts, generally half-hearted, to lose weight. Not an endless series, but regular nonetheless. I have great empathy — and with it, sympathy — for people who have struggled to lose weight. I know it can be embarrassing at times, partly because we are bombarded with people telling us “All you have to do is eat right and exercise,” and partly because deep down inside we believe — know? — those people are right. But most of all, I empathize with the mixed feelings and emotions that come with trying to lose weight, and I really believe that while “all you have to do is eat right and exercise,” that’s like telling a baseball team, “Just score more runs than the other guys every game and you’ll be fine!” The concept is simple, but the execution can be a challenge.

Is it harder for overweight people to eat right and exercise? Absolutely, but only for some of the reasons you might be thinking of. Obviously, it is easier for someone in great shape to go run a few miles. (How unfair is that? When we were looking to buy a treadmill, I noticed that most of the inexpensive ones have a 250-pound weight limit. Come on, people! If I weighed 250, I wouldn’t need your stupid treadmill!) And sure, unhealthy eating habits can be a pain to overcome.

But for me, and I’m guessing for a lot of overweight people, there’s one more element, and it’s completely mental. It’s a little bit hard to explain, so it will be much easier for me to illustrate.

I love baseball. I started playing baseball when I was seven years old, and if it had been up to me, I would have played until I was 40 or so. By the time I got to high school, I had become a pretty good pitcher. My sophomore year, I was good enough to pitch on the varsity team, especially when about ten varsity players quit the team because of conflicts with the coach. Unfortunately, the coach and I were not the best of friends (he had been an assistant coach on my freshman team the year before), and he chose to promote a few of my junior varsity teammates instead of me. I was frustrated, and I probably handled it about as well as you would expect a 15-year-old kid to handle it, but I didn’t burn any bridges. Not yet.

(I guess I need to point out the obvious: I only know my side of the story. And more to the point, it’s been over 15 years, so I don’t even know how accurately I know my side of the story. But that’s at least part of the point, as this whole story has a lot more to do with my perceptions than with reality.)

So going into my junior year, I was optimistic about burying the hatchet with Coach X (not his real name, believe it or not) and playing on the varsity team. On the first day of school, still a good five months or so before baseball season, we had our first practice, and Coach X split us up between varsity and junior varsity — and he put me back with the JV team! After practice, I walked over to talk to Coach X to see what was going on. I said, “Why am I practicing with the JV team?” He said, “Because you’ll be playing on the JV team this year.” I said, “Even though I am the best pitcher in the school?” And he said, “Lose seventy pounds and then we’ll talk.” I said the rudest thing I could think of that didn’t involve anything that was technically a swear word, and I walked away. (In my mind, I like to think that I said something very clever, some play on words about what I was going to lose instead of weight, but I think it was basically something along the lines of “screw you, you big dumb dooty head.”)

Bridges burnt, baseball season over five months before it began. Coach X was the most evil man in the world, terrible human being, breathes fire, eats babies, cheats on his wife, voted for Hitler, you name it, Coach X was the villain. But something very strange happened that day — something both wonderful and awful. I was heartbroken at not being able to play baseball anymore, and I was furious at Coach X for doing that to me, and I was about a hundred other adjectives about the situation. But for a long time, I had been dealing with some feelings of depression — not too deep, really, but definitely there, and definitely related to my weight (and the unattractiveness that went with it, at least in my mind) — and those feelings were gone. I even made a conscious decision, either that very day or soon thereafter, and it was this simple statement: If Coach X, who stands for everything I believe to be evil and wrong, things my being fat is a bad thing, then it must be okay.

It was simple, and it was naive in its own little way, but it was effective. And overall, it was a good thing for me. We live in a weird world, and America is a weird country. We ALL know that magazines and TV and movies are evil for suggesting that perfect physical specimens are the norm and what we all should be, but we also ALL know that America has a huge obesity problem and it’s a terrible thing and our kids are so unhealthy and all that stuff. I know those two ideas aren’t really diametrically opposed, and I know there’s a rational middle ground. But I also know that the people who need both messages the most — children and adolescents — aren’t exactly the most capable of rational analysis. The feeling overweight adolescents get from those messages — or at least what I felt as an overweight teenager — is either:

1) “Yeah, up yours, Big Bad Media! I don’t care if I’m not chiseled like Brad Pitt — I’m just fine the way I am!”; or…
2) “I know, you’re right, I’m way too fat. It’s probably because I’m so lazy. No one will ever find me attractive, which is the worst possible fate a teenager like me could ever have.”

Neither of those attitudes is healthy — the first discourages change, and the second causes tons of self-esteem issues.

