I have what might be considered a strange- no, not strange more like intense- no, I guess you would have to call it a monomaniacal interest with before and after weight loss stories. There is something just so magical about the metamorphose of a gelatinous blob to the trim and slim. Maybe I’m a sucker for happy endings or maybe I am just fascinated with tangible visual proof of human self-improvement. I have spent hours visiting sites like ediets.com and slimfast.com, pouring over the pictures and reading the stories of the nouveauslim. When I was fat I would fantasize about being on the Oprah Winfrey show smiling widely as the audience would “ooh” and “aah” at my unprecedented weight loss. I remember trying to imagine what it would be like to look down and actually be able to see my own feet. Although I enjoy the stories of these fat warriors, I think it is the before and after pictures that I find the most interesting as I am captivated by the sharp dichotomy from bad to good. As I voyeuristically examined these photographs I wondered what fueled their achievement, what was the catalyst of change? In my own life I can think of a few hints that the cosmos was sending to tell me, “Charlie, you may need to lose some weight.”

It was Wednesday morning, nine A.M. and I sat and listened intently about our company’s plans to crush our competition during our weekly marketing meeting. But midway through third quarter-projected earnings, my focus is stolen by a bizarre event.
Inside my head, I feel and hear a buzzing, beeping sound. The sound was not a steady sound, but rose and fell inside my head, with Morse code precision. I dropped my pencil on the table, as I searched for answers to this strange event. As I slowly began to regain composure, I started to concentrate on possible causation. What made this incident so strange was the staccato telephone ring cycle, which was machine-like in its rhythm.

Okay, let’s explore possible reasons: The secret world government implanted a tracking device in my head last night, while I slept. No, too exotic. Perhaps a strange medical condition or some unexplained phenomenon like the Taos hum. My strategy was to log onto WebMD after the meeting and find out, through a symptom search, what would cause such a condition. Could this be the latest virus du jour? But before I could fully think through that line of logic, I felt a buzzing near my side as well. I leaned over and grabbed my love handles, with both hands, and pulled up my flap of skin, my pager blurted out in the meeting room, louder than usual. It was almost as if it was gasping for air. I quickly turned the pager off, and realized that the beep, beep, beep, sound in my head, was my pager’s “beep” traveling through my protoplasm, up to my inner ear. You know, for a moment, I was amused by the event that just took place and was captivated by the science of how sound waves travel through fat. But my amusement was short lived. I snapped back to reality, and said loudly to myself “I’m fat.” I think many formerly fat individuals experience some type of epiphany that screams the very same message to them. Maybe theirs wasn’t as extravagant as mine, but the world does tend to let us know when something is wrong if only we’d just listen. If you are buying two airline tickets- one per butt cheek- then it’s clear that the universe is shouting. Unfortunately, many seem clueless about their situation and it’s only after a catastrophic medical problem that they take action. And often it is too little too late.

Okay, so I’m fat, now what? I really haven’t done much lately that would be congruent with weight loss or general fitness, although I have developed the lung capacity of a Polynesian pearl diver, as every time I went to tie my shoe, I was able to tie both shoes in a single breath. But somehow I felt that didn’t count.

What is interesting is that I am an identical twin. My brother is of normal weight. I think what was happening was that I would reference him as a kind of three-dimensional mirror. I would figure that yeah, I look pretty much like him and wouldn’t concern myself about my weight. He on the other hand would look at me and think, “Man I am getting fat, better do something.” The result: I was getting bigger he was getting smaller. There’s something for the study of identical twins and the human behavior annals.

I’ve read a variety of diet and exercise programs that really, in my opinion, miss the mark. Recommendations about physical fitness include meaningless endeavors, like “park your car further out when shopping”, “take stairs instead of escalators”, or “slip on your running shoes on your lunch break and take ten brisk laps around your office complex.” Oh, what a wonderful world it would be! Unfortunately, this Pollyanna fitness advice gravely misses the point.

I had learned early on that a stroll around the block was not what my body was asking for. The daily exercise model of twenty minutes of fitness, three days a week, was recently expanded to forty-five minutes to an hour, five days per week. My schedule is one hour, six days a week.

Living in the mountains, and lucky enough to live at the base of a mountain trail, I was endowed with the perfect, natural stair climber, which is two miles up, and two miles down. Unlike treadmills, and other exercise fitness equipment that is typically used until one inevitably tires, my program meant that I had to get to one point and touch it, and walk back. And without completing the program, I was not getting home. I also have never been one for crowds. Something about exercise seems somewhat personal and private to me. Being inside a gym, with my gut flopping in the breeze, is a strange juxtaposition to the twenty-two-year-old fitness spokesmodel that’s watching me. The blue birds and the squirrels care not about my robust presence.

