Fit2Fat2Fit (2 page)

I'm overweight. I'm unhealthy. I've started to think that my wife finds me as attractive as a dung beetle. Either that or she considers me to be an extra-squishy sofa, permanently added to our living room furniture. And the strangest part is that it was my choice. I made a decision that I honestly question a little each day. I decided to stop exercising, stop eating healthy, stop being me. I made the decision to embrace the habits I had spent years trying to eradicate.

I decided to do something that, let's face it, most personal trainers will never do. I accepted the small possibility that maybe my clients were right and I was wrong. Maybe I didn't get where they were coming from. After all, my idea of a treat was to have an extra glass of a spinach shake. My idea of a lazy day was cutting my workout by 10 minutes because I needed to go mow the lawn at a full sprint. But what if I was the problem? What if becoming fit and healthy wasn't as simple as saying to yourself, “I'm going to be healthy now”?

I decided to take a journey from fit to fat, and back to fit again. If my message of health and personal accountability wasn't sinking in with my clients, maybe I didn't get how hard the road from unhealthy to healthy really was. Maybe the trainer in me needed to learn a few lessons first. So I made the commitment to spend six months without exercise, living a restriction-free diet. I would force myself to become overweight. Then, after half a year of eating all the typical American foods that feed our desire for convenience more than our need for health and moderation, I would switch gears. I'd put myself through the rigor and pain I'd been trying to get my clients to embrace. I hoped to inspire them to change and take control of their own health.

Yet at this moment, having overachieved in the initial transition from fit to fat, I feel lost. My personal GPS has dropped me at the corner of Shock and Terror. I've gained 75 pounds, which is bad enough. Worse yet, my personality is not the same. I'm full of self-doubt, believing that everyone around me is judging my newfound body type. More than anything, though, I'm afraid.

What if I can't lose the weight? I used to be convinced that I could actually scare fat off my body if I flexed hard enough. Then again, I had expected to gain only 50 pounds on this journey, and here I was at 75. I never knew that those same processed foods I had committed to fighting each day would develop such a stranglehold, both on my psyche and my waistline. And if the pounds do come off, will my skin firm up? Will my body process calories at the same pace it did for the first 30 years of my life, or will it be permanently skewed? My head is swirling with thoughts of the effects this experiment has had on my metabolism and the body I worked so tirelessly to perfect.

I used to judge people who couldn't step away from the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Now, anytime I don't pull the box out of the pantry, I feel like I'm cheating on the little baker captured on the front of the box. If I decide not to hang out with Toucan Sam and his rainbow hoops of pure love and affection, the guilt multiplies. And as a show of support, followers of my journey send me cakes, pies, and other contraband. My guess is that a stalk of celery sent from a well-wisher would not have the same endearing value.

We all struggle with self-esteem, and it would be inaccurate to imply that even on my most fit days I didn't have twinges of self-doubt. But nothing is as extreme as what I feel at my heaviest. These days, I question my abilities as a personal trainer, husband, friend, and father. What if my current reality becomes my permanent reality? Okay, perhaps this is a bit melodramatic, but the fear is real.

I know that I won't allow myself to remain 75 pounds overweight once I have the chance to eat right and work out. But what will the long-lasting effects of this journey be? Will I inherit a pesky 15 pounds that refuse to go away? Will my health be permanently affected?

I wonder whether my wife thinks that now is the time to upgrade to a slimmer, more manicured model. Sure, I'm worried about the weight going away. But I'm downright terrified that my personality, confidence, and self-belief will never be the same. It's still hard to believe that this entire thing was my idea.

O
ne more try. Those were the words that ran through my head as I took a half breath, half sigh, and pushed open the gym door to work with James, a recent client. As I walked past the equipment, filled with individuals either working toward or perfecting sculpted bodies, I went over my new strategy for James.

I barely had enough time to go through the basic points of the speech I was preparing when I saw him standing against the mirrors. He hadn't noticed me yet; he was staring at other people in better shape than he was. Was I imagining it, or was there a sense of resignation in his stare?

As always, I had tried to be encouraging, especially at first, offering comments about how he could get the results he was looking for and change himself and his habits for the long term. By now, though, I knew that I was simply trying to fill the space before his discouragement won out and he would officially quit. As expected, my initial comments had gone over like a lead balloon; James hadn't lost pounds, inches, or his self-doubt. It was now time to make him see that he could change, and that he was holding his own health back.

My interactions with James didn't start like this—with me giving unconvincing pep talks to both of us. None of my personal training experiences did. After all, I was obsessive about my own health, and had been for as long as I could remember. I had the biceps and abdominal muscles to prove it: working out and eating right were key parts of who I was, and this “healthy obsession” had led me to become a part-time personal trainer. (I also had a “day job” as a neuromonitoring technician in a hospital.)

Personal training allowed me to share my passion with others, helping them find health and fitness when they'd lost it or if they'd never had it in the first place. Their results gave my life a greater purpose. To be honest, it also got me more time in the gym without making my wife worry that I had a secret cot in the back, adorned with a gold nameplate reading Drew's Place.

After I became a certified personal trainer, friends and family would approach me. Some wanted general advice on surviving the holidays. Others asked for specific exercises that could help them “bulk up,” or “lose the last 15 pounds” after pregnancy. Which brings us back to James—a relative who'd approached me with a specific need.

