A Weight Loss Story That Should Inspire

30-pound weight loss with little self-control

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

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

On one such date 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 point I felt that yoga was glorified stretching, and I had nothing to do with it. Katie, in her delightfully effervescent southern charm, explained in a way that no one had before how yoga isn’t an isolated activity but a small physical part of an ancient set of teachings about how to live your life. Ayurvedic medicine was holistic and had been built 3000 years ago in India as a union 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, awkward contortions—was simply a physical execution of a broader philosophy. Practicing yoga without the rest of the system struck me as hollow.

Katie wanted to write a book about ayurveda for women, and I was fascinated by this new topic and also had some experience 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 well after a few dates. But offering to help her with her book idea 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 great together working on this book, right?”

And that was our last date. It began a two-year process of helping get her book written and published. At some point she even moved back East, but it didn’t matter much as we did our work online and over the phone. “If you’re going to edit the manuscript,” she told me, “you have to go through the lessons yourself. You have to start an Ayurvedic practice.”

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

Turning off electronics; going to bed earlier. 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 found I’d fall asleep maybe an hour later if those things were gone. Which also let me sleep longer.

Morning walk as soon as I was up. No turning on phone or computer either. Just get up, get dressed, 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 part of the effort. Sometimes I did it. Sometimes I didn’t. I was advised to meditate also, but I wasn’t.

Change my diet. This was key for me; my eating habits were lousy. I didn’t eat junk food or prepared foods, but even organic diets can be unhealthy. I swapped out my M&Ms for almonds and grapes. Just as fun to snack on, but generally better in moderation. I had instructions for when to eat hot things and cold things. And after reviewing my body type and going through my pantry, I ended up cutting out breads and pastas and desserts and having more meats and cheeses and veggies. 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 lived in North Beach, San Francisco, Little Italy, where pizza and pasta are neighborhood fixtures, and life equals sourdough. But I began to visualize eating bread the way someone stuffs a turkey—just taking handfuls of puffy filling and packing it in, and it began to gross me out. I recognized what I was doing as a modified “paleo” approach, but the important thing to me was that it wasn’t draconian—I wasn’t measuring things, and it wasn’t particularly regulated, but it was guided 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 notes about activity and diet. What happened surprised me: every day I shed weight. Because the physical response was immediate, it became positively reinforcing. Which made it easier to do. I didn’t just lose weight; I lost weight consistently and methodically.

Also worth noting: daily fluctuations could be huge—from salt intake and water retention mostly, but on any given day it might bounce up or down a few pounds, so I learned not to stress about the little blips and concentrate on overarching trends.

Once I reached 150, I relaxed some of the dietary constraints—not entirely, but just handled less rigorously. I’d have some dessert, but only sometimes, and not as much. And bread on special occasions, if it was awesome bread. I maintained my snacking on almonds and grapes and had a weekly routine of baking Brussels sprouts, which also were fun to nibble. And I kept up my morning walks (which I did with a camera in hand to feel marginally productive), although I backed off of the yoga practice. And with relative ease, I maintained my old weight of 150 for the subsequent years. That is, until COVID-19.

For about 8 years this was my life. But the shelter-in-place switched me back to staying up late with my computer, lots of noshing, and very little activity, and in just 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 activity regime. And I pulled back out my spreadsheet to track progress. It’s been three months, and apparently the same actions produce the exact same results.