Longtime and well-known DF Member Firehawk writes a revealing article about how he battled obesity. Firehawk writes why he believes people let themselves get not just overweight, but obese. With true courage and vulnerability, he writes from firsthand experiences how he became obese, and then eventually conquered the obesity demon. Many lessons to be learned from this article so grab a pencil and pad and take notes

By DF Member David Roberts ("Firehawk") 

You ever wonder why people let themselves get not just overweight, but obese?  I don’t know either, and I was one of them.  I can tell you my experiences and how I became obese, but I still can’t really tell you why I let myself get that overweight.

Growing up

Growing up I was into athletics a little bit.  I played Ice Hockey for a year or two.  I was in good shape then but only 7 or 8 years old.  Boy could I skate at that age.  My mother, at the time, was going through a divorce and could not afford to keep me in the sport.  (As some of you may know, ice hockey is very expensive.)  I never did get into any other sports until 8^th grade when I joined football, but by then I was well on the path to obesity.  Over the years I had developed a complete carb/fat addiction.   What I mean by that is I didn’t eat much protein because carbs and fat tasted so much better, and I was never forced to eat protein.  My mom didn’t know anything about nutrition.  I was allowed to eat all the pasta, scallop potatoes, french fries-- basically whatever we had that wasn’t a good source of protein-- that I wanted.  When my mother would cook a roast, I’d never eat any of the meat.  I’d just eat the cooked carrots/potatoes and whatever other side dishes were present so long as they weren’t a healthy green vegetable or anything good for you.

I must have been blessed with at least a decent metabolism because while I became a chubby kid, I wasn’t too big yet.  It wasn’t until high school and college that I really started to put the weight on.  By this time I had moved my bedroom to the basement and had my own privacy which is what most teenage kids love to have.  It was at this time that I really started eating too much, and I think it was during these years that I developed a binging habit.  Not only did I only want to eat food loaded down with carbs and fat, but I also developed an amazing ability to eat A LOT of it.  Let me define for you what ‘A LOT’ of food was for me.  It got to the point that I was able to consume 3 super sized McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder w/Cheese Combo meals.  Instead of the pop, I’d get 3 big chocolate shakes as well.  Now, crunching the numbers from the McDonald’s website, and using the ‘Large French Fries’ since they no longer have the super size information, altogether that is a total of 7410 calories.  That’s enough calories to keep any poverty-stricken nation going for a day.  I used to eat that much in ONE MEAL folks.  Typically when I was eating like that, I’d eat something smaller for breakfast, then have lunch at school, then for dinner eat that.  I would guess I was eating anywhere from 8-10,000 calories a day, just about every day.  It really is amazing that I’m still here, alive and healthy, telling you about this.  I gained 30lbs in 1 month’s time, just before I began to turn things around.  This was, obviously, the final straw for me.

What did eating like this do to me?

It depressed me.  I couldn’t help it.  I was just lost.  I knew it was bad for me.  I knew I should have been working out.  (Just think how strong I could have gotten had I been lifting heavy weights while doing this.)  But instead, I never did a thing.  I just went to school and ate large quantities of food.  That was my routine, and a nasty routine it was.  This bad style of living not only made me obese, but it took away so much from my life.  I never wanted to go outside and run around, play with friends, go to the park, etc.  Looking back, I wish I would have played more sports.  I wish I’d have stuck with football, or joined a baseball team, or gotten back into hockey.  But no, I’d rather have gone to McDonald’s. Do you know how stupid that sounds?  While it may sound unbelievable, unfortunately, that is how it is for a lot of people.  And unless you have been there, you can’t really comprehend it.  Hell, I was there, and I still have trouble believing I let things get so far out of hand.

By the age of 23 I had reached my peak weight of 342lbs.  Being a 6’3, broad-shouldered male, I probably carried 342lbs fairly well, but nevertheless, when the baggy clothing came off at night, and I saw myself in the mirror, it just utterly depressed me.  And what was I going to do about it?  I didn’t know anything about nutrition and lifting weights.  But, as luck would have it, God brought me a very special friend.

Then one day

I was sitting with a few fellow college students in the library preparing for a final exam.  My soon to be life-changing and close friend happened to be one of those fellow college students.  I didn’t even know his name at the time.  Somehow, we got on the topic of jobs, and he had been working at an automotive electrical design and testing facility.  I saw this as a good chance to maybe get my foot in the door somewhere so I wasn’t one of those engineering students who couldn’t find a job once they graduate.  So we chatted a bit, and 3 weeks later I was hired in at his workplace.  Little did I know at this time that this would change much more than my income level.  At the time I had met him, he was probably about 270 lbs, but within a year he was down to about 230, and man did he look great.  He was 5’9, 230lbs, at around 12% body fat, and completely natural.

So one day I asked him how he did that.  He said, “I’m not going to tell you.”  I said, “Why not?”  He said, “It’ll be a waste of my time.”  I was almost in tears.  I wanted so badly to know how to get this fat off of my body.  I begged and begged him to tell me, and finally he sat down and laid out exactly what I needed to do, not in a whole bunch of detail, but enough detail that I could at least start and see some progress.  He told me, “First thing you need to do is get rid of fast food restaurants.  No more.  STOP.  Next thing you need to do is learn to count calories.  It’s a pain in the ass at first but afterward it becomes second nature.  The third thing you need to learn how to do is get yourself into a regular exercise routine, doing something everyday.  And the fourth thing, learn to love it.”  These 4 things were the cornerstone of my dieting and exercise routines and still are today.  I still follow all of them, but now I’m going to explain what I’ve learned over the last few years and how I have been able to drop 90 lbs of fat while maintaining nearly all muscle mass.

