Happy Fativersary to Me!

Today marks the seventh anniversary of my first trip into a weight watchers meeting. For seven years, I’ve made time each Sunday, with a regularity that would be the envy of all but the most devout of churchgoers, to go step on a scale, and to sit in a room filled with people who’ve just done the same. It’s interesting to note that although I remembered this anniversary while sitting among my fellow watchers, I didn’t volunteer the information to the group. I suppose I’m a little ambivalent about the occasion, an attitude I justify with the lack of any apparent progress in that period. I weighed in, for the first time ever, at 276.8 pounds. Today, after seven years of off-again, on-again journaling, countless pushes to motivate myself, one 400 mile walk through the wilder spaces of Central California, and combined losses and gains by now tallying in the Oh-God-I’m-sure hundreds of pounds, I tipped the digital scales at 270.0 lbs. That’s 6.8 pounds in seven years. At this rate, I’ll reach my goal weight of 189 lbs just a few months before my 115th birthday. Good thing I’m eating healthy.

Seven years. A time that has seen two presidential and four general elections. I’ve been fighting to lose weight longer than the US has been fighting in Iraq. The Lakers have somehow won nine championships. I can’t do the math on that one either, but I know they win every year, and I think there were a couple of lagniappe titles in there somewhere. I’ve launched, slowed, stalled, resuscitated, stalled (again), and resurrected a halting career as a stand-up comic in that time. Relatives and friends have died; new relatives and friends have joined us. The Red Sox won the World Series, and the Saints won the Superbowl. Apocalyptic fantasies of Y2K, now defunct, have given way to even more paranoid delusions based on urban legends about the Mayan calendar. The Earth is still warming. Republicans are still denying it. OK, maybe some things are still the same.

The point I’m trying to make here is that a rather large amount of time seems to have slipped by without my notice, weight watcher-wise. I mean, if you’d asked 2003 me what he expected of this whole campaign for fitness, I’m not sure what he’d have told you. But one thing of which I’m certain is that he didn’t imagine himself, the better part of a decade later, still just trying to fight the good fight, still just trying to get the weight off for good. I have not succeeded in this campaign, and by the same token, I have not failed. At least insofar as I still attend the meetings, still consider myself someone who is "losing weight."

The problem is that after a certain amount of time, and I'm not exactly sure what amount that is, I began to have a problem defining myself as one who is in the pursuit of weight loss. It began to ring somehow false; it took on a hollow tone and I frankly stopped believing it myself. It might be interesting to note that it was around this same time when I began to have the same feeling every time anybody asked me "what do you do?" and I replied with "I'm a comic." The same part of me that incredulously rejects the term "losing weight" without any actual weight loss seems to balk at "being a comic" without any actual comedy shows. I bring it up only because I feel that this part of my personality is very near to, if not the top dead center of, the core of my problems in the first place.

See, everybody has a part of them that says "you can't do that." That voice, in my head, is broadcasting from a PA system on top of a very tall mountain. On a loop. In five languages. And since this message is on blast, as it were, for 24 hours per day, it has changed some very basic aspects of my point of view. For example; one could view the seventh anniversary of a struggle to lose weight as a hugely positive mark on the calendar, a testimony to endurance and staying power. But in my internal world, warped as it is by the constant, blaring warnings of inadequacy and its attendant risk of failure, each day that passes without significant weight loss just solidifies the experiential case against my chances at ever actually succeeding. "Look, dude, if you were gonna lose weight, you'd have done it by now. So can we please just stop this tired act and go get a pizza?"

Oh yeah, that's the other super-awesome part of that voice(why, oh why, is there no sarcasm font? There should be a sarcasm font. Italics are just too ambiguous): It totally pretends to be on my side. An ally, after all, only looking to soothe, to comfort. Insidious little bugger, if ever there was one. Incidentally, this tactic also works wonders when contemplating the consumption of whiskey, cigarettes, and prescription benzodiazepines. Not to mention the spending of time playing playstation and jerking it to internet porn. To be fair, this is a part of me that does know how to have a good time.

What it knows how to do better than just about anything else, though, is keep me from changing a thing. This voice, this all-too-prominent part of my personality is like that smoke monster from Lost, and it's only mission is to keep me from leaving Fat Island.

It begs a few questions, not the least interesting of which is this: why? I mean, this voice is me, basically. I invented him. He has got to serve some kind of useful purpose, right? Otherwise why would I have ever gone to the trouble of constructing this island, and hiring on this smoke monster, in the first goddam place? The answer isn't simple. I think it has something to do with my mother. Well, at least, my psychoanalyst has submitted that it has something to do with my mother. Then again, if you're spending time and money seeing a psychoanalyst and he doesn't bring up your mom, you're probably wasting both. As luck would have it though, it's not a bad suggestion, and it's worth a quick exploration.

