My Weight Regain Postmortem: Anatomy of a Relapse

You crave what you do not have; you kill and covet, but are unable to obtain it. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask. And when you do ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may squander it on your pleasures.

James 4:2-3

It was all going so well. For the first time in my life I was winning the weight game. I had shed 100-ish pounds from my frame, I achieved an all-time low with regard to obsessive food-related thinking and compulsive eating, and I was settling into a new normal. Life wasn’t just good- it was becoming exceptional. Yet I believe that God desired more for me. In an abundance of grace, He decided that I might follow in the footsteps of his Son, being made perfect through suffering.

So what went wrong? Why did I gain it all back? These are the questions I have been pondering over the past year and a half and I think I have few decent answers. I would like to submit three for your consideration, followed by the things I am doing differently now. 

Why the heck did I slip back into my old ways?

1. My weight loss slowed down, introducing an irresistible new excuse

In order to lose the weight I adopted a very specific program. It was a black and white sort of thing that very counterintuitively worked for me. You see, I my flesh loves the grey. I love to dance in the margins. I am sneak-eater extraordinaire. My eating is historically typified by pristine culinary consumption around friends and family followed by guilt-ladened excesses while alone. Having an unambiguous system of eating with clear boundary lines allowed me to rest that Loki-esque part of my psyche. But it wasn’t a ton of food to live on.

Starting at 305 pounds, my weight reduced rapidly at first. I averaged four pounds per week. After a few months that reduced to three pounds a week, then two, then one. Then half a pound. I essentially “leveled out” at 212 pounds. As the theory suggests, once my body received the message that there was now a permanent drop in calories, it became more efficient. Also there was less of me to move. I found that over time there was less and less caloric grace, meaning that any minor dietary infractions would stop that needle on the scale. I responded by dropping calories even further, likely somewhere between 1300-1400 cals per day. 

As many diet researchers and others have warned, for every diet action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The second “Yo” would be my fate if I was like the 95% of other dieters to have the scourge of regain befall me.

However a crucial point bears mentioning: I am not blaming my regain on metabolic slowdown, but rather the fresh justification that it produced in me that I had not yet learned to combat. The fact is that I became impatient. This revealed that I still viewed my new way of eating as a “diet”. I was weight-focused, rather than lifestyle-change focused.

2. There was a shift of “highest pain”

When I was at my peak weight, life was truly bleak. I felt a good deal of mental, emotional, and physical pain. Shall I count the ways? Mentally, my mind was a mess due to the constant dosing of high calorie meals. I was often grumpy because of the daily hormonal emergency my body would declare. I obsessed almost continuously about either how I was going to get my next fix of doughnuts or pancakes on the one hand, or what magic diet I would discover to get myself out of this mess on the other. I would spend literally five hours per day thinking about how to save myself from the personal hell I was living in. I poured over the research literature and read countless studies. I chased down a legion of gurus, vetting each to see if he or she truly held “the answer”.

Physically, I was simply uncomfortable. None of my clothes fit and my belt was cutting me in half from its last notch. Like a metal rope around a tree, my body was literally growing around my belt, leading to sores under my gut. My obstructive sleep apnea got markedly worse, preventing my CPAP machine from pushing air into my lungs and wrecking my sleep. My lower back seemed to be balanced on a knife’s edge. I had to shuffle around like an elderly man to prevent myself from becoming injured under my own weight. My knees hurt, my feet hurt, even my shoulders hurt from holding up so much more of me. 

The shame was palpable. One can be forgiven for missing an arm, or possessing some societal disadvantage placed on them by fate. Obesity is not in that category. If you are fat it is YOUR FAULT, at least that is the social narrative that I have absorbed. “You got yourself into this mess because of your choices” would rattle around in my head. Of course, rationally I know this is only partly true, but emotionally I feel like a worm of a man, not worthy of respect or esteem. 

Perhaps the greatest toll of this excess weight was how it affected me spiritually. If nothing else, it served as a distraction from my walk with God.

All of that is to say that as a morbidly obese man I was the recipient of a high degree of emotional, physical, and spiritual pain which produced a high degree of motivation to change. As the weight melted away, these forms of pain abated. My back stopped hurting, and so did my heart. My self-esteem was restored and I was released from the near-constant obsession with my weight. 

