My Obesity Awakening

Overthinking being Overweight

It’s been well over a decade since I met a personal hero of mine, David Duke. Heimbach and I approached him at the conference to express our adulation and he immediately poked my belly and remarked on our weight, then went into a half hour long tirade about diet, exercise, and lifestyle — with several gathered around for his extemporaneous speech on my fatness. This was somewhere between humiliating and hilarious for us, but it was the first gut punch (literally?) confrontation with the fact that my obesity could be a political concern.

My (Obesity) Awakening

It later became a meme that TradWorker was fat, with its two most prominent organizers being visibly overweight. I laughed along with the memes poking fun at my obesity, only realizing after it was too late that my personal issue was truly a professional issue, discrediting my work in the eyes of a large subset of the target audience. I’ve never really been able to fully wrap my mind around that mentality, but it’s too prevalent to ignore or dismiss.

Upon reflection, I (partially) get where people are coming from. You’re a total ambassador for whatever you’re preaching. So if you’re trying to convince people to follow your advice, then having something visibly defective about yourself both distracts from and even detracts from your intended message. I can lament the superficiality and vanity of it all, but my target audience has always been humans, and that’s how humans generally work.

Shortly after the party dissolved, I had a lot of free time to reflect on my personal business and invest in my personal improvement. I needed a self-improvement montage. I began with the basics: diet and exercise. But the more I dieted, the less I could focus on anything else (including exercise), and the more I exercised, the more intensely I craved food.

I fell into a disordered dietary pattern of extended periods of “good” eating, followed by binge eating that sabotaged whatever I had achieved.

When I exercised, I became ravenously hungry. It’s hard to describe how spellbindingly hungry I got. I could muster willpower to “just not eat,” but willpower is a finite resource. I became distracted, moody, unfocused, and unable to invest my willpower in other things, namely exercise, while dieting responsibly. My body clearly wanted me to eat more.

I fought the “food noise” but the food noise always won.

Perhaps the best way I have to describe it is “try to stay awake.” You can psych yourself up to pull an all-nighter, but sooner or later nature will win. You can always fixate hard enough to remain awake another few minutes, but it’s a losing game. I clearly am more hungry than most other people, with rock bottom moments of nearly being in tears after binge eating in the Wendy’s parking lot after days of sticking to a sensible diet and exercise plan.

I always managed to lose weight, but never sustainably. I then found a successful hack for dieting: electrolyte fasting. It turns out that if you keep your sodium, magnesium, and potassium levels up with an electrolyte potion, and you’re a fully grown adult who’s not pregnant or something, then you basically don’t actually need to eat food.

It’s unhealthy after two or three days, and your body starts borrowing nutrients from your bone marrow and stuff. Angus Barbieri went a full year without eating any food at all, relying on just salty water. He miraculously lost over 250 pounds and kept it off, and he is a bit of a saint in the mythology of fasting culture. What they don’t tell you, and which isn’t well known, is that he ended up gaining it all back and dying of fatness at 50 despite all that. Despite a heroic effort, even Angus lost the game.

Electrolyte fasting is the real deal, and I went from over 250 pounds to 190 pounds (I’m 5’11”), sixty pounds of weight loss, with my “snake juice” electrolyte cocktail. It truly is easier to just cycle through two or three day fasting cycles until the weight’s gone than it is to do calorie restriction. The misery of eating 20% less is nearly as bad as the misery of eating 100% less (with electrolytes). But then, within mere weeks, my body bounced all the way back. Just like Angus, I got ripped away from the promised land.

Trying to lose weight when your “fat thermostat” is trying to make you fat is a bit like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. The moment your mind drifts from the task, it bubbles all the way back up and all of your effort is wasted. You can never convey the relative strength of urges to other people, so people who’ve never contended with the severity of my cravings are going to assume that I’m a weak person who’s exaggerating. I just need to try as hard as they’re trying.

