The weight problem

When you’re trying to lose weight, it seems almost impossible. I need to lose about 80 pounds in order to get my Body Mass Index (BMI) into normal range. At 270 pounds, my BMI is 35.6; 5.6 points above obese. To get to normal, I’d have to bring my BMI down to under 25. The task is daunting.

I love food. When anyone asks her about our relationship with food, my wife replies “I eat to live and he lives to eat.” That just about sums it up. When I was twelve years old, I was as skinny as a rake and must have had a high metabolism, because I could eat anything in any quantity and my weight barely changed. I remember coming home for lunch when I was in high school (we lived five blocks from school). I’d eat two tins of tuna, put it over rice and then smother it with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. It would gross everyone out, except me. I loved it (I still love it!). By high school, I had grown to about 6'2" and 160 pounds and never seemed to gain any weight. My BMI had always hovered between underweight and normal.

Food was always a central theme in my family. I was born in the Philippines from Spanish parents. As with any Latin family, our lives revolved around food. We ate to celebrate, we ate to mourn, we ate when we were depressed, we ate when we were happy. Any occasion was a good excuse for a feast. My mother spends most her time in the kitchen to this day. She’s 80. What makes it even worse is that I belong to a couple of cultures that loved to eat! I remember as a boy living in the Philippines, I was always told never to leave any food on my plate... Think about all the starving kids in whatever part of the Philippines it was. When we moved to Spain when I was twelve, it was starving children in Biafra, or Ethiopia, etc. To this day in my late 50s, I still think my mom is gonna give me a bad time if I don’t eat every last morsel on my plate.

When I was fifteen we moved to Vancouver from Madrid, and I was into full blown puberty. My metabolism must have changed because I started putting on the weight. Still I managed to graduate from high school weighing just under 170 from all that tuna, mushroom soup and rice. Oh, and I ate bananas like there was no tomorrow. If you ever need proof that we humans are somehow genetically related to apes, all you had to do was monitor my banana consumption when I was a teenager.

During my college years, I quickly gained another 15 or so pounds and by the time I got out of there, I weighed about 185 pounds. However, I maintained that weight for a few years, even after I was married.

In the late 1980s, I began to put on serious weight. When I hit 195 pounds, I started trying out different diets, in desperate, yet mostly failing attempts at losing weight. I only wanted to lose about 10 to 15 pounds, but it seemed next to impossible. I tried the “rice” diet. I didn’t eat anything but rice for about a week. That was a total disaster. I gained weight! Then I tried the “soup” diet. All I had was brothy soups. After about three days, I nearly passed out from hunger. Naturally I had an eating binge after that. Then I tried the “popcorn” diet. That was another waste of time. When we moved to San Diego in 1990, I weighed 200 pounds and slowly but surely the pounds were creeping in. Having tried all the crazy diets, and realizing how futile they were, I pretty much ignored my ever-increasing girth. By the late 90s, I’d ballooned up to around 240 pounds. After a large lunch, I’d get really sleepy and was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. In 1999, I was driving home in the early afternoon and I fell asleep for a second or two at the wheel. I woke up a couple of lanes over, adrenalin pumping and wondering what the heck just happened. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about a week later and have been using a CPAP ever since.

I was still relatively active, played tennis, sometimes skied, etc. But those activities began to hurt a lot more than they did when I weighed 50 pounds less. As the years went by, I got less and less active, and by the early 2000s, I reached 270 pounds. My waist was at 40 inches and my belly was as big as a watermelon (and just about as heavy). I had back issues, I wheezed my way through the day, getting tired at just about every little activity. My wife, who worried about my deteriorating lifestyle was constantly on my case about losing weight and getting healthy. I naturally resented her constant reminders, the furtive looks at my dinner plates heaped with food, comments about second and third helpings at mealtimes. The thing is, I never considered myself obese. I saw myself at the same weight as I was during my college days. Talk about deluded!

Thing is, I don't really eat a lot of junk. I rarely, if ever go to fast food restaurants. I seldom eat white bread or white rice. I ate my veggies just like my mom told me to do. But I was eating a ton of it at a time. What I didn’t realize at the time was that without exercise, there was no way to burn off the thousands of calories that I was piling on. I knew I needed to add exercise to my regimen. But I had to find something I liked and that I could do by myself. Running bores the heck out of me, swimming to me means lounging around a pool with a margarita. Cycling seemed to be the logical choice.

So here I go...