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Prologue

One of my reader/editors (you know who you are:-) sent this comment to me when returning the edited manuscript

Jon - ...if other people are like me, they are looking for the magic answer to weight-loss, and if it takes too long to get to it, they will become impatient.

So, if you are one of those readers, "looking for the magic answer to weight-loss, and if it takes too long, [you] become impatient," (beyond the fact that there is no magic answer...) do this: skip the entire first and second chapters. Start your read with, Chapter 3 What's The Plan? where I report on everything you need to  begin your own journey. Next read Chapter 4, Digital Patterns, where you will be exposed to information that may very well change the way you look at weight loss forever. And finally go to the last chapter Day by Day where you will follow along as I journal my own personal progress in real time.

Then when you're all done reading this book out of order, and feel comfy and settled into the bricks and mortar of your way of doing things, I really encourage going back and reading the rest of the material, because it was written in the height of my newly discovered ability to control my weight, and I believe contains some really valuable information that can assist in controlling your own weight, and understanding more clearly what is needed to succeed.

Life is all about making choices.

Make the one that works best for you.

 

 

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1
How Did I Get There?

Tuesday August 17th 2010 - As I begin to write, it needs to be pointed out that I'm, in this moment, only about one fifth of the way toward my goal. Since that's the case, how, you might well ask, can I be so sure that this is the one? How can I be so sure that this is finally the answer to my lifelong quest to lose weight?

My answer is simple: I've been on so many diets that have worked, and then ultimately failed that I've become hypersensitive as to why they ultimately let me down. The reason for this is that, before, I was always playing by someone else's rules. With this book I am supplying all the information necessary for you to create your own rules for yourself as I now have for myself.

Over the past 56 days (I just used http://www.timeanddate.com to figure that out. Tech-fanatic, remember?), I've lost eleven pounds, and I've realized that not only am I taking off the pounds, but I'm doing it all on my own. When I have reached my goal weight, I will have lost fifty pounds. See, I now have all the controls at my disposal, and I never did before. I am not going around hungry. I'm not eating strange foods, or eating only one category of food.

I am not suffering to lose weight.

I'm so excited and passionate about my success that I have no choice but to share it. What I'm doing is not only working, but it's becoming increasingly clear to me that it always could have worked, and will always work in the future. Can I say that about anything I've ever done in the past to lose weight?

Nope.

Just take a look at the, "Diets I've Known" chapter.

I know from my experiences that nearly anyone who has ever attempted to lose weight has fought a losing battle. A battle where we lost nothing permanently. Yes, sometimes we do see success, but eventually the success is subverted by our own built-in ways of approaching food. We've learned throughout our lives to be overweight, through what we think, what foods we like, media influence, and internal ongoing messages that inform our decision process.

I encourage you to set those past diet experiences aside, and know that the battle is over. Losing weight is not a battle at all.

It's a simple journey.

It is not a journey that happens overnight, so relax. It has taken me years to put on all these pounds, so if it took me an entire year to take them off, and they were gone forever, (or even if a few of them came back because of a wild weekend in Tahiti  -  I could get rid of them without any big deal) I win.

If I can lose it anyone one can.

Try this: go online and search the word, "diet." In a matter of milliseconds you will find the results to be some one-hundred-thirty-eight million choices! What does this tell you? It tells you that, with some 6 billion (and counting)2 people alive on the planet at this moment, each person has the option of approximately 44 diets to test out to see if that one is the one that will do the trick. Of course I'm being facetious since there are plenty of people who would grow to glowing health if only they were able to eat what we privileged Americans throw away each and every day, but you get my point.

There are lots of people and lots of diets, but the problem is that there are some diets that work for some people while others do not. Some diets really do work for lots of people, but very few, if any, empower anyone to keep the weight off for any extended length of time. There are diet programs that allow people to drop a pound a day. There are some that work really well for movie stars, and if you too are willing and able to cough up the coins, you can drop those extra pounds like old shoes after a dance. Recently, an ex-president (you know the one - white hair? women love him?) lost 23 pounds in time for his daughter's wedding. News people commented (depending on which side of the political fence they rode on) how good he looked, or made remarks about how he looked gaunt after losing so much weight so quickly.

When I want to lose weight I look around for the absolute fastest way to do it. Why? Because I am a product of my own place in the media frenzy for my dollars. We all want it fast because that's the world we live in; well, not exactly the world we live in, but an unreasonable facsimile thereof. We've been educated to expect everything, RIGHT NOW.

All I can talk here about is my own experience, and my experience is that, yes, it's possible to lose weight quickly, and, yes, sometimes that weight will stay off for a while, but if you're anything like me, it will be back and you know it, no matter how much you believe that this time will be the charm.