The thing about obesity is that it is entirely possible for obesity to be entirely, 100%, an irresponsible choice and it is entirely possible for obesity to be entirely, 100%, a medical and hormonal disease. Most people are somewhere in between, with the relative severity also being somewhere in between. For example, when I managed to get over 300 pounds, that was during a depressive episode where I sorta chose not to take care of myself for a few months before pulling myself together.

It’s mostly biology’s fault when I’m over 200 pounds, and mostly my fault when I’m over 300 pounds — and everything in between is a gray area. Your mileage may vary. It gets even more complicated when you consider how obesity interacts with inflammatory, metabolic, and mood disorders that themselves have a complex relationship with what’s entirely a disease and what’s entirely under your control.

After yet another failed foray, the last one into relying on personal trainers with fitness advice, I decided to try to troubleshoot it like I troubleshoot my programming bugs. Patiently and methodically isolate the variables until the problem is as simple as possible, but no simpler — and then solve it.

• Hormones: We know for a proven fact that obesity can be entirely and exclusively caused by hormonal imbalances.

• Activity: We know for a proven fact that obesity can be entirely and exclusively caused by lethargy.

• Nutrition: We know for a proven fact that obesity can be entirely and exclusively cured by eating better and less.

• Discipline: We know for a proven fact that obesity can be entirely and exclusively cured by exceptional willpower and focus.

• Support: We know for a proven fact that people with private chefs and personal trainers can cure their obesity.

Instead of picking one, you need to pick all of them. Otherwise, you’ll be playing whack-a-mole, as I was doing. Curing obesity is a multivariate challenge, and the optimal approach is necessarily one that addresses all five of these “fingers.”

Hormones

• Sunshine

• Satiety

• Semaglutide

I remember watching a youtube influencer who pointed out that, “If obesity is just genes, then why weren’t your great grandparents fat?” In my case, they mostly were. My 23andMe directly confirms various genes associated with increased likelihood of obesity.

Don’t hesitate to consider the new GLP1 agonist drugs which directly assist with the hormonal triggers of obesity. But also be sure to get plenty of outdoor activity, including exposure to direct sunshine, to improve your hormones. It’s not cheating. It’s not some kind of “defeat” relative to losing weight without addressing your major hormone imbalances. Talk to your doctor, get the blood work, and ensure that bad hormone levels aren’t sabotaging the rest of what you’re doing to get healthy.

I ended up with a semaglutide prescription after doing my own research and it made a miraculous difference. But even though it was a miracle for me, I am not going to neglect the other “fingers” of my personal “hands” plan I sketched up for myself. If you take the GLP1 agonists but don’t account for your activity, nutrition, discipline, and support; then you’ll just end up skinny and unhealthy instead of fat and unhealthy.

One simple weight loss trick is to chew more slowly, eat more slowly, and get in the habit of focused, mindful eating. Slow, mindful eating both helps us appreciate what we’re eating and how much of it we’re eating, as well as reduces the likelihood of overeating. Your body can and will tell you when to stop eating, but not if you swallow it down too rapidly for your hormonal signals to do their thing.

Activity

• Waking

• Walking

• Working Out

Getting more active is both the easiest and the hardest part of getting your obesity under control. For most, knocking out a simple program first thing in the morning is the most reliable way to enforce a habit. What you do depends on you, your lifestyle, your options, and your personal preferences. It could be as simple as taking a walk around the neighborhood or as complex as a sophisticated bodybuilding routine at the gym.

What you’re doing doesn’t matter. What does matter is increasing your basal metabolic rate. Err on the side of what is most likely to remain a habit and least likely to result in an injury. Walking (or whatever) outdoors has the added benefit of sunlight exposure, which has proven hormonal benefits. Whatever you decide to do, do it as if your life depended on it: It does.

Nutrition

• Macros

• Micros

• Minerals

Native peoples enjoyed gnawing on coca leaves for millennia without becoming depraved crackheads. Some of the most productive office geeks ingest slow-release amphetamines that are biosimilar to meth without becoming wretched tweakers. Delivery method and bioavailability is as important as the chemical itself in determining how addictive or destructive a drug is.

