We liberals have a strange time of it lately when it comes to weight. On the one hand, we read all the studies about the obesity problem in America and its ties to Type 2 Diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. We love Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program even if we secretly wonder how effective it is, and we’re concerned that kids aren’t getting enough exercise at school. We supported the idea of NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on huge sodas, and schools moving toward healthy snacks in vending machines. We like that Obamacare will require large chain restaurants to display calorie counts on the menu. We think obesity is an epidemic and a national health issue that demands attention.

But at the same time, we spastically click the “like” button on all of those stories that flood our Facebook feeds that scream “I’m big and I’m beautiful,” “Bullying fat kids is a tragedy,” “You don’t get to judge me for being fat,” “The media presents an unrealistic definition of beauty,” and all the rest. We practically give those posts a goddamn standing O. We grimace at the underlying discrimination against heavier folks, and we hated Chip Wilson for being such a dick by suggesting that Lululemon’s yoga pants were falling apart because the women wearing them were too fat.

We liberals support the idea of weight loss in terms of health, but not in terms of beauty. We see a fat kid on the bus and automatically hate all the bullies he/she must encounter while silently judging the parents that are slowly murdering their child with food. We admire the confidence and spunk of the overweight pole dancer, but frown at the guy who crowds us on airplanes. We’ll say that Americans in general need to lose weight (that’s just a combination plate of caring and healthcare economics), but we won’t be caught dead saying that any particular person needs to lose weight (that’s fat-shaming).

And it’s not just us liberals. People of all stripes watch “The Biggest Loser” to cheer on people dropping pounds, but then shout “She went too far!” when the winner lost 105 of them. The world idolized Jennifer Lawrence for adamantly refusing to lose weight for the Hunger Games, making her the patron saint of overweight teens (even though Lawrence herself is anything but fat). And a dumb if unfunny pillow at Nordstrom caused outrage due to its implicit association between happiness and body image. We loved John Candy for being the funny fat guy, and when he died of a massive heart attack, commented that he’d been tempting fate all along.

I’ve been fat and I’ve been skinny; and for me, skinny is better.

As a country, we’re obsessed with weight, trying simultaneously to eliminate it and defend it. Unfortunately, women are disproportionately the target of fat-shaming and weight discrimination, and accordingly are the collective beneficiary of all the shame-on-you-for-denigrating-my-body articles. As a guy, I haven’t had to deal with the same issues besides some jovial teasing from friends, because men generally get a pass on weight issues. On TV, we thought it was cool that Jared lost a grip of weight by eating Subway sandwiches, but it also seemed perfectly reasonable when an overweight dude like Tony Soprano could hop in bed with any woman he wanted. Louis CK did an amazing job summing up this male/female disparity recently on his show “Louie.”

So, adult men generally have it easy compared to women in the social aspects of obesity. Even still, I’ve been fat and I’ve been skinny; and for me, skinny is better.

How I became the fat friend

My buddy Casey had a theory that every group included a “fat friend.” While a co-worker of Casey’s said that a group photo of him, Curtis and me looked like a white bar code, that meant that our other pal Justin, though not obese, was the default fat friend in our gang. Poor Justin. That guy seems to eat healthily, hikes and kayaks regularly, and has completed every module of Zombies, Run!–things none of the rest of us could claim–but because he had a little more cushioning around the middle than the rest of us, he was the fat friend and we reminded him often. He was more than happy to hand me the great big title belt last year.

I’m 6’4″, and until the beginning of 2013, I maintained a weight of about 180 lbs. I’d been thinner before, but I seemed to have found an equilibrium at 180–not too thick and not too thin. I didn’t care much about my weight or my body image; I didn’t have any reason to. I didn’t really give it any thought.

I’m a survival eater in the way that wolves are survival eaters.

I’ve never had the best eating habits, either. I’m a survival eater in the way that wolves are survival eaters. Because they hunt big animals that are hard to kill, wolves are designed for feast and famine. They may not be able to eat often, so when they do, they really wolf it down (ha!). I don’t need to eat often (I’m never really hungry for breakfast or lunch), but when I do eat, I shovel food down my piehole until I can’t take another bite as if I don’t know where my next meal is going to come from. I’ve heard all the theories about how grazing is better than binging and how six small meals a day are better than one or two big meals, but my eating habits have always just worked for me. I’d eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but that just happened to take the form of one big pig-out session a day right before a food coma.