Things to remember

The most important thing to remember when you are starting out and are obese, is that the first few days are going to seem impossible.  You may find yourself thinking, “How am I ever going to keep this up long enough to lose this fat?”  But the reality of it is it is DAMN HARD.  I’m not going to lie about it.  It’s a ton of work.  It requires you to be on your game 100% of the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week.  It is always a mental battle, and for those of us that have been obese, it WILL ALWAYS BE a mental battle to keep that fat off.  Since our bodies have been exposed to high body fat levels, they will always want to put the fat back on quickly, so we have to be vigilant and keep tabs on our diets.  The next most important thing to remember is in the beginning, you’re going to mess up.  It’s going to happen no matter how gung-ho you are about it.  That’s just life.  Sometimes you lose battles, but you need to make sure you win the war.  Don’t let this get you down; just get right back up on that horse and keep going.  The first few months I started out, I would slack off in the middle of the week at times, but there came a point where I was able to keep all of my cheating to one day on the weekend, which brings me to my next point.  Schedule yourself a cheat day.  This day, I’d suggest doing a workout to help burn off the extra calories you are going to consume, but make sure it’s a day that you allow yourself to eat whatever it is you want.  Eat ice cream, cake, pizza, tacos, whatever you want.  Eat up to your heart’s content, but keep it to one day, and be prepared the next day to fight the cravings, because they’ll be there, believe me.  Your body will want to revert back to old habits (which is the negative of a cheat day but worth it if it helps you stay focused the other 6 days of the week).

The next thing to do is get yourself a good workout routine.  There are millions online.  Make sure you do some type of exercise everyday, but make sure you are lifting moderate to heavy weights and doing cardio.  Lifting heavy weights is very important during fat loss dieting, and I’ll tell you why.  Think of your body as a corporation.  You have the muscle group, the fat group, and the necessary processes group.  All require money (calories).  Now, let’s say a recession is in full effect, (This would be your fat loss diet, or, in other words, calorie-restricted diet.) and your body has to cut something out.  Well, you HAVE to keep the “necessary processes” group fully functional, so the body can’t cut anything from there.  This leaves fat and muscle.  Let me tell you how the body is far more willing to lose muscle than it is fat.  One pound of active muscle takes approximately 50 calories per day to keep running.  One pound of fat takes approximately 10 calories per day to keep running.  What is easier to maintain?  Fat.  So, just like a corporation cutting big expenses during recession time, your body will cut muscle if you don’t tell it that the muscle is vitally important to the body.  And you tell the body this by, you guessed it, lifting weights.  This is the reason why you may see people get “lighter”, but they never really look thinner.  They still have that pouch and they can’t get rid of it.  This is because they probably don’t lift heavy weights and they likely are keeping their fat while dropping their muscle.  This is the worst thing you can do.  Not only does it make you still look fat when you are smaller, but losing muscle causes you to burn less calories per day, which means you’ll have to eat significantly less calories per day just to maintain where you’re at.  No, the goal here is to burn that fat off and keep all the muscle you can.  More muscle means you burn more calories.  More muscle means you feel healthier and look leaner.

Now the most important

Now comes the most important (and hardest) part of any program, diet and calories.  This has been debated to the end of the universe and back and is still being debated.  All I can do is offer you my advice based off my experience.  In my opinion, it is absolutely 100% necessary for you to learn how to track your calories.  Since I’m a computer geek and use Microsoft Excel on a daily basis, I found this to be my best choice.  What I did was create tabs called “menu” and “daily 2007”.  In the menu tab, I created tables and looked up the calorie content of servings of certain healthy foods, the foods I planned on eating.  I also kept track of cheat foods that I ate.  Over time I have developed an extensive library.  Here is an example of foods from my library: 

As you can see in that last table, I love taco bell.  Notice how the foods are broken down into total calories, protein, carbs, and fat.  I did this so that when I go to my “daily 2007” tab, I can easily copy/paste the line in and have a running total of my macronutrients so that I can easily monitor the daily intake of calories and whatever ratio of nutrients I’m trying to target.  Here’s an example of a table in my “daily 2007” tab: 

The numbers below the table are formulas.  The first row will be the total calories, total protein grams, total carb grams, and total fat grams.  The next row shows the total protein, carbs, and fat in calories.  The last row is a calculation of the percentage of protein, fat, carbs per day. The percentage row is good for helping someone target a 40/40/20 (protein/carbs/fat) percentage ratio diet or 50/30/20, or whatever they are trying to do.  I have been tracking my calories every day now for the last 2 years and it has become second nature.  If I don’t do it, I feel like I’m missing something. This is where you want to get yourself to, and you will over time as long as you are consistent at it.

Where I’ve had the most success

The most success I’ve had is with a 50/30/20 percentage diet or close to it.  High fat diets made me weak, and I didn’t lose anything after the major water loss over 1-2 weeks.  I think high protein and low fat diets with moderate carbs are where it’s at, but this is just what I’ve gathered over the last few years trying different things.  This seems to be where I’ve lost the most fat.  I started at 342lbs at about 42% body fat and am currently at 253lbs and 21% and falling.  I have gotten this far by just sticking with it, working hard, never giving up, getting back up when I fall down, and just pushing myself.  There are days where you don’t feel like doing anything, but those are the days that when you get yourself up off the couch and start walking, and 30-60 minutes later come back and sit down, you feel great about yourself.  These are the situations that motivate.

My closing thoughts

I hope you took the time to read this and were able to take something from it.  I wanted to share my past experiences and a little bit about how I’ve achieved success with fat loss.  I think too many people forget what it is like to be healthy.  I think they forget what it feels like to be able to actually run more than 1 block without being winded.  They forget what it’s like to walk without their belly jiggling.  I know I did, but now I’m starting to remember.

Good luck, and win the war!