Wei Wu Weight Loss

Okay, this has gotten embarassing. It's like the episode of Friends when Phoebe first tries to visit her father, and she sits there in the front seat of the cab, with Joey and Chandler encouraging her from the back, and she keeps saying, "Okay, so here I go. I'm going. Here I go." And yet she doesn't budge.

That's like me and my recent weight loss attempts. Bold proclamations followed by...nothing. My weight has continued to hover in the 260-270 range.

Still obese.

But now I am changing my tact. The Taoists have a phrase, wei wu wei, which means doing without doing. This is most often taken to mean doing without striving or fretting or over-thinking. In martial arts, it is like the concept of no-mind. Letting your subconscious or muscle memory or whatever do the moves, while your mind remains essentially at peace.

And so that's my new plan: have no plan. Just get healthy.

Not sure how engaging this will be in terms of blog entries. We'll see. You can always comment to let me know.

Sine Qua Non: Exericise (without which, it ain't happening)

I am certain -- as certain as one can be without examining the actual DNA -- that I have the fat gene. This is the little piece of code in one's DNA that predisposes one to packing on the pounds. This is why some people are happy with little portions of healthy food, while others of us crave piles of pasta and sacks of Big Macs. This is why some people eat all they want and stay thin as a rail, which others of us look the wrong way at a piece of cake and put on a pound.

This fat gene, called the FTO gene or more affectionately the "Fatso" gene, is on the 16th chromosome. This explains why I have always harbored a secret dislike of 16 (through not nearly as much as I dislike 43 and his dad, 41).

But just when you thought all was lost, the Amish come to the rescue. Researchers discovered that, among Amish men and women, those who were very physically active were able to circumvent the negative impact of the Fatso gene. Exercise, therefore, is the first number of the combination lock, the secret ingredient -- the sine qua non, that without which it ain't happening. (This is the sort of losey-goosey translation that would make my Latin teachers at Choate cringe and suggest I try Spanish or French.)

So my first step is to take my first step. Walk, that is. Rather than worry too much about what I eat, I am going to focus all my effort on establishing the habit of getting regular exercise. At first, this will be walking a lot. At least once a day for 20 minutes. We'll see where we go from there.

My Goal: Become Overweight

Body Mass Index (BMI) was invented so people of different heights could compare there relative fatness...I mean fitness...in some meaningful way. Somehow, some scientist somewhere said, "What if we take a person's weight in kilograms and divide it by the square of his or her height in meters?" (An obvious solution....) And so BMI was born. To convert that crazy formula to English measurements (i.e., to use pounds and inches), you just have to multiply the whole crazy mess by 705. In other words, here's the formula:

BMI = Weight (lbs.) / Height (in.)2 x 705

So, according to BMI, I am currently Obese. At 280, my highest weight and the point from which I began this recent weight loss, I had a BMI of 37. As you can see from the chart above, that put me at the high side of Obese. Eleven more pounds, and I would have been categorized as Morbidly Obese. Yikes.

Now, at 253, I have a BMI of 34 and I am now officially closer to being merely Overweight. To actually attain my goal of being merely Overweight, I'd have to weight 217. That means losing 36 more pounds.

But at 217, I feel and look pretty damned good, to tell the truth. To get down to Normal, or 187 pounds, would put me at a weight I haven't seen since 1982.

Let's just work on getting down to Overweight. We'll see where we go from there.