Which all leads me again to question of why it has to happen quickly? The answer is that we live in the digital age. Everything around us happens fast: instant world-wide communication. If I don't like what I'm watching on TV I don't have to get up off my butt and turn it off. I can just touch a button on the remote - I can just instantly click over to another of my 500+ channels. That mouse on my computer, or the touch screen, allows me to control the media with nothing more than a thought and a finger-flick. I can have instant pudding, instant pizza, instant French fries, and instant gratification. And the more I have of such god-like power the more I want! Right? If I want to lose weight I can take a pill or have my stomach stapled, or I can give myself a disease of dysfunction, and barf my way to a thinner body.

Sure, that's it - we live in the age of instantaneous...

Breathe in. breathe out...

Well yeah, except that as much as I revel in the technology of the life I live I am forced reluctantly to admit that I am not a digital being. It has taken me a lifetime of habit to bring myself along into the overweight condition that I am now living with. My current body is the result of years of continued patterns of eating that have not served to give me the body I would wish for, so why do I have it in my head that losing weight fast is what is needed?

How did that thought get in there?

Is it possible that one day some ad executive had the brilliant idea to sell the public a bill of goods about quick weight loss? No, of course not. Everyone knows that ad executives are all about telling the truth in a way that people can understand. They're only trying to give me the tools to have a better life, right? They live for the high minded principal of contributing to a better world for all of us because it's simply the right thing to do.

I would encourage all of us to listen less to what they have to tell us, and more to what we already know.

Let's try this on for size. What if we can live in the digital age, and lose weight in a way that will create new habits in our lives? What if the word fast needs to be put into the context of one's own lifetime-of-days (for me on November 1st it will be 23,375.5007 days of life) instead of the context of right now today? What if it does take six months (182.621099 days), or a year (365.242199 days) to do it? After all it took years and years to put it on. What if I begin to look at the truth that, in light of all those years of putting it on, taking it off in a year is fast.

Taking off a pound a day is possible. I've done it, and so have most of you. It's really fast, and that pound a day loss does deliver instant satisfaction, which, of course, we're all addicted to. But if it takes a year to lose all the weight we want to lose, and we never again have to deal with being many, many pounds overweight, then which is the better course?
I suppose you already know which one I'm opting for.

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Yesterday my friend said to me, "hey, you've lost weight." I acknowledged the fact, thanked her for noticing, and mentioned that I had another 39 pounds to go. She was stunned, "but you look like you must have lost like 20 pounds already. You must carry it really well." It was a compliment and I accepted it. Afterward, however, I began to think about the idea that I carried it well, and realized that it was the truth. I carried it well by hiding my body beneath layers of clothing and flattering patterns. I kept my gut sucked in when I could. I attempted (not always successfully) to turn in directions away from cameras pointed in my direction, so they wouldn't catch my belly hanging over the top of my pants. I would do everything possible to not look fat even with the knowledge that I was indeed fat. The reason? Nothing I'd ever used to lose weight worked, and my only recourse was to make every effort to contain and hide the reality from the world, and more importantly from myself. The change that has come now is dramatic and has turned my world upside down. I've stopped hiding, which is the reason my friend noticed, but more important, I no longer feel the need to hide and find that I really look forward to the time when I reach my goal. As I see it, reaching that goal is the beginning of something completely new in my life. I expect that how I view the world will have by that point changed to the extent that how I am viewed by the world will also have been transformed.

I have to say that I am a very fortunate person in not having been judged or even viewed by my wife, Georgina, as a fat person, though really she has not known me as anything but. When we first met, I probably weighed about one hundred-seventy-five pounds, so even then, I was some twenty pounds overweight. As I said, I am a fortunate man.

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Let's look at this definition of the word most on our minds at this moment:

Notice that the last definition (d) of the word is the one used most commonly in our society, when really it's the first definition (a) that's at the core of what the word actually means.

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When I was 14 years old, I was 4 feet 11 inches tall in my stocking feet, and I weighed 165 pounds. As you may well guess, I was not a happy child, at least in terms of my personal appearance - and at the age of 14, what else is there? In spite of this handicap, I was a fairly normal child, and managed to grow into a fairly normal adult (although most of my closest friends would likely argue against that last statement).

Over the years, I've tried so many diets it's hard to count them all. I will, however, attempt to document them on these pages. I'm pretty sure that I'll leave one or two out simply by the reality that some of them have blended into one ongoing diet.

Let’s face it; diets generally fall into one of two specific categories: They either work for a while, or they don't work at all. The ones that don’t work are shots in the dark, things that we wish would work. The ones that do work are deceptive at best when, after time goes by, they either stop working, or I become frustrated at having reached a seemingly impenetrable plateau and I give up. 

Over the years and innumerable attempts, I've learned from such experiences. Eventually, I'd just feel out of control. I'd come away with “nothing really works so why should I bother?” Until recently, truth be told, I'd given up the possibility of ever getting rid of the pounds that have steadily increased until I weighed in at 210 pounds. I am, at this writing, sixty-three years old and stand 5 feet 7 inches tall. I will be sixty-four in November. According to those damnable charts that are broadcast everywhere on the net, and on nutritional pages in magazines, I should weigh somewhere between 127 and 157.

