Copyright 2010 by John T. Reed

Losing weight is arguably the most important item on the to-do lists of 30% of adult Americans. They are obese which threatens their health and even their lives, not to mention their self-esteem, careers, and love lives. Yet inability to lose weight has long been an accepted manifestation of human nature in America.

That’s bull!

If you wish, you can go back to your college weight or what your weight should have been when you were college age if you were overweight then, too. This article is about how to do that and also whether you should.

‘Just do it!’
Losing weight is one of those activities that comes under the category of things that the great philosopher Phil Knight was thinking of when he said, “Just do it!”

In July 2005 I had my 59th birthday. The thought that the next birthday would begin with a 6 bothered me. Reflecting on my life at that point, I decided that I had to get a year older each July, but I did not have to be fat.

In 2008, I wrote the second edition of my book Succeeding. I added a chapter on things you can change, like weight, and things you cannot change like height or your personality. I told readers what to do about each category: change the things you can change that are not good and work around the things you cannot change by seeking situations where they are not handicaps. For example, if you are short, do not adopt becoming an NBA basketball player as your goal (Unless you are Spud Webb or Mugsey Bogues). Become, say, a writer or radio personality instead.

If you weigh too much, lose weight—for your health, your family, your self-esteem, and for avoiding being discriminated against because of obesity.

2005 resolution
When I turned 59, I decided that I would get my weight down to 170. At the time, I weighed around 195-200. The most I ever weighed was 203.

Was I fat? Actually, not noticeably. When I announced my intention to lose weight, my friends and relatives expressed surprise and asked why. They were not being nice. It was a sincere reaction. There is a full-length, full-page, full-color photo of me in the June 2006 Money Magazine. That photo was taken In February 2006. At that time, I weighed about 195. One friend who saw it congratulated me on being in such good shape. In the photo, I was wearing a short-sleeve, pullover, Polo shirt and plain-front khaki slacks which is a fairly revealing set of clothes for street wear.

But my youngest son had given me a Pillsbury doughboy as a joke. My wife said I had gotten “thick.” I did not like body parts jiggling as I went down the stairs.

Why 170? It sounded pretty good. It was what I weighed when I was in my early thirties. I did not want to pick too difficult a goal that I would get discouraged about and give up.

Joined health club
My wife and kids were all health club members then. I was the only one who was not. My son got me on his membership at our local Alamo 24-Hour Fitness.

I was able to get strong quickly, surpassing marks I had achieved as a cadet at West Point back in the mid 1960s. For example, I did 16 parallel bar dips to get into West Point in 1964. In 2006 and 2007, I was doing 17 or 18 at the health club—in spite of weighing 40 pounds more than I had in 1964!

Why was I stronger as a 59-year old than as a West Point cadet? Because now I understand weight training and aerobics from having coached 35 athletic teams. And watching my oldest son play football through four years of college. At West Point in the 60s, the idea of physical fitness was that you derived it from playing team sports and taking physical education all four years of college. The Army and West Point were also big on group calisthenics and reveille runs, although those two activities were only done in the summer. Group calisthenics are more choreography than fitness. That’s true in both football and the military. The military now uses weight training and running, which is correct, but they overemphasize it.

I am stronger in a number of ways as a 63-year old than I was as a 17 to 21-year old West Point cadet simply because I do weight training now and we did not do it there at all then.

But from my research of weight loss literature and looking at the scale every morning, I quickly figured out that one does not lose weight by exercise. You lose weight by eating less.

In theory, exercise also loses weight, but it is extremely hard work and time-consuming and exposes you to acute and/or overuse injuries. It is easier, faster, and safer to just not eat or drink the calories to begin with. For example, you have to walk about five miles to get rid of the calories in a can of Coke. Have a Coke zero instead and do a shorter walk. You should exercise moderately for strength, cardiovascular fitness, appearance, and to burn a normal amount of calories. Exercising extraordinary amounts is probably a bad and even unhealthy idea for the reasons I stated above.

