Pudgy Me 14: Nutrition

Changing my diet only made sense when nothing else made sense. As much as I wanted to lower my weight, I had reached a point where it rose and fell like waves in a rolling sea.  It was my wife, Karen, who threw me a life preserver and my daughter, Helen, who provided the rationale behind my drowning: suddenly it all made sense; I simply needed to learn to swim.

A few weeks back, Karen got it into her head to start a new diet based on what her co-workers were doing.  (Not another diet!)  This time Karen announced she would avoid all bad carbohydrates, like white rice, bread, and processed foods, and she would focus instead on eating fruits, vegetables, and healthy “carbs,” like brown rice, quinoa (what the hell is that?), and barley.  From now on, she would eat sweet potatoes rather than baked potatoes – especially, sweet potato fries versus French fries.  

Unrefined carbohydrates, she told me, are good for you, and, just to be clear…

"No French fries at all are allowed on this plan," she said.  

For me, though, I swear, no matter what she thought, this would not be a problem. 

I gave up French fries as part of a New Year’s resolution.  In fact, now that I think about it, it all started with French fries.  A few years back, as the ball dropped, I announced I would stop eating fries, like at McDonalds.  Everyone laughed, as if the thought of never eating a French fry was incomprehensible.

Yet, to this day, in spite of what my wife thinks, I am a walking “no fry zone.”

Another year I gave up potato chips, and this past year I freed myself from butter and table salt.  (Karen refused to join me on this, and I know she sneaks both butter and table salt into her culinary concoctions, much to my chagrin.)

Wait a minute.  One year, in fact, I gave up beer.

What a disaster that was!  

Karen thought I was turning into a wino.  On top of that, she said, when I wasn’t chugging down cheap bottles of wine, I was consuming large quantities of scotch.  Karen argued finally, when she saw I had researched how to make moonshine, that if I wanted to continue to indulge, beer was infinitely better than federal agents showing up at our door with sledge hammers and hound dogs. 

Jeez, dear, what's a little white lightning among friends...  

Though most my New Year’s resolutions were good nutritional choices, surprisingly, none of them resulted in my losing any actual weight.  It wasn’t until I started exercising that first summer my daughter came home from college that I saw my weight drop. 

My conclusion: NUTRITION was for the birds.

It was only when Karen and I finally went to the gym on a regular basis that we lost weight.  In fact, we prided ourselves on not being on a diet.  Fuck NUTRITION.  We glorified in the realization we could eat like pigs as long as we joined in the aerobics classes at night. 

When my weight-loss slowed after a year, I simply upped the ante by increasing the difficulty or length of the exercises. 

Obviously, running helped. 

This worked until the last couple of months.  My body had adapted thoroughly to my lifestyle and my caloric intake offset the variety of nightly exercises I engaged in at the gym.  

"Now, Motherfucker, what are you going to do?" I heard my body whisper.    

Okay, that's it.  However, when I tried to reduce my overall calorie consumption to continue to lose weight, my body rebelled.  I found myself in countless late-night, binge-induced, eating sessions.  I would be watching horrified but unable to stop myself. 

It couldn’t be simply calories in versus calories out.  Something was wrong.

This left only one thing to consider: ugh, my NUTRITION. 

Eighth grade health class, I knew it would come back to this.  Coach Asshole's health class would haunt me forever.  Why did I nearly flunk that class?  Fucking Coach Asshole was a terrible teacher and not much of a football coach either.  Besides, who gave a rat’s-ass about the digestive system and the food pyramid when the reproductive system, with its cool illustrations, was so much more interesting!

Jeez... 

Karen said her new diet was not so much a “diet” as a lifestyle choice involving improved NUTRITION.  If I wanted to lose weight, I should join her. 

As part of the plan, in addition to changing the foods she would eat, she would sleep more, exercise daily, track the volume of water she drank, and maintain a diary focusing on positive thoughts.

Hmmm...

Helen jumped on this idea, when Karen explained it to her over the phone, and right away agreed to join her mother, even though she was living in a dorm in Chicago, never slept, had no time to exercise, and almost no access to a kitchen. 

Yet, together, they said they would support each other… 

"Hell no," I said when they asked me if I would join them.  The Chicago Marathon was coming and I needed to keep from morphing into the macadam on a muscular street in the middle of no where Chicago -- didn't Carl Sandberg call the city the hog butcher of the world?  I can't afford to be someone's sausage.  Or worse, what if I succumbed on the Magnificent Mile.  (How embarrassing!) I could see me, with my last breath, saying, "Take me to the Nike store.  Let me traverse my final journey in Nike's new, dry-fit, running apparel." 