At this moment I weigh 193.6 and I have been actively measuring my weight loss since June 23rd when I weighed 205 pounds. Earlier on in May, I weighed nearly 212 pounds, which is reflected in that photo of me in the green jacket. That photo, by the way, is one that I had to really search for because, typically, I would have thrown away such incriminating evidence. Incriminating to me. I hated looking that image because it exposed my lack of control, right? Possibly, but things have changed since then, and I can look at it now because I now have the power to control my weight.
I hold all the controls.

So how did I lose those first seven pounds? It was one of my typical experiences: I suffered through eating in an unnatural way (protein only) with the result being that I did lose those seven pounds until I reached 205, at which point I stopped losing weight, became discouraged once again, and stopped dieting. The circle had completed itself one more time.
However, there was a gathering of circumstances that conspired to place me on a path to losing weight that not only worked, but allowed me to eat the exact same things that I normally eat.
When I say circumstances I'm speaking of seemingly unrelated things:

• I had just lost five pounds, and reached a plateau where I remained for days on end until my weight began to creep back upwards
• I got a new iPod.
• The bathroom scale broke and I bought a new one - digital this time

I will speak more directly about how these things interrelate later... I have not changed any of the foods I normally eat. Not like I generally eat fast food, but the reality is, I could eat it and still lose weight.

 

2
Tech Fanatic

Picture me standing in the front of a room filled with strangers  (that would be you) I step up to the podium, and declare in a loud firm voice, "Hello, my name is

Jon, and I'm a tech fanatic."

You all respond  solemnly and in unison, "Hello Jon," and I then go on to tell my tale.

Right around  the time the first computer came into our home, there was ongoing talk about everything going digital. Those in the know said that every- thing was going to change. I didn't listen all that much to the talk mostly because I didn't understand  what digital was. I was still using my cassette player to play and record music. We were still renting tapes for our  VCR from Blockbuster. I had only recently purchased  my first 35mm camera a year before and to get those photos into Photoshop in the computer meant scanning them in at the local copy place where they would put them on a floppy disk for me to bring home to then transfer to my computer.
Digital was around,  but it had not yet made the impact that was about to come.

When digital technology did make its real appearance in the form of such devices as mp3 players, and a digital cameras, I ran out and bought a combination of the two made by Casio. I could take pictures  and listen to my favorite tunes at the same time.

 It looked like this:

 

It could capture an amazing-gigantic-colossal 2 megapixel image!

Life was good.

You've got to be asking at this point what this all has to do with weight loss? Relax. Eat a cookie. I'm getting there.

Okay, over the years, like many of you, I spent  more and more time at the computer.  I stopped  doing work that had me being active on a daily basis, or at least I spent more time staring at the monitor. Combine that behavior with a good amount  of TV watching and you have some of the pounds  clinging to my body.

Not all of them  however.

I gained weight because that's what my body does as a hobby. When I'm not paying attention, I'll eat because my body is telling me it's bored, and has nothing to do. When I am paying attention, my body never gets bored because I'm con- stantly instructing it through the food I eat, whatever exercise I get, and my new ability, through  use of tech-tools, to see exactly what's going on with all those calo- ries I'm using and consuming.

Nobody taught this course in school: "How to pay attention to your body, so it doesn't get bored, and fall back on its weight-gaining hobby for entertainment."

So really, I could have not gained  weight - if only I'd been  paying attention.

I wasn't paying attention, because I did not know how, and I did not have the tools.
Still, the advent of technology  in my life played some part in my weight gain. It has also played  a part  in many of the  things  I do now. My iPod is one  of the  won- ders of our age, and it would be difficult for me to get along without it.

We live in a time of wonders,  but because  we live in it, we cannot  really see how wondrous it is. Step back for a moment and realize that what I'm proposing here is nothing  short of an intimate connection  between  the technology we live in, and our bodies.
Don't be afraid. This is not the path through  which we all become  cyborgs, melding our bodies with computer interfaces and physical attachments making us into super-humans.

Really, it isn't.

However,  as an avid sci-fi reader  I have to point out that that might also be interesting and cool... but I digress.

I can't think of a single person who likes being overweight, though I do acknowledge that some people have simply decided acceptance is the best option at their disposal.

What I'm suggesting here is to use what's available to us now. Isn't that what everyone has done through  the ages; using the technology  of their times to address their needs? When printing was invented, people were able to accurately transmit knowledge from one generation to all those who came after. The technol- ogy that is now at our disposal is available to us to use in the most inventive and creative ways possible. Losing weight is but one aspect of using what is available right now.

We've all heard that there's  an epidemic  of obesity in the United States, and we've been informed that taking a pill, having surgery done, eating certain foods, or walking ten-thousand steps a day is the answer to the epidemic. As far as I can tell, those answers never addressed the real problem, or we would not continue to be in this condition.  Those answers are the equivalent of scratch-painting on the cave wall as compared with the age of print.

Today, the answer to the problem we're facing is right in the palm of our hands.

Step into the technological light, and lose the weight.

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