So anyway, I had been bouncing between those two attitudes, until the day Coach X told me to lose weight. At that moment, #2 was gone from my life forever, but it was replaced with a big fat dose of #1. In retrospect, I think #1 is much better than #2, and if you HAVE to choose one extreme or the other (and with teenagers, I guess you often do), it’s the better way to go. For me, the ramifications of that paradigm shift were wonderful, and they started immediately. By the end of that week, I was a member of both the football and wrestling teams, and by the end of my two years at each sport, I had become something between “good” and “pretty darn good” at both brand new endeavors. My writing, which I had been doing a lot of as editor of the high school newspaper, took on a new confidence that helped me hone my skills more quickly, even if it was a bit obnoxious at times. I quickly developed a lot of new friends at school, partly because I was playing two sports and partly because I was no longer shy and self-conscious.

Everything was great, except that I now had absolutely no desire to lose weight. I was just fine the way I was! I was a great athlete, people liked me, why did I need to change just because jerks like Coach X wanted me to?

I won’t lie. That defiant confidence made me who I am today, and I’m not afraid to say I think that’s a good thing. I think I’ve been a more compassionate person for having been on the other side of the fence. Overall, I think life has turned out great. But I’ve never been able to lose the weight and keep it off.

I’ve had a feeling for a long time that Coach X was part of my problem. It was several years before I reached the point where I thought, if I ran into him at the grocery store, I would be able to walk past him without punching him or spitting on him or flipping him off or something. I eventually got to the point where I thought I had overcome all of the negativity, but I still thought about him far more than I thought I should. So I knew I would eventually have to face that particular demon if I was ever going to get healthy.

And that’s how I ended up in therapy. As I consider myself one of the most mentally healthy people I know, it was a weird place for me to be, but there my lovely wife and I were a few weeks ago, sitting on an old couch in a room that was just a bit too warm. The lady we met with is a hypnotherapist, but it wasn’t what I expected (or what you probably think of when you think of hypnotherapy). I originally called her hoping she could make me magically not like ice cream and mac & cheese anymore, maybe trick my stomach into thinking it’s full after one helping instead of three. But what I got was much, much better.

When she hypnotized me … I don’t know how well I can explain it. I don’t know if there are different forms of hypnosis, like you see on TV where they make people quack like a duck, and they send them away with a subliminal urge to scratch their head every time they see Ashlee Simpson in a magazine. This was not like that. It was like I was in two places at once. I was always aware of my actual presence on the couch, always aware that my wife was sitting right next to me. But I was also in these places the therapist put me, and it was an experience that, when I look back on it in a few years, I am confident will prove to have changed my life.

I won’t go into all the details, but here are a few things I learned from the experience:

1) My subconscious mind has never wanted me to lose weight, because that would be an admission that Coach X was right. Deep down inside, I didn’t want to live in a world where Coach X could be right about anything. I thought if I lost weight and THEN ran into him in a grocery store, I would have to deal with the look in his eyes telling me “I told you so.”

2) I had turned over control of my life to Coach X. Not even Coach X, really, but a memory of a vilified caricature of Coach X. I don’t even know if Coach X is still alive — he was in his 60s when I knew him — but I was allowing my hatred of him to run my life and ruin my health.

3) I am easily strong enough to make the changes necessary to lose weight. When I was 23, I quit biting my fingernails cold turkey, just because I had done it as long as I could remember and I knew it was gross. I gave up a swearing habit cold turkey the year before that, just because I knew it didn’t reflect well on who I was and who I wanted to be. I have made numerous immediate and permanent changes in my life, just because I wanted to. I can do this one too.

4) Perhaps most surprising, I learned that Coach X was not evil. He was just a guy who had no idea how to deal with teenagers and never should have been put in a position of leadership over them. By the end of my session, I actually felt sorry for him — not a condescending sympathy, but a real, genuine sorrow that I had spent so much hate on him for so many years. I believe that he was probably a nice enough guy, and I know I would hate to be judged solely on my weaknesses.

So I have moved past the “I don’t want Coach X to be right” phase and into the “I want to be playing with my great-grandchildren when I am 90″ phase. The only consideration for me is my own personal health. I don’t care much how I look — my wife fell in love with me at 380 pounds, she kept loving me when I topped 400, and she still loves me now that I am on my way down to a healthy weight. I don’t care what other people think. All I care about is that I want to be with the people I love for a long, long time, and it will be a lot easier to do that if I stay alive. And if I can walk up a flight of stairs and not have to sit down and rest for five minutes, well that’s just icing on the cake. (I mean, that’s just light dressing on a bed of fresh veggies. Or something.)

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