First, I forgot to count down: Officially at 89 days to the Maratón!
Back in April, I completed the Whole 30 challenge. The Whole 30 Challenge is a part of the Whole 9 life, created by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig. The concept is simple: For 30 days, the goal is to eat good food and avoid types of food that cause damage to your body and cause unwanted and dangerous addictions. It’s about 30 days of intentionality, planning and purpose and ultimately, it’s you hitting the reset button and getting a fresh start.
To say that is helped change my life is not an understatement. It altered my relationship with food, what I eat, how I eat and the most important, why I eat. Close to three months in, habits that changed are still changing and I’m better for it.
But to get to that point, fellow air breathers, was a real challenge.
As a child, I wasn’t athletic but I was active. Childhood asthma stifled my ability to do many things, as did a complete lack of interest in playing high school football. (I did play junior varsity volleyball my freshman year. My position was left out.)
My family ate at fast food places often but my mother is a wonderful cook, so we ate well. I got to college and gained the freshman 15 like every other person but I was still active, so weight wasn’t a major issue in my mind.
I studied at Oxford during the fall of 2000 and while that was a life-changing experience, coming back to the States and to college was one of the worst times of my life. I struggled to re-insert back into the uniqueness of a Christian college sub-culture. My grades dropped because I wasn’t interested in my classes. I was madly in love with this woman and was convinced that we were ordained by God to be together and be married (sadly, that is not an exaggeration) but we broke up soon after I returned.
Thus, I gained about 45 pounds or so. I got to 225 lbs and stayed there, give or take 10 pounds, for about 11 years.
Coming out of the HOLE in fall 2012 and training for the half-marathon, I knew that I needed to eat better and make better choices about food. Mercifully, I was moving away from being the guy who started ‘Five Guys Fridays’ but that wasn’t getting to the root of my issues with food. If anything, I didn’t think I had any issues with food. I ate and that was that.
I had heard about the paleo lifestyle but didn’t know much about it. It seemed, well, weird and freakish and certainly not for me. I mean, the best dish I knew how to make was chicken and dressing. Here’s what’s in chicken and dressing:
chicken
sour cream
can of chicken and a can of mushroom soup
fake stuffing
mostly real Chinese noodles
very real butter on top.
I mean, seriously, a Caveman could make that.
Anyway, I found that the Paleo lifestyle wasn’t freakish (well, not that freakish) and actually, it’s pretty easy to implement. My friend M. at M = 1 (who is during her fourth #Whole30 this month and I’m so, so proud of her) told me about the grain manifesto, which led me to the #Whole30.
(As a side note, I won’t go through what the actual Whole30 challenge entails here. Click on the link at the top of this post to get all the details.)
Pretty much everything that is said will happen during the #whole30 did happen. It’s a not a big deal for the first two days, then your head starts to hurt. In particular, my head started to hurt because I eschewed coffee during my #whole30. That’s big. I’ve been a coffee drinker since I was 13 years old (again, no exaggeration) and giving that up for 30 days was the hardest by far.
After you get used to the hurting head, things become a bit foggy, almost dream-like. Then, you want to punch the universe in the face, followed by people that quickly come to mind. You get bored, then sick of eating leafy greens, then start to dream about coffee and milkshakes. Before you know it, you’re on the last week and it’s as if someone turned on a light and you begin to see things you haven’t fully recognized before. Your energy levels balance out, you sleep better and you FEEL better. And then, it’s 30 days.
In addition, these things were a big discovery for me:
I never thought more about food than during this time. Eating is an unconscious action. You think, “I want this.” So, you buy it and eat it. For the #whole30, this was the first time I had to think about every single thing I ate. What’s in this dish? What am I suppose to be looking for again? This has sugar. Does everything have sugar?
And thinking about food meant being mindful about food which meant giving a lot of attention to planning meals, figuring out where to shop, stopping to look at all the ingredients. It’s a lot of time and effort. For me, I was learning a new skill and really, that’s a bit embarrassing. I’m in my 30s and I don’t know how to shop for myself? Well, yeah.
It was one of the emotional experiences I’ve had. I’m a pretty emotional person by nature but I never equated emotions with food. Turns out that I’m an emotional eater and food has been a real comfort to me. It does make sense: After a long night in the newsroom, I’d stopped by 7-11 and get some candy bars. There’s candy everywhere (and I mean everywhere) in the newsroom. I’ve always had a strong stomach and could eat virtually anything and thus, I ate virtually everything. I ate when I was alone, I ate on my grand adventures, I ate in moments of sheer boredom.
Near the middle of the month, I started to recognize different emotions that came to the surface about many things that I had no clue were there. I felt anger at some things, disappointment and real hurt in others. Sadness over lost friendships, shame and regret and joy and delight that I just neglected to notice were present. Much of that was buried under my usage of food. And also me being a man, which leads to me to…
This is one of the most masculine things I’ve done. I posit that men have a different relationship with food than women. Men can (and often expected to) whatever they want and whatever fashion they prefer. Society frowns heavily on obese men and women but overweight men get a smile and possibly a joke or two, but that’s all. A man’s man is not one who likes his kale. It’s a man with BEER and BRATS. That’s a man who knows how to eat!
I always knew I was overweight and somewhat non-athletic and really took a bit of a perverse joy in that. I wasn’t “that guy.” Well, whoever “that guy” was, it wasn’t me and I made sure of that. I often was “the smart guy” or “the guy who does all these cool things” or “he’s such a nice guy but I’ll never date him” guy. But I sure as hell wasn’t “that guy.”
The truth was that I was scared. Terrified, even. What scared me wasn’t going on a diet or not eating dairy or exercising. It was taking responsibility. At this point, it didn’t matter how I gained the weight or what I ate. What mattered was that by going this road, I guaranteed the status quo, which was blissful failure.
However, if I succeeded in becoming physically fit, then that means active, not passive. Which means I do have control to make better decisions. Which means I’m not a victim or a martyr. Which means this is now and that was then and you have to let those 45 pounds go.
So, now they’re gone. And to celebrate…
The Road to Good Air 