Karen suggested, her plan, instead, would help me stay alive and give me a positive goal.

I didn't know about staying alive, but I had plenty of positive goals:  1) don’t die in Chicago, wait until I get home to the privacy of my own bathroom, 2) don’t have a stroke or brain aneurism drinking gallons of Gatorade or sucking packets of goo during the run, 3) remember my name or old what’s her name, my wife, if ever I am lying spread eagle over a manhole cover, 4) point a sticky finger to the back of my health card chained around my pudgy-middle: "resuscitate me with beer, plenty of beer, otherwise cheap wine or good scotch."     

Still, even though I was not participating in the challenge, in our house, the food in our pantry and refrigerator changed following Karen’s new lifestyle choice, and suddenly I was eating tons of brown rice and quinoa (what the hell is that?) and lots of broccoli and green beans.

I asked Shaun, my old friend at the gym and a former European mountain climber (until he had a heart attack sitting around at home), if he had ever heard of this “healthy carb” plan.  He just rolled his eyes and said if I was going to die running a marathon, why did it matter.  “Avoid oil,” he added.  “Peanut butter is clogging your arteries.”

Jeez, none of this made sense and yet it all made sense.  

That’s where Helen kicked in from college with a video she wanted me to watch.  It said sugar was the hidden gorilla in the closet, the poison in our diet; sugar was making us all obese and leading us down the road to diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, and all sorts of other problems.

Clearly I had figured out that French fries, potato chips, soy sauce, and table salt were horrible, and Shaun had warned me about the evils of “oil” and god’s own peanut butter, but I had never given “sugar” much of a thought.

I didn’t even know what Karen referred to when she mentioned the different types of sugar highlighted in the video.  I thought she was talking about granulated, brown, and confectionary.   Why would any of these be a problem?

I had a lot to learn. 

According to Helen's video, I was eating a ton of sugar that manufacturers added to my foods and, especially, in my carbohydrate choices.  AND not just any old sugar either, but fructose as opposed to glucose.  Fructose from corn versus glucose from sugar cane. 

Fucking high fructose corn syrup was invented in some laboratory in the 1980s and now was being dumped into everything we eat because it was cheaper than glucose and we could eat more of whatever it was in without feeling "full."

We are pigs, just like the big, black boars growing up on the farm. My brother and I would wind striped-down ears of corn into the electric fence surrounding their pen and watch the boars’ coarse hair stand on end when they tried to eat it. 

Somehow the electric fence is now surrounding us and a ton of corn is being dumped into our system without us even being aware of it. 

We are being fattened up for the slaughter. 

Our obesity -- not just Karen and me, but as a country -- was the direct result of fructose introduced into our foods, fiber removed from our diet to keep food on the shelf longer, and the push by the American Heart Association back in the 1990s for us to be on a low-fat/high “carb” diet to reduce the risk of heart attacks.  

The impact was a disaster in terms of our national health.

A perfect storm in which I lived unknowingly smack in the center of the “eye,” which happened, as it turns out, to be right dead center in the middle of my kitchen. 

Rather than Thor, I was now the new version of Captain America, Captain America for the 21^st Century: obese and stuck to my couch, stuffed full of electrified corn.

The realization was shocking. 

Through Karen's new plan, over the last couple of weeks, when we cut out the foods from our diet that included sugar or was processed with fructose, or other strange chemical names for sugar, once again, I saw my weight drop. 

Most importantly the late night binges stopped, my cravings came to an end.

In truth, I felt I finally had gotten a handle on my nutrition. 

Perhaps things were coming together after all for my marathon.  Perhaps I could survive this horrible 26-mile ordeal and live to see another day.  Perhaps Shaun was wrong, I wouldn’t be sucking sewer water in Chicago with the Angel of Death pointing the way.

Yet, in the back of my mind, once again, I could hear Coach Fucking Asshole from eighth grade.  We are standing mano-a-mano in the school hallway after I had been kicked out of his class.  “Giles,’ he says smacking my chest, “You are a total fuck-up, your brother was a fuck-up, and you’ll always be a fuck-up.  At least your bother was man enough to go to Viet Nam.  What did you do? – You squirmy, panzy-ass!  Forget your wife and daughter, forget fructose, run your stupid marathon.  You’ll be dead by mile ten because that’s what happens to fuck-ups like you.  Then, you little pig, what smart-ass comment will you make back in my class?  Then what will you say to your twerpy, little friends sitting in the back of my class?”   

Jeez, that’s encouraging.  Thanks, Coach, for lending a hand.  Eat some corn.  See you in hell.  

