originally posted - November 2, 2013 at Nor’easter Martial Arts blogspot.
Too often in life we assume we know someone elses entire life by simply looking at them in the here and now. Looking at me now, you are probably unaware that I struggled with my weight since I was 12 years old. Roller coaster rides on the scale. Battles with eating disorders. Chasing fad diets. Trying, to no avail, to exercise my way out of bad diets. As a coach, I am often in a position to help others with their own weight struggles, yet going on appearances, and lacking stories such as this, it is hard for people to believe that I understand what they are going through. In the hopes of quelling those communication gaps, and to hopefully bridge the divide, here is a story of my own struggle with weight and self-image through the years. There are other people who have it far worse than I did, but if my story can help even one person then I am happy to share it.
Up and down my weight has fluctuated over the years, even while serving in the U.S. military. In bootcamp I was classified as overweight for coming in at a scale-busting 160 lbs. Thus began the unhealthy cycle of how I perceived my own self-image. I should re-iterate, the military only cemented these feelings in place, and helped foster them into a full blown train wreck. High School was where it really began. The constant struggle with weight, unhealthy eating habits, and trying to hide my body behind baggy clothes. Ever aware and concerned with how I looked and appeared to others. Once in the army, this grew into another animal entirely.
The Army standards called for maximum weight of 155 lbs for my height. Since I failed to meet the standard for this upon entering bootcamp, I was affectionately assigned to the ‘Fat Boy Program’ along with others that were dealing with far larger weight loss problems than myself. We were all in it together, big and small. Fat is fat in the eyes of the military, it matters not whether it is 5 lbs, or 100 lbs over.
The ‘Fat Boy Program’ means constant shaming from Drill Sergeants about our weight until we can come in under the limit. We were placed on a calorie controlled diet. No seconds at the chow hall, and we only eat from the regular offerings; no short order food (grilled cheese, hot dogs, burgers, fries). On the rare occassion dessert was allowed that was off-limits as well. It had the desired affect, along with some residual side effects.
I graduated bootcamp at 149 lbs. Slim and trim. I maintained this weight throughout flight school. Only due to the high stress environment that kept the calorie burning pumping full steam. My first trip home on leave after receiving my wings, was met with my grandmother discouraging look, and complaints that I was “too thin”, and “looking ill.” Next stop was Permanent Duty Station as it is called. He we were assigned to a regular active duty unit and stationed with there until deployed, or reassigned. There is a bit more freedom in this environment, and things changed. These changes brought more free time, with weekends off and the choice to eat in the mess hall, or buy food off base. Many of us, myself included, filled these vacancies with pizza, beer, and taco hell.
My first year of Mantis Boxing - 155 lbs - circa 1999
Along with these escapades, came the expanded waistlines and horrible physical fitness levels. My uniforms no longer fit, and purchasing replacements ate into my beer and cigarette stipend. I was failing weight tests, blaming BMI (Body Mass Index) charts, and lacking any sound nutrition knowledge on how to fix my growing weight problems. Through ignorance, I was in denial about my dietary choices and the only solution the military machine had for fixing weight issues - more exercise. If only I knew then what I know now…
This cycle continued for the next couple of years and was eventually exacerbated by civilian life once I left the military. My relationship with food, was warped and broken. Three or more meals per day, snacking, fast food, and the necessity for an overabundance of processed food due to the low income wages I made. Working 12 hour night shifts threw even more inconsistent and erratic eating patterns into the mix. Eventually this spiralled into a courtship with bulimia.
Co-workers would all want to order out from the local pizza shops, or fast food, and I would willingly join in the fray. While they were pleasantly digesting their meals like fat, happy cats for the remainder of our shift, I was finding some private location to inject my finger down my throat, and watch as my freshly eaten food erupted into the toilet, the woods, or even the rooftop of the factory. I found myself anywhere I could, to secretly unload the feelings of guilt and shame over what I just ate; only magnified by the awareness that I just wasted more of what little money I had, while living on a shoestring budget.
Guilt, shame, and cash, were the toll to pay on the highway of self-control while my food obsession continued to break the speed limit and drive recklessly down the freeway. Try as I might, this was my last ditch effort to regain a minor semblance of control over my body. It didn’t work.
