This isn’t a topic I ever really thought I’d write about publicly. It’s a complex, deeply personal thing to expose so openly — that’s scary. But my recent convictions and life-changes have lead me to want to put this out here. I feel like I finally found an answer to the chaos and despair. Before we get there, let me go back. Way back!

The Past

The simplest way to describe my childhood from a body / weight standpoint is that I was a chubby kid. Or, maybe better put, I became a chubby kid. I certainly wasn’t yet on my sixth birthday — I was a cute kid!

But I became chubby somewhat rapidly over the next several years.

Some of this was likely due to my mother’s deep love for me (especially being the youngest and “her last baby”) constantly manifesting in sugary treats, cookies, and other short-term joys. Some of it was simply the food culture in our home, which I’d describe as very middle-class default (we ate a lot of middle-of-grocery-store foods) and not particularly healthy. And some of it was my own decisions. Yes, I was a child, but I still had some responsibility here! I knew I shouldn’t eat so many sweets, but I did.

The next real body-weight season for me was junior high. I’ve always looked back and told my friends that eighth grade was “the year I took PE super seriously and got into wrestling”. Both are true. That first year of wrestling also began to teach me what real hard work in the next level of sports looked like. This would prove helpful in the years that followed.

Luckily for me, the hardcore-PE and wrestling coincided with a growth spurt. So I got taller and much skinnier. This was nice 😊. I don’t have many images from this time, and most of them are in that embarrassing pre-teen age, but here’s a couple to illustrate the point.

That season was probably the first time I ever felt good about my body weight and body image. I wish that this was the end of the post and I could simply say “so I stayed that way for the next twenty years and here I am” 😅. No such reality.

I also don’t want to understate just how much work that process was. I didn’t know anything about nutrition, eating, and/or how exercise interplays with those, so I just kept exercising until I got skinny. I now know that it doesn’t really work that way, but the growth spurt probably made this work. At the end of the day I felt like I was just paying sweat penance for a childhood of sugar — finally having to run off all those calories and carbs. All the while maintaining a struggling inner dialogue of, “I just don’t want to be the fat kid anymore.” This was both physically draining and psychologically brutal. I don’t wish this on any children ever.

I started high school and played my first year of football essentially still in this state. This is when I fell in love with football and made so many new high school friends. These are good memories 🙂

That emerging love for football lead to a full-on deep-dive (and remains with me even now) — learning the sport better, growing in my abilities, and growing my body to get bigger and stronger. All these things did happen, but in the midst of learning all things weight-room and working out consistently for the first time, I added a gainer (like a protein shake but with 50-100 carbs), ate a ton, and got big. Par for the course, I did get stronger, but my sophomore and junior years of high school were ‘big-boy’ years. Placement started to matter here as my body formed its new shape. We’ll just say that I was focused on squats more than bench-press 🤦‍♂️.

Again, athletically, this did very well for me. In about two years I became one of the strongest athletes at our school, landed the ‘Weightlifter of the Year’ award, and while I dealt with a lot of bullying when I was a young chubby kid, nobody messed with me after that 😅. So it’s not all negative, but I remember this being another season where I really didn’t like the way I looked, even if my athletic performance was benefiting. I remember there being a psychological toll to this body.

One note: I will say, my sprint time definitely did not benefit from this weight, and our offense style was predicated on every player being agile and quick. It was clear to me that I needed to drop some pounds to be effective for my next season.

But the yo-yo keeps yo’ing and, thanks to the endless sweating of wrestling conditioning, some tweaks to my supplementation process (no gainer, fool!), and some better mindfulness, I shed some of this weight.

By my senior year I felt like I’d really found a good place — a strong muscular foundation that powered my football success, but without the fatty layer on top that lead to body image disdain.

Ultimately I had a great senior year, too. Our football team did incredibly well, my social life was bustling, I went to state with wrestling, I finally got a license. This was another great period of life!