Cut back on food
I cut back on the amount I ate, generally just reducing the amount I normally ate but still eating the same stuff.

Did that work?

Yeah. For about five pounds, then I plateaued at 195. 195 is not 170.

So I realized I had to cut back more than I thought.

In Vietnam, I acquired the habit of drinking about 7 cans of Coke or some such a day. You had to be there to recognize that was not as dumb as it sounds. It was hotter than hell there. I was in forward areas sometimes and rear areas at others. In almost all areas, we had generators and refrigerators and lots of Coke and Fanta drinks. The only water we had was in yellowed large plastic bottles that had chemicals in them.The words “potable water” were written on the bottles in grease pencil. The water was drawn from local sources, then had chemicals dumped in it to kill all the bacteria and such. The water was room temperature. In other words, the water was not cold, looked ugly, and tasted bad. The Cokes, on the other hand, were ice cold and pure. Bottled water as is common now did not exist at all back then. I thought about writing a letter to the head of Coke from Vietnam asking tem to send us some cans containing plain water. I suspect they would not have complied on the grounds that they could not sell it for a profit. Back then, selling tap water would have been greeted with, “Are you kidding?” And Coke probably would not have wanted their sales of soft drinks to go down in Vietnam because of increased water consumption.

Anyway, one of the changes I had to make in 2006 was to cut my Coke consumption back to one per day. I do not like the taste of Diet Coke.

Progress
Once I made that Coke change and others that were somewhat radical I began to lose weight steadily. Another change was I would ask for a knife and fork when I got a hamburger or chicken sandwich and eat only the meat, not the bun.

Then I steadily made progress and got down to 170 around July 1, 2006, about a year after I resolved to get my weight down to that level.

Hunger

Was it easy? Generally yes. I was a bit surprised.

You do get hungry when you are losing weight.

I had learned that in Army ranger School in 1968 and at West Point during freshman summer in 1964. At both ranger and West Point, they starve you.

Your stomach is used to the amount of food you have been eating. Its size reflects the amount you eat each day. To lose weight, you have to shrink your stomach size. You do that by eating less. After a time—I’m guessing several weeks, your stomach shrinks to adjust to the new amount of food to digest.

Initially, when your stomach does not get the amount of food it is used to, it complains in the form of hunger pangs and growling noises. Basically, what your stomach is saying with those two hunger manifestations is,

Either put some food in your stomach or we are going to take your fat.

If you refuse to eat more, your body takes what it is used to from your fat cells. That means you are losing weight. It just melts away like some ads say. No pain (hunger pangs,) no loss when it comes to weight.

The good news is that if you reduce your food intake permanently, your stomach shrinks permanently and you no longer get hunger pangs from failure to eat as much as you used to. Your body including your hunger pangs adjust to the new lesser level of food intake in two ways. First, it takes fat away from your body then it just operates on the new lower budget and you get no hunger pangs. If you doubt your stomach shrunk, try eating the amount you used to after you lose weight. It literally will not fit. We all learned that at our final ranger school meal steak dinner. We only got a little New York steak, but we could only eat half of it.

Your body also gets used to the schedule of when you eat. So if you eat too much at one meal, your body will still get hunger pangs next time you normally eat even though it should be full. For example, if you eat three meals and one evening snack, you cannot eat extra at supper and skip the snack without suffering hunger pangs. So it is best to stick to your routine regarding when and how many times per day you eat as well as how much.

Lighter

Lots of people say they “feel great” after losing a significant amount of weight. Did I? Not really. I felt fine before and after. What changed was that I felt lighter—a lot lighter.

I had lost 33 pounds. That is equal to a back pack containing six, full, two-liter bottles of Coke. When you shed that much weight, you notice it. I felt like I had helium balloons attached to me when I got up out of a chair or climbed stairs.

There was also no more jiggling. That which had previously jiggled simply no longer existed to jiggle.