But in January of last year, things changed. I lost my day job (one where I was on my feet all day), and I began doing freelance work from home; so I was burning far fewer calories per day. My desk is just a few feet from my kitchen, so eating became a lot more convenient. With extra time on my hands, I took up cooking like a hobby, which in itself isn’t an issue, but I’d cook a metric fuck-ton of food, and because of my wolfy eating habits, gobble it up until either it was gone or until I needed to take a breather before returning to the trough. I also like to bake, and I’d plow through a homemade cheesecake in three days, or a poundcake in two, because hey, it’s there to be eaten. I wasn’t used to paying attention to what I ate or how much activity I got, so with the combination of more food and less exercise, by summertime I’d put on thirty pounds and became the fat friend. By December I’d packed on another ten. Justin was downright gleeful.

Rob McElhenney after gaining 50 lbs. for his character Mac on "ItFor a guy my height, 220 lbs doesn’t seem like a crazy weight. But, I don’t have any muscle. I never have. Even when I did two years of weight training in high school for PE credit, I got stronger but never gained visible muscle mass. So gaining forty pounds meant that I was just plan ol’ fat, and I didn’t wear it well like some dignified Frenchman either. I looked like Rob McElhenney when he put on fifty pounds for a season of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” only sans the biceps. Basically, disgusting. And while McElhenney was quoted saying that being temporarily fat was “awesome,” for me, being fat suuuuucked.

My chin largely disappeared. My belly stuck out far past my moobs, which themselves had bulged until they could be cupped and jiggled when running to catch a departing bus. Not only did my belly hang over my belt, but so did my back. My loose-fitting clothes became tight, and my well-fitting clothes became unwearable. Some of my tee shirts couldn’t be tucked in. I couldn’t fit into my suit for my friend’s wedding. I started sorting through my closet looking for fat pants and had to really suck it in to get my jeans buttoned. I had to hold my breath when tying my shoes. I was using the very last notch on my belt. I got winded walking four blocks up the hill to the grocery store. I’d run out of hot water before my claw-foot bathtub was full enough to cover my gut. My thighs got rashes from sweaty rubbing on hot days, and I pitted out my shirts on any given day. My hands and feet were always cold because of worsening circulation. I started getting heartburn every time I ate anything, regardless of what it was. Basic body functions went haywire in embarrassing ways. I felt tired all the time. In a rare night of romance, I kept my tee shirt on during sex like the fat kid in a swimming pool. I kept thinking of a quote from the original short called “The Spirit of Christmas” that spawned the “Southpark” phenomenon: “You’re such a fat fuck, Cartman, that when you walk down the street people go god DAMMIT that kid’s a BIG FAT FUCK!”

Something had to change.

Finally, one day in December I had a complete freak-out about my weight, and it was due both to body image and to health. I’d turned into a fat slob, and my body wasn’t functioning properly. I wanted to look better, and I wanted to feel better. Instead of a passive acknowledgement that I could stand to lose a few pounds, suddenly I wanted the extra weight gone, and gone right now. So, I made a simple decision, and lost fifty pounds in twelve weeks.

How I stopped being the fat friend

You know what? Weight loss isn’t complicated. It’s not fun, but it’s simple. I get that everybody’s body is unique, and different folks have different metabolisms, that there can be issues with thyroids and glands, that there’s genetics at play, and all of that. I get it. And I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist; but in my view, losing weight just comes down to this: burn more calories than you consume, or to put it another way, consume less calories than you burn.

Whatever someone’s metabolism, the equation still stands up. It’s total calories in vs. total calories out.

Your body burns calories (energy) for basic processes (blood flow, breathing, digestion, etc.), and burns additional calories when you’re active. People with high metabolism burn more at a standstill than others, so someone with a low metabolism would have to be more active to burn the same number of calories, or eat less to hit the same net calories in a day. In a certain light, that blows for the person with low metabolism because they don’t get to eat as much or they have to exercise more. Or, in another light, low metabolisms are awesome because those bodies are highly efficient–they don’t have to eat as much to perform the same amount of work, or they can perform much more activity on the same food intake–having a low metabolism is like being a Prius, and you wouldn’t insist on dumping more gas in the backseat when the tank wasn’t emptying fast enough. Anyway, whatever someone’s metabolism, the equation still stands up. It’s total calories in vs. total calories out.

In my case, I knew that I could either eat the same but exercise more, or I could continue with my utter lack of physical activity but eat far less. Or, I could both exercise more and eat less–and that’s what I did.

I used two tools: Fitbit and MyFitnessPal.

First, I bought a Fitbit Flex, a wristband which detected and recorded all of my physical activity. Based on my height, weight and age, the app calculated the calories my body burns just to stay alive, and added the calories I burned from the physical activity recorded by the wristband. I set up an aggressive weight loss goal, and it would tell me how many calories I needed to burn and how much I could eat based on my burned calories. If I exercised more, I got to eat more (woohoo!).