Then college.

Let me be clear, I loved my experience at Denison. But I originally went there because my football career brought me a scholarship and I fell in love with Ohio (still here!). I only ended up playing one year of football at Denison due to a massive cultural mis-match, but that was enough time for some things to change.

Where my high school team was, “everyone fast and agile; our lineman need to be quick too!” Denison’s offense was more old-school, “lineman are the huge guys in the front” — ‘huge’ both muscularly and weight wise. Fueled by protein shakes, constant meals in the all-you-can-eat college buffets, and ice cream, I quickly became the 300lb lineman we needed 😓.

Being that large, both in terms of body-weight and general disposition, is sometimes fun (feeling like a monster), but more often still laden with the same psychological tolls I’d felt earlier in life. Maybe more “big guy” than “fat guy”, but at the end of the day, wearing a 40”+ waist set of jeans is wearing a 40”+ waist set of jeans.

You won’t be surprised to hear what comes next — I lost some weight! My sophomore year of college I learned about that neat technique of losing weight where you’re too busy to eat so you just don’t. Super healthy. Extremely effective.

For instance, one day I worked a full day of audio engineering, had classes, and I’m pretty sure I pulled an all-nighter the night before. Eat? Wasn’t going to happen. I passed out on my bed, just like this, in full clothes and legs hanging off 😅. My roommate was entertained, at least!

Was just missing meals for a semester like that healthy? Not at all. Would I do it again or recommend it? No, please don’t. But it did the job.. I lost a lot of weight that semester. And I swore off sweets for the next two years (seriously). Somehow I think this lead to me loosely maintaining that weight and body image for the last two years of my time at Denison. Which was great! For two whole years I was able to maintain a body weight I liked.

But then I graduated from college and started my independent adult life. I don’t exactly recall why, but I decided at that point to start tracking my weight daily so that I could see long-term trends. Thank you, younger self! I now have seven years of data to reflect on. It looks like this:

That long lull on the left side was those two years of college I mentioned. Since then? Up and down and up and down… Aside from this being really, really bad for your body, it’s just constantly heartbreaking. If you’ve yo-yo’d in your weight, you’ll know what I mean. To still have the image of yourself at a healthier weight so close in the rear-view mirror as you now see the weight you’ve packed on… it’s tough. And my yo-yo’ing has never been “a couple pounds per year”. It tends to be very rapidly either in the upward or downward direction. There are multiple forty pound spikes that took less than a year in that chart.

And that’s ultimately what this entire section of “The Past” culminates to. I’ve lived a life of bouncing between some lower weights and some higher ones, always in a rapid and polar way, over and over, for a couple of decades now. All of this fueled by my lack of discipline around food (in both quality and quantity), deep struggle with sugar and treats, and difficulty in ever creating a sustainable model. This was my life!

It had to change. I didn’t want this to be my repeating story for the rest of my days.

(*I should note that the very last drop in the line, as it goes down to 200 and then goes flat, is the goal. I’m currently on the descent but not there yet.)

The Present

The first thing I want to openly recognize is that I clearly don’t have it figured out yet. Every single time I’ve come down to a lower, healthier weight, I always thought I had a good solution that would work long-term. Obviously that was never true.

In ‘18 I lost weight by cycling and burning insane amounts of energy on very long rides. In ‘19 by some (less) cycling and sustaining 75% of my life on Kirkland trail mix alone (the stuff is amazing). In ‘22, after traveling full time left us super overweight, Kalika and I did keto for the first time. Then again in ‘23, again in the beginning of ‘24 briefly, and now again I’m on (what should be my last round of) keto at present.

All of that to say, each time I had some kind of plan for how to stop myself from walking right back up that mountain. None of those worked — none of them were sustainable. Keto is particularly nefarious because after true, pure abstention from almost all carbs for months, your will-power to only consume a few when you re-join the ‘normal food’ world is at an all-time high. But slowly over the following months, that will-power deteriorates and the breads, sugars, and sweets slip in more and more. You believe that you can do it since you just did months with no carbs, but the carbs will get you over time.

