by W.D. Ehrhart
I inherited a “fat gene” from my mother. She was maybe 5’4” or 5’5”. When she got married in 1943, she weighed 103 pounds. When she died in 1990, she weighed over 300 pounds.
Her younger brother was in ROTC in college, so he couldn’t have been too heavy back then, but by the time I was old enough to remember him, he was badly overweight, obese really. Others of her siblings had weight problems, too.
In 9th grade, at age 14, I had a double chin and used to have to buy my clothing in what were called “husky” sizes. By then I was getting interested in girls, but they weren’t interested in Russian potato dumplings, so at 15, I went my entire sophomore year without eating breakfast. My mother said this was unhealthy, but by the beginning of my junior year, I had taken four inches off my waist while growing six inches taller without gaining a pound. Ann Broderick kissed me on our first date, and she used her tongue.
I enlisted in the Marines after high school. When I finished boot camp, I weighed 155 pounds. A year and a half later, when I got back to the States from thirteen months in Vietnam, I weighed 120 pounds, but it was all sinewy muscle, like steel cable.
Eventually, my weight stabilized at about 135 pounds. I was a varsity swimmer in college, swam laps on my own in subsequent years when I had access to a pool, then became a regular jogger just before I turned 30, and kept that up for more than twenty years.
My weight seldom got above 135, but I had to work at it. When my weight would start to drift up, I would cut back on my eating and jack up my mileage jogging. I ran two marathons in my 30s and regularly did 10K races into my 40s.
But in the early years of this millennium, I started gaining weight again. In fact, I put on 70 pounds in less than a decade. By the time I was in my early 60s, I was well over 200 pounds, and again bore a striking resemblance to a Russian potato dumpling. Because I had become medically obese, my employer offered to pay for a weight loss program.
I lost forty pounds in three months, and got down to around 160. But as often happens with “miracle” weight loss programs, within less than two years, I had regained all the weight I’d lost, and I just gave up. I had been struggling against weight gain all my life, and I just got tired of fighting it. It was just my genetic fate.
But I was ashamed of myself. I hated looking at photographs of myself. I didn’t go to my 50th high school class reunion because I didn’t want the kids I’d grown up with seeing what I’d let myself become.
Then a year and a half ago, I went to dinner with friends of mine. I put on a relatively new pair of pants, but realized before I even left the house that the pants were too tight to wear, and I had to change. And then I went out and ate a bacon cheeseburger, French fries, and onion rings.
I woke up the next morning thoroughly, utterly disgusted. “This has got to stop,” I thought. “I don’t want to look like this anymore.” I stopped eating bacon cheeseburgers, French fries, and onion rings. With only occasional exceptions—none at all in the first six months—I stopped eating potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread, and cut way back on cheese.
I stopped eating candy, cookies, cake, pie, donuts, pastries, and ice cream (that one was hard to let go). I ate only oatmeal for breakfast, sweetened with half a tablespoon of honey and some fruit, usually blueberries. I ate a lot of vegetables, cooked and raw. Dessert became fresh fruit. I ate only three times a day, and never snacked between meals.
And the weight started dropping away steadily, about a pound a week for maybe six months before it began to slow down. The next six months went much slower, but steadily trended downward until it plateaued at about 152.
I had wanted to go lower, maybe hit 140, but my doctor told me something I’d never heard in all my 77 years: “Don’t lose any more weight.” He says I’ve stopped losing because my body likes where it is and doesn’t want to give up any more weight.
I am not a doctor. I am not giving anyone medical advice. But I have managed to shed over 25 per cent of my body weight, and to do it gradually over about 15 months, simply by changing my diet and my eating habits. Not by heavily exercising (I walk a few times a week at a very slow pace). Not by using weight-loss drugs. Just by putting healthy food into my mouth three times a day.
When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, I am going to have a “green burial.” They’re going to wrap me in a winding sheet and stick me in a hole in the ground. And when they do, no one will mistake me for a Russian potato dumpling.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.