See, I've known pretty much forever that my mom substitutes food for love, warmth, and comfort. I even used to joke, in an unintentionally ironic foreshadow of my adult problems, that my mom is the root cause of all fatness. But the facts speak plainly here. First of all, I was born, if I recall correctly, almost a full two months before I was supposed to be. In 1979, this represented more of a challenge to the medical community than I'm told it does today. Like, a challenge on the order of magnitude of "no, you can't hold him, ma'am, and we'd strongly advise you not to take any pictures, 'cause it'll just be too sad..." kind of a problem. I'm told that I was on life support, and that it was a bit on the touch and go side for a while. All of which, you might imagine, was enormously traumatic not just to my freshly post-uterine little brain, but to that of my already anxious and possibly clinically depressed mom. So what does a mom like mine do for a kid who was born weighing just a tad less than a bag of flour? She feeds him. If he's eating, then he's hungry. If he's hungry, then he's growing. If he's growing, then he's moving farther from dying. So feed him. And feed him some more. If he cries? Cookies work well. Throws a fit? He really likes spaghetti-os. Oh dear, it seems he's getting a little...husky.

So maybe this voice, gentle and comforting as it is violently oppressive and suffocating, is my mom's. Not really hers, mind you, but the version of her voice that was always so racked with the fear of losing it, of losing a kid, of just plain losing. It's a warming thought that this influence, as self destructive as it may have been for so many long years, is in fact nothing more than a misguided attempt to share motherly love and affection. If this voice, so filled with fear and despondent loneliness and so misunderstood that it has to blanket everything around it in sadness and defeat, is coming from a place of love, then I can stop feeling so angry at it. I can give up another quest, now much older than seven years, to destroy or drown it. I can learn to live with it, work around it, maybe even love and think fondly of it.

Because, you see, there is another part of me that needs to be considered. After all, the reason the doctors were so sure that I was an almost lost cause on my first day is just that so many like me had been born, only to spend a few anguished moments here before expiring, life support notwithstanding. Hooked to the same machines, and watched over by the same trained experts in the thwarting of death, many had nonetheless not survived their first week on this odd little planet. But I did. My heart, with a little help from a warm damp washcloth patted gently on my tiny chest, refused to stop beating. For a long time, I've entertained the depressing notion that I'm only here today because of those machines, that perhaps the natural order of the universe, if left un-f*cked with by the hand of medical science, dictates that I shouldn't exist at all. It plays nicely as an accompaniment to a narrative of self defeat. But it wasn't the machines that kept me around. If it were, then there would have been no need for such morbid precautions as keeping me from my mother's arms, of forbidding photographs.

No, the reason I'm still here is because there's a part of me that just refuses to die. This part of me doesn't have a loudspeaker, and most of the time you can hardly hear his voice. But he's there, patiently walking this path with me, refusing to let go. It is to this voice I now must appeal. This is the child who needs to be nurtured, who needs to hear as many times as it can be said how amazing, and how strong, of a person he really is. If I am to succeed, at weight loss or at anything else in my life, it will be this guy standing behind me, cheering me quietly onward.

This guy will not be defeated, no matter how loudly he is told to. This guy will get back up each and every time he gets knocked into the dirt by rejection, self loathing, booze, donuts, shame, and/or any combination thereof. This guy has showed up, without much to show for it on paper, to almost every weight watchers meeting for the last seven years. And if seven years seems like a long time, just remember that this guy has been showing up every day, without anybody even asking him to, for more than 31 years now.

By now, I realize that this guy, and I alongside, are fighting for more than just a smaller pair of pants. In a real sense, he’s fighting for my life. And this is not just a struggle to end obesity, which will if left unchecked kill me of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. etc. This is about the time in between now and my own personal expiration date. It’s about recognizing that I get to choose how I spend that time, and that I get to write the story from here on, not just read it a day after it happens.

In alcoholics anonymous, they tell the, uh, new arrivals, to pray every day for a month. I asked somebody who has been there what one is to do in the absence of a conveniently placed man-in-the-sky fantasy, and she replied that maybe you don’t have to pray to a god every day, that maybe you just pray to the best version of yourself; offer up a thought of gratitude, and ask help in getting through one more day of sobriety. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so different in the life of a person trying to lose this weight, and to keep it lost. And if I am to offer up a prayer, I offer it to that brave little guy in my head, the one whose heart beats in defiance of all the scary, dangerous hurdles that come his way, no matter what.

Thank you, so very much, for sticking with me these last seven years. I’m sorry you haven’t gotten more press. You deserve all that anyone can give, and more. Please, walk with me through each day, and help me fight this fight. I know you’re going to do it even if I don’t ask you, but may it strengthen my resolve to know you are there.

Amen.