30 pounds lost while lacking self-control

While I’ve never been particularly fit, neither am I overweight. I’ve been 150 lbs since college. I was 150 during my wedding. My thermostat was set at 150, and while it swung up and down a few pounds, I’d guess it was me.

Until I was hospitalized at 44. The six months of lying around in bed helped to reset my system, and in a pretty short time, I weighed 180. No matter what I tried, this was my new normal. Newly split, living alone, I thought I had acquired new habits: staying up late, snacking on peanut M&Ms, and keeping my laptop in bed with me, and it was the last thing and the first thing I saw every day. I was also starting to date.

On one such occasion I met Katie, a woman who was a popular SF yoga instructor, but more than that, she was a practitioner of ayurveda. Up until that time I felt that yoga was glorified stretching, and I had nothing to do with it. Katie, in her sweetly effervescent southern charm, emphasized in a manner that no one had before how yoga isn’t an independent practice but a tiny physical element of an old set of lessons about how to live your life. Ayurvedic medicine was holistic and had been developed 3000 years ago in India as a oneness of mind, body, and spirit. It made sense to me: I could imagine millennia of trial and error, and suddenly I could recognize how the yoga asana practice—those bendy, excruciating contortions—was merely a physical manifestation of a broader philosophy. Practicing yoga without the rest of the system struck me as hollow.

Katie wanted to develop a book about ayurveda for women, and I was interested in this new topic and also had some skill in book publishing, so I offered to help. A couple of things happened at this point that are worth mentioning. I really wanted to go out with Katie, and we were getting along great after a few outings. But volunteering to help her with her book concept seemed to change things. “I really like you,” she told me as we sipped wine in Napa, “but I don’t think we’re romantically inclined. But we'd be amazing together working on this book, right?”

And it was our final date. It began a two-year process of assisting to have her book written and published. At some time she even relocated back East, but it didn’t matter much as we performed our business online and over the phone. “If you’re going to edit the manuscript,” she informed me, “you have to go through the lessons yourself. You have to create an Ayurvedic practice.”

As Katie was now in Virginia, she requested her friend Chrisandra, another ayurvedic practitioner, to work with me in person: we met every week or two, and she not only performed yoga with me but worked with me on nutrition, sleep, and other lifestyle choices I was making. On day one I made the following changes to my life:

Turning off electronics; getting to bed sooner. It wasn’t so much about the precise time, but I had to put away my computer and phone at 9 pm, and then it didn’t matter how late I stayed up. Inexplicably, I discovered I’d fall asleep maybe an hour later if those things were gone. Which also allowed me to sleep longer.

Morning stroll as soon as I was up. No turning on phone or computer either. Just wake up, get ready, and walk for a half hour. Again, no one was a stickler about the durations as much as the habit.

Daily yoga. Oddly, this was the smallest component of the project. Sometimes I did it. Sometimes I didn’t. I was told to meditate also, but I wasn’t.

Change my diet. This was vital for me; my eating habits were dreadful. I didn’t eat junk food or prepared items, but even organic diets can be unhealthy. I changed out my M&Ms for almonds and grapes. Just as pleasurable to snack on, but typically healthier in moderation. I got instructions regarding when to eat hot products and cold stuff. And after studying my body type and browsing through my cupboard, I ended up cutting out breads and pastas and desserts and having more meats and cheeses and greens. I had a lot of fruit.

Most of these directives were simple to implement, but I wasn’t sure I could hack the diet. I’m addicted to sweets. I resided in North Beach, San Francisco, Little Italy, where pizza and spaghetti are neighborhood mainstays, and life equals sourdough. But I began to visualize eating bread the way someone stuffs a turkey—just taking handfuls of puffy filling and shoving it in, and it began to stress me out. I classified what I was doing as a modified “paleo” approach, but the crucial thing to me was that it wasn’t draconian—I wasn’t counting things, and it wasn’t extremely regimented, but it was directed to match the season and my moods.

I weighed 182 lbs when all this began. And I decided to record my morning body weight every day and put it in a graph, along with other data regarding activity and diet. What happened amazed me: every day I shed weight. Because the body response was immediate, it became positively reinforcing. Which made it easier to do. I didn’t just lose weight; I lost weight consistently and consciously. This is my chart from the first 6 months:

Also worth noting: daily fluctuations could be large—from salt consumption and water retention mostly—but on any one day it might bounce up or down a few pounds, so I learnt not to obsess about the tiny blips and concentrate on larger trends.

Once I reached 150, I dropped some of the dietary limits—not completely, but just treated less strictly. I’d eat some dessert, but just sporadically, and not as much. And bread on certain occasions, if it was wonderful bread. I kept nibbling on almonds and grapes and had a weekly habit of baking Brussels sprouts, which likewise were pleasant to chew. And I kept up my morning walks (which I performed with a camera in hand to feel fairly productive), although I fell off on the yoga practice. And with remarkable ease, I maintained my original weight of 150 over the coming years. That is, until COVID-19.

For almost 8 years this was my life. But the shelter-in-place shifted me back to sitting up late with my computer, plenty of noshing, and very little activity, and in only a few months I watched my weight creep back up, and when it hit 170, I freaked out.

This summer I decided to try again, and I went back on the exact same diet and fitness routine. And I got back out my spreadsheet to track progress. It’s been three months, and apparently the similar behaviors give the exact same outcomes; here’s my 2020 graph set opposite the 2012 graph:

The blue data is from 2020; the red is from 2012. The slopes of the two trendlines are virtually equal.