Let’s talk about my diet. Not the foods I eat, but the weight I want to lose. When I quit working at the Y five years ago, I sat at an appropriate weight. Maybe pushing the upper healthy range on the American Body Mass Index scale, but, just like people always say, it was all muscle. No really, it was! I worked at the premier fitness center in Gettysburg. I lifted weights at lunch. I instructed two spin classes a week. I ran, lots.
Once, running in the park shirtless (gotta work that tan) a friend and his son saw me. My friend reported to me later that his son said “Dang, Mr. Cann is really fit.”
My response: “Ah, good, I’ve been trying to catch the eye of twelve-year-old boys.”
I’ve been slowly adding weight ever since. A couple pounds per year. A few months ago, it finally caught up to me. Or at least it caught my attention.
My work attire is something of a uniform. When I started working at the library, I bought four pairs of trousers from Old Navy—identical except in color: tan, brown, green and gray. Throw in a pair of jeans and I’ve got the workweek covered. The gray ones always fit loosely, like the sweatshop kid who made them was having an off day. Now, the gray ones are the only pair that fit. I’m wearing a lot of jeans to work—the ones I inherited from my son Eli when he lost a bunch of weight two years ago.
I warned my wife about my diet plan. Daily when I wake up, I weigh myself. And then I mark my weight on the bathroom mirror with a Sharpie. I did this once before. The first few years after my kids were born, my exercise program slacked off. I put on ten pounds. I looked soft. Emily, one of the fitness instructors at work started trash-talking me about running. She blathered on about how I would eat her dust if we ever ran the same race. Me in my late forties, her, super fit and in her twenties, it seemed like a stretch, but I trash-talked back. We picked a race two months away.
Sure, you can train obsessively (I did) and make gains (I did). But the easiest way to increase your speed is to drop weight. In those two months, I lost twelve pounds. To Emily’s shock, I beat her by two minutes in a 5K. When I announced my current diet, I knew I’d drop my excess weight in a couple of months, just like last time. My list of daily weights recorded on the bathroom mirror looks pathetic. Over the first three days, I dropped two pounds, but then I gained them back. I haven’t lost an ounce since. I weigh exactly what I weighed a month ago. The problem is I like to eat.
Today, after lunch, after an hour-long, cold-weather bike ride, I felt famished. I ate candy, I ate two chocolate chip pancakes, I ate a couple of handfuls of walnuts. Susan and I ran an errand. Still hungry and out on the town, I ate a Reese’s peanut butter cup blizzard from Dairy Queen. For dinner, I ate four pieces of pizza, and now I’m waging a losing battle against my craving for a Guinness beer.
I solve my problems by blogging about them. Typically, during the introspective three hours it takes to write a post, I’ve analyzed a situation from every possible angle. I almost always walk away with a plan. I’m taking a different approach this time. By announcing my diet to the entire world, I’m trying to shame myself into losing the weight I gained. In the meantime, I’ve started buying new trousers. One pair so far. I want to see how they wash up before I fill out the rest of my wardrobe. I’ll report back in two months. I better make some progress.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com
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