James wasn't just overweight. At 5'8" and 340 pounds, James's physique was now a medical problem. Whereas many people hope to lose a “few” extra pounds, James had to lose weight. If he didn't, the consequences would be much more severe. He'd struggled with extra pounds for most of his life, but a motorcycle accident some time back had damaged his knees, and with that injury came more weight. James wanted help, and I was immediately interested in helping. After some measured success with other individuals, I was ripe for a big success story. Plus, this was family, and James's situation had clearly graduated beyond wanting to shed a little weight—he needed help. If nothing else, if I helped my wife's relative I'd store away Husband of the Year credits for times when I was being the typical, problematic male.

So we hatched a plan for me to become his personal trainer. I would guide him in exercising and provide meal plans to turn his health around. And although I warned him that I could be militant, I also promised to be supportive.

Early on, James followed my meal plans faithfully, and although he often seemed to be on the verge of cursing me during our workouts, he pushed himself every time. We were working out three times a week, and the level of effort he made impressed me. Even better, the weight started to come off. Granted, it wasn't at the level I had expected, but any weight loss was exciting. During workouts, we were partners. When he struggled, I was there to provide support and encouragement.

The first crack in the plan came at the beginning of what would be the most draining workout so far. James weighed in prior to starting, and the scale revealed that during the past week he hadn't lost any weight. This was a first since our partnership had begun. I was clearly too slow to wipe the disappointment from my face, because he immediately went into confession mode. He had cheated on the meal plan, he admitted. It was mostly due to a busy work schedule, but there were a few other excuses thrown in for good measure.

I put my poker face back on, encouraged him to stick with the plan, and brushed his challenges off as something that everyone deals with. But I went home that night and confessed frustration to my wife. James had already started seeing results; why had he now jumped off the wagon? More so, James had to lose the weight or face dire consequences. How could he not see it? I was doing my part. The diet wasn't too restrictive. I made certain not to be overly rigid in my plan so that anyone could follow it. Like a good wife, and one who had been through quite a few of these conversations before, Lynn told me to get back up and change my strategy.

Instead of being a workout buddy, I started to approach James with a coachlike mentality. I encouraged him with gentle reminders that this evolution was within his power. We started to make progress again. After a few more weeks the surprising weigh-in truly seemed a blip, and James seemed more committed than ever. That is, until he canceled a workout. I can't remember the reason—just the frustration. We'd been planning to track his weight progress that day, and my guess was that he didn't want to suffer through another confession.

Why did he ask for help if he wouldn't commit for the long haul? Not only was James taking chances with his own life. His decisions would affect his family as well. Moreover, he had lost both of his parents years ago to health problems. A necessary change was evident, but James seemed to be the only one who didn't see it. It bothered me enough that I asked him about it the next time we met. Instead of admitting his struggles as before, he, too, changed his tactics. He mentioned that some of the habits he'd picked up were “harder to break than you'd think,” and that his body “wasn't used to this kind of exercise.” The coach in me continued, although James's hesitation and doubt were obvious.

The situation was compounded by our familial relationship. It was one thing for my clients to say that they were struggling—or worse, that they were following meal plans when they really weren't. But I was around James outside of personal training. At family parties I would see him downing multiple sodas, partaking of more than one cheeseburger, and devouring desserts. And I clearly knew how serious his health and weight had become. It was getting uncomfortable for both of us.

I'm sure my wife actually stepped on my foot on more than one occasion as I opened my mouth to speak. I had a hard time watching James sabotage his health. With each get-together it only got worse. Lynn was rightly worried that the next family event might resemble WrestleMania. And yet James still kept coming to workouts. I hadn't lost him yet.

The measures of success, with the exception of a pound being dropped here and there, were much fewer as time went by. A subtle tension started to form between us. I'm sure James could sense my frustration, while I could clearly pick up on his lack of faith in my approach, both short- and long-term. I kept pushing him at our meetings, while afterward venting to my wife about his inability to stop pulling up at the drive-through, and worse, to take such needless chances with his life.

James soon started to make comments about me “not getting it” or just not seeing that “this isn't natural to me.” After he canceled three workouts in a row, I changed tactics once again. I picked up the phone and tried to get him to recommit. I even tried to scare him—to make him see that this was about more than losing a few pounds. I emphasized that this lifestyle change could be followed. I was living proof, and my program could get him wherever he wanted to be. I fully believed in the power of the halftime pep talk, but he had to show up—he had to try again. James begrudgingly agreed.

And so now, with “One more try” going through my head, I found myself walking across the gym, trying to gauge how forceful I should be, or if pure apathy should be my last-ditch approach. Before I could get into my personal trainer groove, James stopped me. He was going to try to fight the weight on his own for a bit, he said. He commented about “having the basics” from the instruction I had provided, and thanked me for everything. The reasons flowed from his mouth as if they had been gathering there since the beginning. I lost track of how many excuses he provided before I stopped really listening.

Like a deflated balloon, my bravado sank. I offered generic words of advice, told him to keep in contact if he needed an extra push, and watched him leave the gym. Of course, I couldn't let it go entirely; instead, I went into strategy mode about how I would get through to him at the next family party.

But as I put myself through a rigorous workout to burn off steam from the failed encounter, another thought went through my head. Something was missing. There had to be another way. I pushed a bit harder in my own workout that day, but I couldn't help wondering if I was ever really going to make an impact on someone other than myself.

An interesting thing happens when you grow up and have children of your own. A part of you tries to remember all the important lessons you were taught, hoping to impart some of that wisdom to the next generation. Another part of you swears to avoid some of the choices of your parents, happy that you have the power to cure the ills of your own childhood. And a final part embraces the age-old tradition of every generation—that we are smarter, wiser, and more successful than the last.