Yet what I have learned is this: pain is like the air in a balloon. Even if most of the air is let out, what remains still fills the balloon. Maslow knew this; he suggested that you could tell where someone was at on his hierarchy of needs by listening to what was complained about. There will always be trouble in life, but whatever represents a person’s worst troubles will tend to come to the forefront. 

When my weight was 212 lbs and I was no longer considered “obese”, the pain of overweight had all but disappeared. That allowed the “pain” of a low calorie diet and a slow-to-move scale to gain pole position as the most irritating, frustrating, and resentment-inducement aspect of my life. My restrictive diet became the “biggest problem to be solved”. My surrender to this very successful manner of eating, in the absence of the obesity-based, compliance-inducing pain, dissolved.

3. I slid into old patterns again by lying to myself

So I started cheating….just a little. Like an alcoholic, I wondered if maybe I could have just one friendly drink with friends. I chose to ignore what I knew so well about myself: that I cannot handle a social drink. The pull is just too strong.

It didn’t help that I went on a cruise (which is essentially Armageddon for any diet) during this time of weakness. Surprisingly, I did very well for the first five of the seven-day jaunt. However the temptation of an uber-hyper palatable food environment wore me down. But I want to make a point here that I believe is crucial to my overall failure, and might be helpful for others to hear: the temptation was not the failure, it was the rationalization (lie) followed by the CHOICE. Here’s what I mean. I knew I was being tempted. I knew what the truth was. “That food is not on my plan, and if I go off my plan it will lead to my relapse”. So I had to tell myself a lie to justify the choice. The main aspect of my plan was No Sugar. Ever. Sugar is the Devil to me. This is a clear boundary, which is why for the entire preceding year I ate literally NONE of it. But on that big boat, in the waters of Alaska, I told myself the following falsehood: “Look, they have sugar-free desserts. I can eat those and not be in violation of my no sugar rule!” Now, I knew this wasn’t true. I knew that eating sugar free desserts was not on plan. But in that moment I chose to ignore the truth. To look away. To dissociate and disavow. Like Eve, I chose to believe the lie and I ate. 

This led to a flurry of “what the heck” responses, as well as a profound re-awakening of that Loki part of my brain that wants to scam the system. The part that tells many lies and who tells me that I can, “have my cake and eat it too”. From there I oscillated my weight back up. I would try to get back on plan and be successful for sometimes a week, then fall off again. Soon I would find that I could only stay on for a few days before compulsively returning to my dysfunctional impulses. 

So what now is the fix? 

Here are a few new things I am now committed to. I do so not with a sense of great confidence, but with the hope that I will find greater success this time around.

First, I am going to double down on what works

I can’t argue with the fact that the program I was on worked and worked relatively well. I have never before achieved this level of success for this length of time. There was nothing wrong with the program. I simply need to go back to it, full stop.

Diets are rarely the trouble. Human nature is the problem.

Second, I am bringing my faith into this. 

I have been reluctant to link my food and weight issues to my spiritual life, but I can no longer afford to ignore the reality that I have been given this “gift” of dysregulation around food for clearly cosmic reasons. I have been intensely studying some biblical concepts that I think will help me to frame my struggle and perhaps find success. In fact, that is the purpose of this blog; to share what I have learned from the Scriptures.

What if God gave me this struggle simply to glorify him? (2 Corinthians 12:6-10)

The one action I am committing to in this regard is what I call a daily “integrity-focused quiet time”. This isn’t rocket science; that’s just a fancy way of saying that I want to spend time with God each morning at the very start of my day. I intend to spend my time praying and studying the Bible, but also being sure to commit my food to the Lord for that day and ask for his strength to help me honour my promises to him and I.

Third, deeper surrender.

I relapsed on food because I still viewed my way of eating as temporary to some degree. So I am adding a few elements to further ground myself on a daily basis and to reinforce my true choice: I am choosing to forgo sugar and flour and eat in a particular way in exchange for a reduction in weight, obsession, and self-disdain. That choice also affords me an increase in integrity, self-esteem, and health. It’s that simple. Every other thought in my head is merely a form of self manipulation that comes from an animalistic part of me.

That’s it. More tweeks coming as needed.