I then tried any and all "diets" of the times - those failed to succeed at nothing more than reinforcing that I had no control over this. This cycle continued for 3 more years. Beating on my body full tilt. Alcohol, tobacco, food. All out of control. At the age of 25, a giant road sign in life smacked me right in the face. Another story for another time. Simply put, I had a moment of reckoning with myself, or rather, life had chosen a reckoning on me.
I became staunchly aware that at 17 years old, I was in bootcamp. At 18 to 20 years old I was flying multi-million dollar helicopters. Where the hell was I going now, five years later??? Hell in a hand basket woven of reeds pulled from the swamp of my own failed decisions.
After staring deep into my own soul, I pull hard on the cyclic, and cranked a 180 degree turn. Reversing course on my life of nowhere, and nothingness, and chose to refocus my priorities. I went on a 'low fat diet' (horrible choice that caused more problems down the road) and lost 32 lbs whilst quitting smoking, drinking, and taking up mountain biking. I added in exercises I learned in the military for strength and conditioning. The pounds shed off. Although this likely had more to do with ditching the alcohol, and the poor food choices that go along with it, than it did with the low-fat diet.
I receded from 180+ lbs down to 155 lbs, but that low-fat thing I mentioned before, had a negative side effect that I was unaware of until years later - low fat diets lead to depression. It turns out our brains require fat. I kept on it though, and exercise counterbalanced this. I would bike every day, and if I wanted an ice cream, I had to pedal 12 miles to the nearest ice cream stand to get it.
A year later, I returned to martial arts. Something I had my mind set on for 5 years, but never took the time to do it. Mantis boxing became my new focus. I trained 6-7 days per week, competing in any tournaments I could find and afford. I watched what I ate, and between the two, this kept the weight off for a couple more years. Yet I struggled with mood swings, and energy fluctuations that plagued my daily living. I sought out doctors suspecting blood sugar issues, but they would brush me aside and never pay heed to my words.
After a series of life altering events such as - losing part of my hand in an accident, living with a paranoid schizophrenic for one year, and watching my entire life burn to the ground in an electrical fire, taking everything I owned minus my life, and new work laptop I had just purchased the night before, the depression took over once again and I started to gain weight. Lots of weight.
I moved out of state, getting a new job and trying to change my life from manual labor to computer programming. Factories to cubicles. I was obviously running from the events prior, but in my mind believed that I was moving forward, and I had it all under control. After all, I was supposed to be ‘positive’. Nothing else was acceptable given my prior years of courtship with pessimism, nihilism, and self-destruction.
Boston Kung Fu Tournament - April 2003 - ‘Wendy and I’ - 204 lbs
I was in total and complete denial. Meanwhile, the weight piled on and the mirror continued to tell lies. It also did me no favors that not one person around me, said something about how much weight I gained; save for one - my boxing coach. Friends and family falsely believe that they should stay quiet. Sometimes the nicest thing we can do for people we care for, is to tell them the truth.
The scale doesn't lie, the mirror does. Our brain warps reality so we can cope with these gluttonous obsessions. Denial was my closest friend, right after Wendy’s of course. Things continued to spiral out of control over a fairly brief period of time. I became addicted to food, especially bad food. The more I ate of it, the worse it became. Not only from a weight gain perspective, but my hypoglycaemia would bounce like a racquet-ball shot from a cannon.
I was spending 3 to 4 hours per day in the car between commuting to work, travelling out of state for school 2 to 5 days/week while trying to finish my Bachelor’s degree, and insisting on continuing to train with my first mantis boxing coach a three times per week. Because I wanted to keep my loyalty to someone who had helped change my life, and it was easier, and more comfortable than seeking out a new school near my residence. I lived two plus hours away from his gym, commuting to Concord, N.H. from Beverly, MA three times per week.
Cooking my own food? There was no time in the day, or night for such frivolous endeavours. And the pounds packed on. I maxed out at 204 lbs before I changed things. I signed up at a new martial arts school in Boston that was close to my work. I could now train in classes more frequently.