****

Pudgy Me 13: Racing, Part 2

Immediately after my “ship-listing” 10K in November, 2012, I determined I would run religiously every Sunday until reaching the half-marathon I had set as a goal for myself the following spring, keeping my eye squarely on the race date coming up in March, while building up distance and, as always, lowering my weight.  This time, I was determined that by race-day I would be ready.  Bring on the rent-a-mountains — I would be more than ready.   

My training that winter, in fact, seemed like out of a storybook.  Indeed, it was a period of enchantment...

When I ran in the forest, cute little birds migrating south would land on my sweat-stained shoulder and chirp silvery songs of encouragement.  Spunky little squirrels would keep pace, offering me the very nuts they had tirelessly collected and stored for winter, and agile doe racing ahead, carved a sure path through the underbrush for me to follow. 

Even on the paved roads, the magic shimmered around me as country folk came out of their warm huts and offer words of encouragement:

“Onward, oh-not-so-young, Pudgy One,” was their chant.

If I ran in snow, these simple-minded, gentle villagers would come forward and shovel the road in front of me.  If I stumbled, they would lift me above their thread-worn but colorful garments, singing “Hosanna!  Hosanna!”   

In sleet, these same devoted rustics would offer me their guest towels, or even run beside me with their golf umbrellas, handing me their Nestle, home-baked cookies to settle my stomach or a cup of warm, honey-laced tea to soothe my parched throat. 

Yes, it was a time of magic and all manner of beast and men alike were into it. 

Not like before…

Not like when I was training for the 10K back in the previous spring.  When drivers slowed down and honked their horns in irritation, like somehow my “fat-ness” interfered with their unbridled access to the street.  Like somehow I needed flagmen in orange plastic vests to work the traffic around me. 

When irritated suburbanites in bulging bathrobes threw their trash at me, thinking I oozed bad, caloric karma.  Or when they opened their screen doors and set their ravenous rat terriers on me, believing, given my pace, I must be a peeping-tom or, given my speed, they needed to teach me a lesson about stalking…

Rather, training throughout the winter, all things were beautiful. 

Even the racing gods were kind.  When it snowed, the snow tasted of fresh marshmallow.  When it rained, the rain was light and of a golden ale that boosted my energy and renewed my strength for the run.  When the wind blew, it was always at my back, pushing me gently forward, sighing “Maria” in the cool air.

  

Even on cloudy days, the sun always broke through and directed an inspirational ray of glittering light just before me, illuminating the way even when darkness and creatures of evil grabbed at me from all sides, trying their best to make me give up, or walk, or turn off the chosen path. 

But I never deviated that winter and, in fact, marked my progress in a special, heavenly journal that many called a wall calendar, but I called it my “golden book,” which I kept with a magnet on the refrigerator door. 

It was a time of miracles, physically and spiritually. 

I literally had gone out into the proverbial desert and forty days later returned in running-shape and close to sainthood, if not martyrdom.  

Karen could see it, I had lost another ten pounds, more than sixty total; she could see in my calm demeanor, hear it in my soft speech – when I referred to her, my sentences started with “Oh, my blessed child…”

Yes, I wouldn’t be deterred, not this time.

In addition to my heavenly runs on Sundays, I ran on a treadmill at the health and fitness center once a week and between the two training sessions, Sunday and Wednesday, soon was achieving distances of ten miles, twelve miles, fourteen miles. 

My pace, in turn, was speeding up.  I was getting stronger and faster. 

I was becoming the Thor I was meant to be: a comic book legend fully encapsulated in my body!

And like I observed at the 10K, I learned to carry a belt with containers of Gatorade electrolyte juice and chocolate gel packs, and I practiced when to drink, when to eat, and when to stay fast.   

I learned to wear band aids to keep my nipples from bleeding and trim my toenails to stop them from cutting into my toes and soaking my socks and shoes in blood.    

I even added an app to my phone that tracked my mileage with a small GPS.  Within the app I learned to long for the feminine voice that gave me my mileage.  She spoke to me ever so succinctly through my earphones, but with a lilting voice of love.

“Where are you?” I would ask. 

Her light, yet distinct response gave nothing away: “Time: eight minutes and fifty-four seconds.” 

Just the same, I knew she needed me.

“We must meet.”  I would reply, trembling, drenched in sweat.  I could tell, it was all she could do to avoid me, to ignore my urgency for intimacy. 

“Pace: seven minutes and forty-three seconds,” I would hear her retort in my ear.

“We can’t go on like this,” I would implore.  “You must let me be with you!” 