MyFitnessPal was better for tracking my caloric intake. If I ate something packaged, I’d scan the barcode and log how much I ate of it. If I cooked something from scratch, I’d create a recipe that included all of the individual ingredients, and then log how much I ate of it. If it went in my mouth, it got logged. If I couldn’t log it, I wouldn’t eat it. I captured every bit of nutritional data.

I set up the two apps on my phone to sync together, and then I obsessed over the data. Lots of great, gooey data. Exercise, weight, calories, nutrition, water consumption, I’d geek out on all of it. I’d look at the numbers, charts and graphs a bunch of times a day, logging intake and noting activity. It was like checking your bank account balance when there are constant deposits and debits happening throughout the day. I went all Nate Silver on myself.

I didn’t want to merely starve myself. I wanted to lose weight quickly, but healthily. I made sure to eat at least 1,800 calories a day, and started paying attention to how much iron, potassium and vitamins I was getting; and the balance between carbs, protein and fat; and adjusting ingredients in what I cooked to make sure I was getting enough of everything. I didn’t eliminate fat, or carbs, or sugar or anything. There were no tricks. I just limited my calories, and tried to get proper and balanced nutrition within that caloric budget.

At the same time, I committed to taking walks every morning, beginning with a 2.5-mile route and then replacing that with a six-mile route. Any other walking I did during the day (to the grocery store, to the bank, to the coffee shop) was a bonus to the morning walks–the more I walked, the more I could eat. I walked in the snow, I walked in the rain, I walked in the dark and I walked on sunny days. I walked hungover, I walked sick, and I walked when I felt like a million bucks. I just didn’t leave myself any other option but to fulfill my minimum commitment. There were several days when I didn’t get it done in the morning, and so instead of just calling it a miss, I’d take my six-mile walk at night. I felt like I owed it to the data stream; I didn’t want there to be any gaps or failures on my charts. And I didn’t want to be an excuse-making loser.

While I love being active (hiking, climbing, Frisbee, whatever), I really hate exercise for its own sake. I hate running, I hate push-ups, and just the idea of spending time on an elliptical machine or any similar workout fills me with dread. But, I quickly learned to love my walks. I’d listen to podcasts, plan out my day, and have tons of ideas flow through my brain.  For an hour and a half every morning, I’d get fresh air, scenery, clarity and creativity, and I didn’t even have to pay for a membership like the people I see getting out of taxi cabs at 24 Hour Fitness. Seriously, I always want to advise those people that if they live close enough to take a cab, then they could just cancel their membership, skip the cab ride and walk/run that distance for free with the same effect.

I didn’t cut anything out of my diet. If I wanted the cake, I had to pay for it with exercise.

I didn’t cut anything out of my diet. I didn’t replace pizza and beer with kale salad and seltzer water. Nothing was off limits. But, often I did have a decision to make: I’ve reached my calorie limit for the day, and I really want a piece of cake. Mmm-cake! Is that piece of cake worth taking another long walk? Sometimes my dread of another walk kept me away from the cake. Sometimes the delicious cake was enough to send me out the door to log a couple more miles. I didn’t consider it a temptation, it was just a decision–if I wanted the cake, I had to pay for it with exercise. It was that simple. Sometimes it was worth it, and sometimes it wasn’t. And if I accidentally went a little over my budget, I’d head back out the door and walk up and down my street until I’d burned off the excess.

Weight Chart for 1 Year

And over the next three months, I watched the weight come off. The heartburn went away. My hands and feet stopped freezing. I was able to breathe while tying my shoes. My clothes started to fit better, and by the end, I could wear my suit again–and I have to say, I do look pretty dapper in a suit. I began to sleep better, and didn’t feel lethargic all day (no more naps!). My weird bodily malfunctions went away. I looked better, and people noticed. I felt better, too.

My initial goal was to get back to 180 lbs. It was bittersweet when I hit that goal on a Friday morning. Sweet because I quit walking and pounded hamburgers and french fries for three solid days. Bitter because I’d spent three months of hyper-focus on this one goal, and I was left with, “Now what?” This must be what postpartum depression is like for women after giving birth. By Monday, I decided to go another five pounds, and resumed my walking regimen. When I hit 175, I decided that I really didn’t need to lose any more, quit walking, upped my food budget to maintain my current weight and kept tracking. It seemed my body had momentum, because more weight came off without my effort. From my peak, I’d lost just over fifty pounds in twelve weeks.

Now I’ve steadied out at about 166, right in the center of the normal BMI range. Some days I eat a lot, and some days a little. Some days I walk a lot (depending on where I need to go), and some days I don’t. I know one thing, though: I don’t want to put the weight back on. I’m still keeping an eagle-eye on the data to avoid plumping up again. Being healthy and thin is a much better way to go.

It’s really great not being the fat friend anymore, but I could use a new goal. Maybe it’s time to start doing push-ups.