Seven Steps to a Successful Eating Disorder

People have been asking me how I lost 30 pounds or so this summer and went from this:

to this:

Well, here it is, the secret to my success, in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step format. You can thank me later.

Step One: Go to a family reunion at the beginning of the summer and come back so emotionally traumatized that you’ve lost seven pounds over the three-day weekend. (I think this is the only part of my formula that the reader should not try to replicate, but that’s okay because it is an inessential step.)

Step Two: Identify your chief source of empty calories and eliminate it. Cold turkey, today. Mine was Mountain Dew. Yours might be beer or wine (previous favorites, already long-gone from my diet), or Cheesey Puffs… but if you drink a lot of soda, that should be the first thing to go. If you really need your caffeine, take an Excedrin every morning. Take care of the morning’s little aches and pains and get you out the door on the bounce. Throw it in with your vitamins if you want to feel less like a junkie.

Step Two-point-one: I also eliminated caffeine this summer. Not because it was part of the weight-loss plan, just because. It turns out it was a crutch that I did not actually need, and was only doing habitually. Buh-bye.

Step Two-point-one-point-one: If you can, look at your medicine cabinet and see if there’s anything else you can cut back on, or out. For instance, I stopped taking Advil PM to help me sleep and an Excedrin in the morning to help me get up. Shortly thereafter, I went out for four hours in unfiltered, 95-degree heat and photographed a track meet and was shocked to discover I didn’t miss the caffeine a bit.

Step Two-point-two: Have an especially shitty cholesterol score. That’ll really reduce the amount of food you want to eat—that you are still allowed to eat—to almost nothing. I tried Step 2.2 and it’s worked awesomely! These days, walking through grocery store aisles is like flipping through the pages of a scrapbook of old girlfriends.

Step Three: Schedule a colonoscopy (you know you should). They’ll starve you for a week before the “procedure,” at least if the diet restrictions the prep requires are as distasteful to you as mine were to me. I quickly decided I’d rather eat nothing than the tasteless, vegetable-based slop I was allowed. This worked to my benefit by establishing a self-discipline where eating was concerned that I had previously lacked. I took that week to reassess my relationship with food, and having discovered how much less food I actually required to do all my regular stuff, couldn’t in good conscience go back to trying to fill up my self-esteem hole with groceries.

This leads directly to Step Four: Only eat when you’re hungry, and then only eat until you’re not hungry, instead of full.

Re-read Step Four until committed to memory.

You will be amazed at how little food you actually need to eat to still function and feel like a normal human being. It’s like discovering that you’ve been using super high-octane for years, when you could have been using regular unleaded all along. And driving a snazzy import with really excellent gas mileage instead of your dad’s clunky old American sedan.

Step Four, I think, is the genius Step. Once you’ve gone cold turkey and are only eating when your tummy has been grumbling for a while, prepare whatever you’re going to eat in half-portions then try not to finish that. The genius part is that I have been able to continue to eat whatever I want—within the damned guidelines of my low-cholesterol diet—and still drop weight. You’d be amazed how many sweet treats and high-calorie delicacies are low in cholesterol, and fill you up in a hurry.

But for the most part (and for the record), stick to undressed fruits and vegetables. That is to say, don’t dip your fresh strawberries in mountains of powdered sugar, nor add buckets of heavy sauce to veggies in a hopeless effort to make them palatable. Eat them raw and fresh. I lucked out and dropped my spare tonnage over the summer, when fresh fruit was abundant. You can burn off a lunch of grapes and peaches just feeling sorry for yourself that you weren’t able to have a proper meal.

Step Four-point-one: At this point, you’ll be drinking water like you used to pound back Pepsi. Or Budweiser. Or Franzia or whatever. By replacing your whatever with water, you’re not only dropping the millions of empty calories from not drinking your usual whatever, but you’re also peeing extra pounds of water away on top of it.

Step Four-point-two: Nothing to eat or drink but water between 8 p.m. and breakfast. Impossible you say? This brings us to Step Five.

Step Five: Work your self-loathing. It will provide the momentum to pull you through the particularly rough patches. Just repurpose it. Turn it from punishing your body with abundance to punishing it with denial. The result is still the same, with one exception. When you pass yourself in the mirror and risk a glance, you’ll see one less thing to hate about the person looking suspiciously back at you.

Step Six: This one also is strictly optional, but a dental emergency or two is always good for helping drop the spare pounds. Especially if you’re already committed and just looking for enablers to help your budding eating disorder along.

Taking a closer look at it, Steps Five and Six, like Step One, may be specific to me.

Moving on… I also have it on reliable authority that if exercise were added to the mix, I would probably be healthy by this point instead of just looking healthy. Still, exercise has that same sense of inevitability about it now that sobriety did back when I was drinking. I know it’s coming, I’m just not in a big rush to get to it.

But to be responsible, let’s put Exercise down as Step Seven. Hand to God, The Missus and I have been talking about getting me a stationary bike. My Spiritual Advisor recommended it, and he’s never been wrong before. He pointed out that I could watch TV while I did it, and a wealth of possibilities opened up before me. (I’ll be able to get to the fifth season of The Rockford Files after all!) Suddenly, the thought that I might get that other kind of cholesterol down and get my doctor off my back seems slightly less out of reach.

Plus, I’m going back to another family get-together for Thanksgiving. The Missus and I have agreed I will stop at 180 lbs, so I will probably have to weigh myself frequently while I am there to make sure I keep my end of the bargain up.

Like guitar playing, if I had known how satisfying this feels, I would have started years ago.

Disclaimer part: Now, this is just what has worked for me. I’m not a dietician or a doctor, just a layman relaying his personal experience and extrapolating some larger conclusions from it. I’ve lost weight in the past, but it’s never felt like a lifestyle change before.

All the same, I am not discounting the possibility that with seven steps currently identified, I may still have a few yet to discover. These things usually come in twelves, don’t they?