It’s the same with food, with ultra-processed food being the crack of nutrition. Disregard all of the debate about whether to eat more protein, fat, or carbs. All of these nutrients are relatively unhealthy in their ultra-processed state and relatively healthy in their natural, intracellular state. Your digestive system is designed to break down cells, albeit plants, grains, dead animals, or whatever. The cells in the food you eat, if it’s made out of cells, contain pretty much everything your own cells need, presuming you’re enjoying a sensible variety of “cellular” food.

Humans evolved as opportunistic omnivores, and can do fine on absolute garbage. What they can’t do well on is ultra-processed food. Even the raccoons and opossums, similarly omnivorous creatures who are typically healthy in the wild, often end up comedically obese when their primary food source is ultra-processed foods they dig out of our trash.

Think and learn about your food, and try to reduce or eliminate foods that aren’t “cellular.” After the initial learning curve, you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether what you’re eating comes out of a factory or a farm animal. There’s no agreed definition of what “ultra-processed” means, which is why the “is this cellular?” question is better. For example, healthy apples are made out of cells, while apple juice is created by breaking apart the cell walls, creating a lethally unhealthy “apple juice.”

Know the difference between apples and apple juice and ignore the talk of macro this or micro that. You’re made out of cells, and have a digestive system designed to extract what it needs from cellular stuff you put into it. Don’t be dumping a bunch of “fiber” or “protein powder” or whatever into your diet. Eat fibrous plants and the muscle tissues of dead animals (or whatever works with your preferences).

Minerals are largely addressed by eating cellular stuff, but you can turbocharge your weight loss if you wish by supplementing with sodium, magnesium, and potassium. A huge subset of appetite is your body signaling that it needs more minerals, minerals which have zero calories and can be delivered to your body without bundling them with calories. This can get dangerous if overdone, as your body is healthiest when it has a steady supply of diverse macronutrients and micronutrients, and us fat people can suffer from malnutrition just as readily as starving people.

Discipline

• Fasting

• Focus

• Forgiveness

This is the favored solution for people who’ve never actually struggled with obesity themselves. They imagine that we’re like this because we lack the self-discipline, will power, and strength of character they possess. Haters are going to hate, and should be tuned out. But discipline can and will be an important part of the plan if the other parts of the plan are in place.

As you already know, discipline isn’t enough when the hormones, activity, nutrition, and support aren’t in place to ensure that your investment of willpower translates into lasting results. Focus comes and goes, and I assume you also have a busy life that includes other things to focus on than your obesity problem. A great thing to do, though, when you do have a wave of focus, is to electrolyte fast for a day or two.

Never electrolyte fast for more than three or four days. I know about Angus and know that there’s a community of people who often do it for longer. The benefits and risks of fasting are a very active area of scientific research, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that fasting for longer than a couple days is unnecessarily stressful on the body.

Most importantly, lean into the yen and yang of discipline. Don’t be discouraged by the lapses in discipline. Forgive yourself when you slip up, and get back on the wagon, or bicycle, or expensive exercise machine or whatever. Beating yourself up about your failures is a sure way to end up becoming avoidant and defensive about your obesity rather than active and engaged.

Support

• Socialization

• Software

Don’t go it alone. Get your friends and family involved, to the greatest extent you’re comfortable. We’re social creatures, and feedback and encouragement from the people in our lives makes all the difference. My weight loss journey began with a celebrity who had the courage to tell me the truth that everybody else was too polite or obsequious to raise. I have an especially stubborn personality where the online bullying about my weight mobilized me, but you may be a little less thick skinned.

I have a digital scale with bluetooth and an app that I use to routinely keep track of my progress (or lack thereof). Whether it’s with the weight loss, the exercise plan, or a hiking app that tracks your steps, experiment with different popular apps that help gamify and visualize your progress.