I started attending lunch Kung Fu classes during the day and going back for three more back to back classes at night. I shed 30 lbs over the rest of that year. Then I started to plateau again. Martial arts training alone was not doing enough. Of course, stopping at Krispy Kreme on the way home from class didn’t help either. Again…we can’t exercise our way out of a bad diet. But I didn’t know that back then. Eventually I left the cubicle world, and decided I wanted to teach martial arts for a living.
Getting out of the 8 to 16 hours per day in a cubicle, and the lunch/snack runs with co-workers was one of the best things for my weight. I cleaned up the junk food, over-consumption, and brought my weight back down to the high 160's as I went into competing at the Wushu Nationals in 2004. I was still a bit chubby for my height though.
I spent the next few years continuing to struggle with my weight. It would fluctuate between 165 and 175 lbs; never able to shed the remaining weight no matter how much exercise. This devastated my morale. I was well into running my own school, and training 5 or 6 hours per day. I did not understand why I didn't look like a martial arts teacher. At least what I believe one should look like.
My superiority complex was getting a kick in the balls. I certainly did not want to become what I despised years before. Travelling from competition to competition, silently sneering at, and criticizing the food being served to competitors - donuts, pizza, hot dogs, and candy bars. Scoffing at the judges as they sat there in their chairs, shamelessly displaying their bare skinned balloon bellies protruding from their gi’s. No longer able to close the jackets because their guts were too big. [We hate most in others, what we despise so deeply within ourselves…]
Angry Rope Dart - summer 2004 - roughly 170 lbs
This was not what martial arts represented to me. I looked at martial arts as not only the constant struggle to perfect our fighting skills, but the manifestation of self-control; discipline over mind, body, and spirit. I was now representing the losing side in that battle. Diametrically opposed to what I believed in and aspired to be.
Since my early training in mantis boxing, I had suspected that something was wrong. As I mentioned, I sought out the help of doctors even when my weight was in acceptable parameters. I asked if I was hypoglycaemic. A big word for me back then, that my coach had to explain. The doctors always said ‘no’. Never delving deeper into the problems I was having. No proper testing for this condition to find out if it was lurking underneath.
I believed them, or at least listened to them tell me ‘no’. But this ignorance did not change the symptoms - massive mood swings when hungry (HULK SMASH!!!), foggy brain, inability to focus; a dependence on caffeine to regulate energy between meals. Each day was a roller coaster ride from morning to night. A typical day looked like this:
Breakfast -> crash -> caffeine -> crash -> lunch -> crash -> caffeine -> crash -> dinner -> crash -> sleep. Wake up starving the next day, ready to tear someone apart if I don’t get food - ‘NOW!!!’
In 2010 I reached my limit. I sought out a nutritionist, not a dietician (there is a stark difference) and scheduled an appointment. With the objective of determining:
If I was in fact hypoglycaemic. And,
How to shed the last 5-7 lbs I wanted to lose
At this point, I was down to 162 lbs through cutting my caloric intake so drastically low, that I was constantly stressed out, moody, and angry, and depleted of energy. I was hungry all the time, but could not reconcile with gaining weight because I was over eating. My relationship with food was still vastly negative and unhealthy.
As the weeks led up to the appointment, I came very close to cancelling my due to finances and scepticism. After all, years of doctors, diets, and dieticians had done nothing to help. Something deep down was so tired of living like this, that I stuck with it and went to my scheduled meeting. with Eric Reardon of Crossroads to Health. Eric, listened to my symptoms, and confirmed through blood tests that my suspicions for years, were quite true. He warned me that continuing on with this pattern, was an all but certain path to diabetes.
I worked with Eric as he gave me custom recipes, a meal plan, and even a shopping list of what to buy in the grocery store. These were extremely convenient, and made the changes easier to accomplish. No guesswork. He released me on my way and we were to follow up in a couple weeks to measure progress.
I followed his instructions to the letter. Everything I was supposed to do, I did. I was hell bent on breaking these chains that had pulled me into the abyss for decades. As I sought to stabilize my blood sugar (the first priority we were attending to) an interesting thing happened; the weight I could never lose before, shed off of me in 2 weeks.