But she was adamant.  “Split pace: eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds.”

Oh, she was cold, so impartial, and yet, on those lonely roads, I knew as long as I ran, she would return time-after-time and whisper sweet mileage in my ear. 

In late January I even joined a suburban kickboxing gym to satisfy my ongoing dementia, though, ostensibly, I said to myself, to strengthen my upper body and flexibility. 

With my instructor, Albert from Hell, immediately hating me, I found I had muscles I never knew existed.  (What?  Who are you?  Where did you come from?)  Albert refused ever, ever, ever to cut me slack and only once in a while was slack asked.   

By March, the fairy tale had reached its peak, and Thor, the warrior stood ready.  Bring on the half-marathon monster if you dare!

Only… a week before the race… reality, like a cold slap to the face, woke me up.

I realized in reading the race material, rather than the half-marathon starting at noon, a sensible time for sensible runners, and, it so happens, the time I train on Sundays, some wicked cretin scheduled the event to start precisely at 7 AM. 

What?  In mid-March?  What outdoor race starts at 7AM? 

Only polar bears would be up at 7 AM.  Only minks and Eskimos going ice fishing on snowmobiles would be up before the sun in mid-March at 7 AM.      

Certainly not me, not anyone I knew, and not anyone who wasn’t from Siberia.

Not only would it be absolutely frigid outside, but it would be totally dark too.  I would need airport flashlights attached to my earphones to see anything at all in front of me! 

And I would be barely awake and not at all ready to run a 13-mile-course.  Not in mid-March!  Not in June either!  Not ever! 

Not when it was the perfect time to lie on a soft couch, snuggled under a warm blanket, watching chirpy telecasts of Sports Center.

Pudge or no pudge, in mid-March I wouldn’t – I couldn’t be going anywhere that early.

Why do I constantly do these things to myself?

I can remember hearing my wife in the shower at 5:30 AM that Sunday – she, at least, had an excuse: her job required her to work that weekend; she would never knowingly get up before dawn to participate in or even watch a sporting event. 

Only in the coal mines and hospitals in the middle of nowhere would you knowingly get up that early. 

Lucky her, I thought!  She gets to go to work where there is light and heat and, most importantly, coffee.

I was heading out the door with all my stuff: my belt, my gel packs, my band aids, my iPhone, and my app with the ever-present voice of my mileage-muffin.  Yet instead of feeling positive, I was thinking:  “This is not good.  This is not good at all.”

Too dark.   Too cold.  Too tired.  Too little coffee.  Too long a run!

Besides, I couldn’t decide what to wear to go out into that dark, pre-dawn hour.   

So I stayed with what got me through all of December, all of January, and all of February:  I dressed for winter. 

However…

Once in the pre-race area, I knew immediately something was wrong.  I saw it all around me: I was the only runner wearing a Norwegian parka with a blizzard fur-lined hood.

I was the only one with two layers of thermal LL Bean long johns. 

I was the only one in thick purple leggings, orange ski mittens, snowshoes strapped on my back, and a woolen red hat.  

I was the only one who looked like a creamsicle!

Did I mention how early warm weather comes to the Piedmont in North Carolina? 

Everyone else was in t-shirts and shorts.  Some people had on sweatshirts, but no one was wearing their one-and-only, special-designed, Norwegian-fucking-parka.

In the crowd someone in a sleeve-less tee asked me if I was cold. 

I looked at him incomprehensibly. 

“No speak, English.” I muttered, mother-fucker, “I … from Siberia.”  

If I was the only one accurately to prepare with the right clothes, who, then, would have the last laugh? 

On the other hand… 

When the starting horn blasted into the pre-dawn sky and the fleet-footed runners took off and left me behind, it was clear, with all of my layers of clothing to protect me, I was totally discombobulated. 

On top of it all, I couldn’t get my snowshoes to function properly. 

Several miles into the race, I realized I was in serious trouble.

I was unbearably hot, like close-to-blowing-my-top hot, like I was running through Hades hot.  My blood was bubbling like a pot of boiling water.  AND I still had ten miles to go!

I quickly ripped off my hat and gloves and stuffed them into my jacket – but the damage was done. 

I needed to get a handle on this before my cells burst and became Ebola-like, disrupting throughout my body and turning my very bones into a puddle of goo. 

Okay, okay, I knew what needed to happen. 

I yanked off my Peruvian-Paca-lined parka – which, by the way, was hard to do – while running in snowshoes, in total darkness (except for the flashlights tied to my head), and hundreds of runners stumbling to get around me.