Yo-yo’ing is hard to cope with and, while I’m confident that my strategy now will be more effective and lead me to a life of sustained weight and no yo-yo’ing, I need to say that with a grain of salt given my track record. But I really do think I’ve found the right answer this time.

Some Realizations / A New Path

The short version of this story is that I read two different books, both of which had a deep impact on me. The first was Magic Pill, Johann Hari’s investigation into, and self-reflection (as a participant) of, GLP-1 hormonal weight-loss drugs: Ozempic, Wegovy, etc. I didn’t read this book because I was interested in taking Ozempic or any of the others, but because I’d just read another book about how tweaking hormones in humans can have huge, unforeseen psychological impacts apart from accomplishing the direct goal of the medicine. While they essentially mimic the “I feel full” hormone in humans, I was curious if any of these GLP-1 formulas also have interesting side-effects on psychology, generally.

I did find the answers to those curiosities in that book (it’s a good book!), but while reading it I also found myself in the pages. Johann Hari has also struggled with weight throughout his life and, while not as drastically as I have, he spoke about so many things that line up with my experience. We had a mutual understanding going in my internal, book-reading, dialogue.

Now, again, I’m not interested in taking Ozempic. Actually, more than that, I really don’t want to take Ozempic. I don’t think we know enough about it and its long-term side-effects to allow half the population to be on it. And once it hits pill form in a couple years and the manufacturing costs drop, trust me, we will have half our (US) population on it. I don’t love the risk.

I also don’t like the solution it provides. We have a broken food system that’s hacking our physiologies every day so instead of trying to fix that, we’re going to put the onus down at the individual level to take these new drugs instead. And instead of getting better food into the system, these drugs just keep everyone 80-90% “full” all the time — they’ll keep eating the current food-system junk, just less of it in a sitting.

There’s lots of sides to this argument and situation; I get it. It’s complicated. I just know that I don’t want to get on Ozempic. I want to construct a life without yo-yo’ing myself, without a drug.

But the first major realization I had is this: if I can’t get out of my yo-yo’ing weight pattern and find a place of long-term consistency at a healthy weight, I will need to get on Ozempic. It’s a tough, stark reality, but it’s brutally clear. We don’t know everything about GLP-1’s yet, but I do know that the next ten years of my life need to be a flat weight line, not peaks and valleys (across a 50-80lb spread!!). The risks and health concerns caused by spending those next ten years yo-yo’ing are far, far worse than the risks we currently know about GLP-1’s.

So that’s the first thing. I need to figure out a new system and get consistent with it now, this year, or I’m going to need to get on GLP-1’s. The current trend can’t continue.

The second piece of this puzzle came from the book I read just after Magic Pill, Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken. I sort of hate the notion that any single book as “the right answer”, but wow does this book come really close. For the first time I had a real sense of why I gained weight so quickly and so aggressively. Ultra-processed foods (UPF). I don’t want to go too deeply into it here; the book is so worth the read and my current “if there’s one book to read, this is it” recommendation to others. For me, the short of it is that I’ve lived a life on ultra-processed foods and they are almost certainly the reason I rapidly put on a lot of weight. That needs to change.

So that’s the second thing. I need to stop eating ultra-processed foods. Permanently. I believe this is how I will maintain a weight-level for a long period of time rather than just ballooning right back up.

The last thing I realized is that BMI isn’t so wrong after-all. I’d believed for many, many years that the Body Mass Index didn’t correctly account for high levels of muscle mass and therefore tended to account me as obese when I’m just strong. I rested on that theory for comfort for a long time. But after I got a true DEXA scan last year and compared the body fat percentage numbers in that scan with where I think I ought to be, lo and behold, it’s exactly in the healthy range of the BMI chart. I guess it either does account for some degree of muscle in its ranges or I’m not that muscular. Either way, I can no longer deny my place in the BMI chart.