1,300 calories
After I got to 170 and stayed there for four years, I was unhappy that I still had a spare tire—albeit a sort of English racing bike tire. So I decided to try to lose more weight down to 160. I believe that was my weight when I was an upperclassman at West Point at age 20 and 21. In grad school, one of my goals was to get down to 160. I think I was about 165 in grad school (age 29 and 30).

Just generally resolving to weigh 160 did not work. I had to count calories.

Basically, each person has a number of calories that maintains their current weight. To lose, you have to eat a little less.If you eat a little more, you gain weight.

What is my maintenance level? Apparently about 1,300 calories. Yours is probably the same after you adjust proportionately for differences in height and weight. I am 5'11" and 163 as of 6/4/10.

I read a lot of stuff about diet that assumes a 2,000 a day caloric intake is normal. Jesus! That would be the formula for my going back up to 200 pounds!

Lighter still
Although I have only lost an additional seven pounds thus far, I feel it. It fees like I am made of balsa wood in terms of weight. Indeed, weighting 163 causes me to have the thought, “Hey! This is familiar. I remember feeling this way—back in college.” I still am, and feel, strong in a weight-lifting and walking sense.

I was disappointed, however, when I took some measurements. I figured I must have 10% body fat, a waist-to-hip ratio of .75—athlete measurements.

Nope. After losing 40 pounds from my 203 peak, my body fat percentage is 18% according to one web site. That’s on the border of “fit” and“ acceptable”.

Jesus H. Christ! What do you want from me? My junior high school weight when I was a couple of inches shorter!?

My waist-to-hip ratio is .87 (34/39). You’re supposed to be .95 or below as a male (.75 or below as a woman). So .87 is pretty good, but not great. One limiting factor is that I have broad shoulders and broad hips to match. I’m talking bones here. How narrow your waist can get is dependent somewhat on how narrow your hip bones are. Not everyone has the bone structure and muscle-growing propensities to win a body-building contest. Effort can achieve much in life, but not everything. When I coached high school football, I felt sorry for the kids who busted their asses in the weight room but who fundamentally lacked the size and/or athletic ability to compete with the bigger, more athletic kids. Those guys need to follow the advice in my Succeeding book to move to a situation better suited to their strengths and weaknesses.

Furthermore , the ideal body nowadays is probably unhealthy or freakish. I read that in its early years, Miss America winners had healthy body mass indexes. But in recent years, their heights and weights have indicated body mass indexes that fall in the “malnourished” category as defined by the World Health Organization. I saw a TV show where people were asked to choose the ideal body for men and women using a computer cartoon-type that offered them “A or B?” choices over and over. The ideal men’s body they chose was “kinda broad in the shoulders and nar’r at the hip” like“ Big Bad John” in the Jimmy Dean song. It was body building champion unusual, but feasible. However, the woman’s body the survey participants created was physiologically impossible for a human: the waist was far too narrow—wasplike—seen only in Dolly Parton (who is the same age as I am) and who I hope, for her sake, achieved that by wearing a girdle, not by changing her body to live up to that impossible standard. It has also been pointed out that Barbie dolls had impossible proportions for many years.

You may think you want an athlete’s body. No, you don’t. I coached over 900 amateur athletes. Being an athlete is a job. Part-time at the amateur level; full time at the pro level. Normal people do not have time to diet and train so much that you have an athlete body. It takes far too much time and effort for a person with a full-time job and normal life. Also, former athletes are less healthy in many ways because of an accumulation of injuries that did not fully heal and overuse injuries from extraordinary amount of strenuous activity during their athlete days.

I will get down to 160, but that’s it. I know I weighed 154 when I played high school football as a 17-year old. I still have the programs. But I was 5'10" or so. I did not get to 6' until July of 1965. I still have a posture photo taken of me on our first day at West Point. We were wearing only a jock strap and standing in front of a wall with graph-paper-like markings to identify posture irregularities. It looks almost identical to the way I look today which is sort of what you would expect given I weigh about the same. I do not think it would be appropriate health-wise for me to take my weight below 160, which is what would be required for me to achieve “athlete” ranges of body fat and all that.