I found a 6-pack. Under the dozen donuts… - 2011 - 145 lbs
By the end of 30 days, I was down to 152 lbs. In addition, my moods regulated, my stress levels dropped; anxiety dropped, no more seasonal depression common to northern climates; and I was enjoy the food I was eating (consuming 4x more than I had been eating prior). I never went back to eating the way I did before. [Thanks, Eric]
I feel better, look better, and perform way beyond what I could ever do in the past. At the time of this writing, at 41 years old, I dwarf the me that graduated boot camp in the autumn of 1990. It is ironic and comical to find myself in this position now. In 1992, I had a Sergeant Major (highest enlisted rank in the battalion) when I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. He was in his late 50's at the time. Sergeant Major Rhea.
Sgt. Major looked wicked old in comparison to our spry 19 and 20 year old selves. Looks deceived however. He would spank us hard on the 2-mile, 5-mile, and 10-mile runs. In his light, I would feel like a worthless scumbag. A third his age, and not even close to keeping up with him. He was a machine! He would run laps around our formation as we were sucking wind and dogging it up a hill during PT. On the straights, he would then take off and run a quarter mile ahead, then back to pull us along. Because of him, I could never make an excuse for my sad, sack of self. Never. I always had to own it. My condition, or lack thereof, was my own fault. No one else’s.
These days every activity I do whether it be mantis boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, tai chi, kickboxing, hiking, biking, hang-gliding, running, swimming, or competing, are all drastically altered by what I eat. I can feel the difference, most of all in my brain. I now know it can be done. Nutrition is the key. Not more exercise.
Now you know. You know that I lived it. That I understand what it is like to not have answers. To feel helpless in controlling our own bodies. To feel like a stranger in our own skin. Willing to take extreme measures to try and correct how we look and feel. Wisdom, the knowledge earned through hardship and experience, has taught me that the extreme measures, should be positive ones. Like spending money to get the help of a professional, or dedicating ourselves to a proper lifestyle change.
So…if I seem crass, unforgiving, or unaccepting of excuses to someone struggling with weight, it is not for lack of empathy, or walking the same lonely path, or not understanding what they are going through. I just see things from the other side and I don't buy excuses that we tell ourselves on why we can’t lose weight, or get in shape. I lived it. I am not superior to anyone else, I just have more failures. I was not born with a six-pack, even though I’m from New Hampshire. Ask my mother. I was a pudgy, insecure, 12 year old boy once upon a time.
I am, human. And humans, err. I have faced the trials and tribulations of modern day obesity problems like many of you who may be reading this. Battling against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine telling us to eat garbage. The fix?
Get educated about food.
Get off our ass and do it.
Our body is a machine. We need to treat it like one. We cannot run our cars without gas, oil, brake fluid. Likewise, we cannot run our bodies on Wendy’s and Krispy Kreme. We need fuel -protein, fat, carbs, fruits, grains, and vegetables. The lettuce on the fast food chicken sandwich doesn’t count.
My school is my life. It is the representation of what I do and what I believe in. I designed it to offer everyone a holistic approach to their life and training so they might gain the same benefits that I did, and continue to.
One of my greatest joys is watching someone commit themselves to a change, and experience the growth and benefits to their lifestyle and health as reward for their efforts. This is truly why I do what I do. That, and watching a weak, insecure individual, become capable of kicking someone else’s ass.
We can all achieve our goals and have the body we want - as long as it's OUR body. Meaning, our DNA determines our frame size, and how much muscle we can carry. We cannot, with any sense of reason, look upon some skinny twig in a magazine, or on social media, and set our mind to looking like that if it is not in our genetic make-up to do so. If we are a roaring oak, we can prune ourselves and strengthen our branches, but we cannot suddenly make ourselves into bamboo. Shape our own block of clay, not someone else’s.
The right knowledge is a powerful tool! Good luck.
Fitness Note:
9 months after reigning in my diet, my colleague Jeff Hughes of Austin Fitness Martial Arts in Austin, TX shared with me a fitness program that took him to another level. John Hackleman’s Cross-Pit program. Cross-Fit for fighters/boxers/martial artists. Old school martial arts conditioning with modern training techniques and methods. This helped shape my clay and I am forever grateful.