When I started my program, I remember thumbing through outdoor magazines and seeing countless hikers standing at a hilltop with their trekking poles. I remember thinking, “Man, that’s for me.” There’s something almost regal about the hiker’s pose with the hiking poles, like two magical scepters that just seem to represent power. I read an article in a fitness magazine that suggested that the use of trekking poles could increase my workout by twenty to fifty percent. Further, the Leki sales brochure cites a medical study that states that during an eight hour hike the poles remove 250 tons of accumulated stress from your knees and lower back I was sold. After a quick trip to the local outfitter, I was in possession of my Leki Super Makalu Trekking poles, with spring suspension, to take the jarring off my arms. In the very moment in which I grasped the comfortable ergonomic laminated cork handles in my hands, I knew that I was upstream of a major life shift. The day I started my walking program, I wrote a note to myself, six months in the future. I was weighing in a little over two-hundred-and-seventy pounds, and I picked a date exactly six months later, and wrote this note to myself:

Dear Charlie,

I hope you enjoyed the fifty pound weight loss. Keep up the good work, and
pass it down to your future Charlie.

Best regards,
Charlie

I never really backtracked from that six-month period to determine if that was a reasonable amount of weight loss, based on diet and exercise plans, but I wholly believed that I could make it happen. I was tired of being fat and I wasn’t going to take it; I declared war on my obesity.

In my small community, I was probably the only one in town that actually used the trekking poles. These were a sort of new and emerging trend for hiking and fitness walking. So I was often greeted with questions like, “Are you getting ready for the ski season?” “Did you hurt your leg?” Despite the way I may have looked in those early days, the poles felt right, and they allowed me to shift my efforts from my legs to my arms. Apart from my poles functionality as a fitness device, they also became great tools for picking at unidentified objects on the trail as well as fending off the occasional stray dog.

My legs, like many heavy men, weren't necessarily my problem; after all they had the formidable task of toting around my rotund body. The poles allowed me to work my upper body, my chest, and arms, and to walk the terrain like a quadruped. Some days I am amazed by the accuracy and finesse I possess with my poles. I can impale a pinecone with my stick’s carbide tip and launch it across the trail and hit my target nearly every time. My poles have become an extension of my arms. I couldn’t even begin to calculate the number of face-plants my poles have saved me from, likely preventing injuries that would have kept me off the trail for days. One morning, like the Crocodile Hunter, I gently picked up a California King snake with my stick for closer inspection, and then released it carefully back to terra firma. It’s difficult for me to describe and really understand how the poles have become such an important part of my fitness quest, but indeed they have

For those following behind me, I would offer up the following advice: Identify a few problem foods in your diet. For me it was cheese and butter, as I’m a vegetarian, I really had a pretty good diet, overall. But everybody has a few problem foods, and those should just simply be eliminated. I know most recommendations come in the form of moderation, but dieting presents a very unique challenge. If you're an alcoholic, you can stop drinking alcohol. Those with substance abuse are not given the recommendation to cut back on drugs and alcohol, but rather to stop. Unfortunately, we need sustenance to survive and can't stop. We have to do it in moderation, and moderation is tough. So I say, stop the problem foods. I no longer eat cheese. That represents at least one-third of my total calories. Also, avoid the diet of the day. The reason you're fat isn’t because you haven’t been told about the latest diet, where you consume tons of protein or tons of carbohydrates. It’s about balance. Eat less food, eliminate problem foods, and eat a balanced diet. In regards to fitness, as I mentioned earlier, the belief that parking your car out a little further, working in the garden, and strolls around the corporate complex, as a true fitness plan is simply false. I climb up my mountain, each day, with great vigor, which induces a targeted heart rate and lots of sweat. To believe that something less is needed for weight loss and general fitness, is counter to the agrarian rule that dictates effort before harvest. There are no short cuts. There are no rubs, herbs, magic potions, or magic diets. It’s all about dedication and consistency. I love it when people see me in town and say, “My God, I can't believe how much weight you’ve lost. How did you do it?” I look at their faces and see how they change with great expectation as they wait for me to deliver the name of the latest herbal nostrum or slimerizer exercise gadget. But no magic secrets cross my lips, I merely say eat less, eat healthy, and get out and exercise.

Every morning, after my cup of coffee, I trek up my mountain, now nicknamed Mt. Killson for its challenging grade. I remember in July, opening my day planner, and seeing the words that I had written to myself six months prior. That morning during my weigh-in, I discovered that I was only one pound away from my weight loss goal. I felt almost as if I had time traveled, I had goose bumps when I read my note to myself from myself. I had made it! I had lost the fifty pounds, and more weight would come off later. It’s rare to find me leaving for my walk without my trusted poles, which have been my fitness partners and seen me through good and bad days of exercise, and I have logged over two thousand miles on the poles to date. In fact this article was dictated on my morning hike. The Killson trail is riddled with thousands of pockmarks in the dirt that evidence my long fitness journey with my poles. These small divots in the dirt are my new footprints as I now walk this earth as a quadruped lighter, healthier and forever changed.