Young versus old

When I was young, if I pigged out, I would gain maybe one pound and it would be gone in one day. In later years, if I eat a bit more than normal, I gain a pound and it stays there forever. What’s up with that?

Most people attribute the difference to metabolism. I doubt that. Metabolism burns fat in the form of exercise or just running the body—breathing and heart beat. I think the laws of physics require some manifestation of the conversion of fat to energy like heat or movement. I ran no fevers when I overate in my 20s. I was somewhat more active then, but not much and many people were no more active or even less active in their youths, yet almost all older people have trouble keeping weight off.

My best guess is that the body rejected excess food at the digestion and fat storage stages when I was young, but now is quite religious about storing every gram of excess food. Whatever the reason, too many college aged and older people feel entitled to eat the way they did when they were in elementary and high school and not gain weight. In general, the old can be the same as the young, but the old have to make effort to do so; the young achieve many desirable things without effort. Sorry about that, but denying it will not change it.

Appearance
Most people figure losing weight will make you look better. Generally, that’s true. But it’s a little more of a mixed bag than that.

You cannot spot lose weight. That is, when you lose weight, it generally comes off every place in your body in equal percentage. In 2006, I visited a traveling museum exhibit called “Bodies.” It was in NYC then and still is. They had on display dozens of dead human bodies from Mainland China. They had been preserved in some way that all the components seemed like plastic. And they had sliced them in various ways. One was a middle-aged fat woman who had been sliced from top to bottom so that there was a front half and a back half. You could see the layer of white fat, identical to the strip of white fat you trim off the edge of a steak, under her skin everywhere: top of her head, fingers, toes, knees, etc. The thickness varied at different places, but hardly any part of the body was not used for fat storage. I recommend visiting that exhibit. It is a serious anatomy lesson and gives a whole new meanining to the phrase “take care of yourself.”

A lot of guys lift weight to achieve “definition.” That is, they want their muscles to show through their skin. That’s easy. Stop eating. When the half inch or inch-thick layer of fat gets carted away by your blood stream as a result of dieting, you will have definition. Lifting weights before then may make you stronger and increase the size of your muscles, but if they are still covered by a thick blanket of fat, there will be no definition.

My local postal clerk had the vaunted abs a while back. How many sit-ups did he have to do to achieve abs? None. He was in the hospital with pneumonia and lost a lot of weight. Voila! Abs! All God’s children got abs, but the vast majority of American adults have hidden them under a thick blanket of fat. You can do sit-ups till you drop. No one’s ever gonna see the resulting abs until you diet off that fat that covers them up. I read somewhere that to have visible abs, you need to have a body-fat percentage of about 10% or less.

When my weight got down below 175, I got an anatomy lesson from my own body. I had become like the Visible Man model kit.When I reached for a toothbrush, I would see in the bathroom mirror many of the muscles and tendons of my arm doing their thing.

That was fine, but you also see more than you want to know about your veins, an unattractive characteristic of top body builders as well.

There comes a point where you want to lose more off our waist, but not your face. Too bad. It’s coming off both places whether you like it or not. Many a woman has successfully dieted to shrink her waist only to find she also shrunk her bra size, a result she did not want.

As an elementary school kid, I was skinny and my ribs showed when I was not wearing a shirt. At 163, I am trim but no ribs showing. Around college age, I liked the way polo shirts looked on others, but I thought I did not look good in them because I was flat chested. Now, I am the Imelda Marcos of Ralph Lauren polo shorts. My late mom would say I “filled out.”

So there comes a point in weight loss where you have to choose which body part you want to look its best. I have noticed that a lot of older people—both men and women—focus on their waist and keep losing weight to achieve ideal waist circumference. But in the process, they make their faces look too gaunt. You get a similar effect on the back of the hands and a turkey neck. (The palm side of the hands and fingers seems forever young.) Since the face, neck, and back of the hands are almost always in view, and the waist is almost always hidden, those people arguably lost too much weight if better general appearance was their goal.

