Most people have to struggle to lose weight.
For me, that’s the easy half of the battle. I can lose weight if I put my mind to it, but sadly, it has been extremely difficult to keep it off.
I have had three different diets in my post-35 years in which I have lost more than 80 pounds, with the best of them — in 2010 — resulting in a 116-pound loss.
Wouldn’t you think a 60-year-old man who spent six months dieting and exercising to get down to what he weighed at age 17 would finally have learned his lesson?
I went from 284 pounds — my highest weight ever — down to 168 pounds and was walking six miles or more every day to keep the weight off.
Not this 60-year-old man. I gained back more than half the weight I had lost in less than a year, and on July 16th this year, that 71-year-old man weighed 270 pounds.
The picture at the beginning of this piece is one I never intended to show. I’ve used it before to show my wonderful family, but only after cutting out the tub or lard on the far right. Yes, that was me in early April, and the second photo is of me earlier today.
I have lost 51 pounds since July 16th, and I plan to lose at least another 20-25 before I stop.
As I said before, that’s the easy part.
To be fair, the diet I’m currently doing is one of the easiest ones ever for me. I’m doing Noom, and I can’t exaggerate how wonderful it has been for me. First off, when I set my goals, it gave me a reasonable amount of calories to do what I need to do without feeling like I’m starving.
I have a base of 1,400 calories a day, and I’m allowed more depending on how much I exercise.
In the 98 days — 14 weeks — that I have been doing the program, I have only exceeded my calorie allowance once, and that was only by 25 calories.
Getting back into walking has been the tough part. My body deteriorated a great deal between 60 and 71, and there’s simply no way I can walk six miles or more without serious pain. In fact, the walking I do is with a cane. Otherwise, I have balance problems.
One good thing is that the walking I do goes nowhere near places to buy food. In 2010, even when I was walking six miles or more, I would stop at McDonald’s for a McFlurry. Not a huge deal until I stopped the walking and maintained the snacking.
Of course I’m hardly alone in having trouble keeping the weight off. I’ve seen estimates that for ever 10 pounds American dieters lose, they gain nine of them back within a year. It’s an incredibly healthy way to live.
I had a friend who spent much of his adult life weighing about 650 pounds. Through a combination of dieting and surgery, he lost nearly two-thirds of that weight, more than 400 pounds.
It would have made a huge difference, but he already had done too much damage to his heart. I believe he weighed about 230 pounds when he had a heart attack and died.
There have been two big differences — call them additional motivations — for me this time around. The first one is that the additional 11 years has really taken a toll on me through osteoarthritis. It’s a rare day that I don’t have serious lower back pain.
The second is that really important one. I developed Type 2 diabetes in my early 60s, and it’s really only been the last year or so that I’ve gotten serious about fighting it.
My old friend Mick turned out to be something of a prophet back in 1984 when he suggested that I would wind up alone in a fleabag hotel after losing a leg to diabetes.
Actually, he wasn’t much of a prophet at all. I’m not alone and I live in a nice house. I’ve yet to lose a limb, although I have some annoying neuropathy in my feet. He did call the diabetes, though, and I was dumb enough never to think about it till I was diagnosed with it in 2014.
My a1c and my glucose levels are both good and getting better, but at almost 72, this probably is my last chance to get it right.
Here’s hoping I remember that.