There’s good news there, though. I now have a clear goal. I know where I want to be. By body weight, by body fat percentage, and by BMI number.

The Future

Alright, so my weight story is ongoing, but I think I have a clear direction and methodology now. As I write, I’m about two months into this new direction. I’m happy to report that it’s going well! It’s a new lifestyle, but I’m really happy with the results.

The first and foremost piece of this is leaving ultra-processed food behind, permanently. That means being a stickler about every single grocery product we buy; reading every single ingredient label and buying specific foods from specific places. The idea I’ve adopted is this: if there’s anything in the ingredients that isn’t found in a typical home-kitchen, I’m not buying it.

What that ultimately means is that we’re shopping around for specific things a lot more — from farmer’s markets, from local farms, from CSA’s, from Whole Foods, and occasionally from Costco (usually just meats). Finding the right products that are created and sold without stabilizers, modified starches, gums, preservatives, garbage seed oils, and all the other junk that’s in everything these days, is tough. But it’s doable. And we’re doing it. It takes time, effort, and research, but it is doable. High quality, non-ultra-processed foods are out there! They’re just not the norm anymore.

That also means that we’re cooking a lot more. Almost everything we eat at this point, we’re cooking ourselves. Not just because we want to and have really great ingredients to work with now, but because we have to. You simply can’t buy premade / ready-to-eat foods at grocery stores that don’t have preservatives. They need the preservatives in order to stay “ready to eat” by the time you buy them! You can’t have your cake and eat it too! That which is fresh and clean will not last the way easy-foods do. So put on the apron!

I should note, though, that this isn’t a bad thing. The foods we’re making now are better than what we’d eaten before, across the board. Fresh ingredients from local farms cooked at home just burst with flavor. The meats I’ve been smoking at home are hands-down better than alternatives that have been treated and prepared. I’m really enjoying the flavors and foods we’ve been eating!

This isn’t a short-term diet plan, either. This is my plan for the rest of my days, so long as I have a will. I believe that the secret to not yo-yo’ing my weight, staying healthy for my kids, and living a long time, is avoiding ultra-processed foods.

The second piece of this direction is shedding off my current weight and getting to a place of real, actual healthy weight. For me, that means getting to 200lbs, roughly 15% body-fat percentage, and a BMI of 24-25 (these are all roughly equivalent). That’ll be pretty radical for me, since I haven’t been lower than 240lbs since eighth grade and generally think I look pretty good at 240! I have no idea what my body will look or feel like at 200. I’m excited to find out 🙂.

I’m using keto as the vehicle to shed off my current weight, but that’s combined with the first piece above — strictly non-UPF keto. The don’t-eat-UPF directive is a life-long plan. The keto is just a temporary vehicle to get down to <200lbs. I’ll introduce some carbs after that, but non-UPF restriction will mean that I’ll likely be making my own breads and, occasionally, ice cream.

I’ll note for the record too that this round of keto seems to be working much faster than previous keto-times. My sense is that the highly processed ingredients in a lot of “keto” off-the-shelf foods stifled the ketogenic process to some degree before. But in avoiding all those things now, the weight is coming off quickly! Regardless of my net loss goal being eighty pounds, and having started June 1st, I may well hit that mark before the end of the year 🤯.

I’m not sure how to wrap this post up since this is an ongoing, day-to-day story. Suffice it to say that there’s an element of accountability to posting all of this publicly (which is good), but that I won’t know if everything goes according to plan for a while. Even when I hit my weight goal mark, the real goal is sustaining that weight long-term. So I really won’t be able to claim ‘success’ for at least a year post-keto. Until then, all I can do is write about my past, my motivations, my plan, and where I’m at currently.

Like so many things in life, I’m simply in progress 🙂

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