Connecticut attorney general Blumenthal recently got caught lying about having been in Vietnam with the Marines. In one media story, I saw a photo of him at college age. He looked very handsome in college. But now, he is apparently a vegan, waist-obsessed, old guy and he looks ugly and gaunt.

There are links to YouTubes of me at 170 pounds at my home page.When the photo of me on my about-the-author page was taken, I weighed about 175.

Fat is useful, you know

Most people think fat is ugly and unhealthy.

True. But it also has some uses. When I lost the first 30 pounds, I found I had to start taking a seat cushion to football games where they had bench rather than individual stadium seats. When I had the extra 30 pounds, I had a built-in cushion. Fat fills in parts of your body that look better and/or function better with some fat, like your face and the backs of your hands—maybe also your neck. The backs of old people’s hands remind people of wicked witches. Plus, old people are always suffering bloody injuries when the barely bump or scrape the backs of their hands. Some fat there will look better and probably protect you from so many bloody cuts and lacerations. Fat covers most veins, which is also a good thing visually and prevents injury.

A grad school classmate of mine said his son was going to U.S. Army ranger school and had 9% body fat or some such. I told him to read my web article on the subject to try to talk him out of that. I also said “Screw the 9% body fat deal! In ranger school, that might get you killed. If he goes, tell him to load up on chocolate and pastries beforehand so he has as much body fat as possible. They will starve him there. If he starts with no body fat, they may kill him literally. He would not be the first.”

I would give similar advice to person going to an extremely cold weater climate.

Remember fat is made and distributed by your body. It has multiple legitimate purposes. If you do not believe me, try losing 30 or 40 pounds and those purposes will soon become painfully obvious to you.

Pick a healthy weight

So within the range of healthy weights for your height and body type, there are weights that optimize your face, neck, and hand appearance and others that optimize your waist size. You need to choose which you want then figure out the caloric intake that maintains that weight and be disciplined to consume that amount and no more or less.

Is losing 40 pounds as hard as everyone seems to assume? No. You need to get your calorie target, learn what food types and portions match it, and eat accordingly. Eating at home makes it easier than eating out. A routine is a great help.

I have discovered Coke Zero especially the vanilla and cherry flavors. They have no calories and I like them. I still cannot stand Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi. Coke Zero helps lose weight if you enjoy a Coke with your meal.

Otherwise, you need to eat stuff that is a bit better on calories. Fried food is bad. So are a lot of bread and icing and such. Protein is good. If you just start using the Net to figure out how many calories you are eating each day you will accumulate a list of how many calories each of your favorite foods has. Then you unconsciously eat what you need to eat. It’s like showering, shaving, and shampooing every day and going to the gas station when your tank gets low. No big deal once it becomes a habit.

If you weigh too much it’s because you eat too much. Figure out what the right amount is and start eating that and only that. Losing weight is no big deal in terms of how you do it or how hard it is. Your body is designed to do it correctly. Failure to lose weight can kill you at worst, and reduce the quality of your life at best.

I call my diet the Richard Jeni five-word diet. Richard Jeni is a comedian who committed suicide in 2007. He used to do a comedy routine built around the sentence,

Stop eatin’ ya fat bastard.

Good advice.

But don’t overdo it. Various web sites say I should weigh between 155 and 175 for my height. I have several characteristics that suggest I should be near the top of that range: XXXL head (which I discovered when none of the batting helmets fit me in adult baseball), broader than average shoulders and hips (which do not show up in your height) and long arms (ditto). Plus I have always been heavier than people guessed. I once won a stuffed teddy bear at around age 50 at a state fair when the Guess-your-weight guy refused to accept my advice that he not try it with me. He was way low.

I have now visited all the weights from 162 to 203. I suspect about 172-3 is my optimal weight for health and appearance. You should go through a similar experiment, find your ideal weight, then discipline yourself to eat the indicated amount of calories per day. It will improve your health and your life in general. It costs next to nothing and does not require a booming economy.

Enjoy.

John T. Reed