THEN, once I got that damn coat off, especially without pushing my Gatorade belt down to my sweating knees, I couldn’t decide what to do with it. 

I wasn’t about to throw away my only parka (the one strategically engineered for fighting Russians at the North Pole) or toss it to the side of the road.  

What if a communist runner took it as a memento? 

This left me with no choice.  I tied the sleeves around my waist.  Now I looked like I was wearing a thick Irish kilt.  If I was running with bagpipes, I would have been perfect! 

Jeez, who knew this race was so international? 

Runners, slowing down to get by me, must have thought I was a homeless man, running with all of my belongings surrounding my belly – of all things, the very pudge that had gotten me into this.          

Just as I resolved that issue, I realized with the flood of humanity thrashing to swing around me that somewhere somehow I had forgotten to bring the one essential thing I needed for this race:  my legs! 

Where the hell were my legs? 

Just when they were required to step up and run the 13 miles and carry me and my ten-pound, dead-weight parka, they were nowhere to be found. 

Had I left them in the trunk of the car along with the spare tire and the metal jack? 

But wait, that didn’t make sense.

My old jeep didn’t have a trunk, let alone a spare jack, and, besides, why would I leave my legs in the jeep when I knew I would be running like a crazy man at the crack of dawn? 

Wait a minute.  I remember seeing my legs. 

Weren’t they squirming in the line at the Port-o-Johns when I desperately needed to empty my bowels after seeing thousands of runners milling about in t-shirts and shorts?

Weren’t they twitching nervously when I bent over to double-knot my snowshoes?

In fact, didn’t they almost bolt out from under me when I couldn’t get the GPS app on my iPhone to work?  (So much for my sweet lover, my feminine voice of love, encouraging me on the run!) 

Wait, I remember settling them down like thoroughbreds, and stretching them first to the left then to the right in the starting area, warming them up for the shock of what was about to occur. 

But that was back then.    

Maybe I tossed them in the garage container along with the sandwiches and Doritos and the plastic water bottle when the horn went off and all the runners cheered and I upchucked breakfast.  

Maybe in crossing the starting line, I stepped into a vat of thick cement and the quick-drying concoction quickly hardened into heavy blocks of concrete.  Maybe my legs were back there like twitching prongs. 

They certainly weren’t with me.

Runners were passing me by the thousands.  Some were in a huff, others casually chitchatting with each other – they didn’t even notice me as they ran by, enjoying their milk toast and playing gin rummy. 

It was so embarrassing.  I needed a giant hawk to swoop down and take me away.

What seemed like three hours, I reached the halfway point of the race and thought, finally, I had stemmed the tide.

– But, no, another thousand runners ran by me on the way back to the finish line.  I was dizzy with it all!  Afraid, even, to look behind me.  

Would the humiliation ever end?

I had worked so hard on those lonely roads through winter. 

Everyone was passing me, mothers with babies, blind people with canes, fat, frat boys with cases of beer lost and looking for the beach… 

Everyone, I should say, but one – I passed an eighty-nine-year-old-man with a broken-walker – but other than him, and only him, I simply was fodder for the other runners to easily pass by and mock on their way to the award ceremony.    

 “Okay.  Okay!  Bring it on!” I shouted to the world, “Pudge man, can take it.  I can take it.  Bring it on!”

Then another thousand passed me. 

“Mother fucker!”

"If any more people run by me," I shouted, "I swear, I’ll kill them."

Suddenly a soft feminine voice whispered lightly into my ear.  “Time: one hour and fifty minutes.  Distance, eleven miles.” 

“Oh, fuck you!” 

“Current pace: ten minutes and twenty seconds.”

“Go away.  Leave me alone.  Can’t you see I’m wearing a fucking kilt, lost my legs, sweating like a pig, and about to murder somebody…”

“Current speed: eight minutes and thirteen seconds.”

“Arrrrr!  Not now!  Stop!  Who cares?  Where were you when I needed you?  Where are the deer and the mice to show me the way?  Why are the gods of racing doing this to me?”

“Split pace…”

“ – No, no, no, you cold, calculating bitch.  The damage is done.  I’m through.”

“Split pace: nine minutes and forty-three seconds.”

“Help!  Somebody kill me.  Kill me.  Please!”

I realized, then, I thoroughly hated her and I hate running in races. 

I hated little squirrels and white tail deer and Pacas from Peru, and I hate running in races. 

I hated port-o-johns at dawn and pulling down long johns, and I hate running in races. 

I hated packets of goo that stick to my fingers and belts with Gator Aid that seep onto my shorts, and I hate running in races. 

I hated legs that disappear and pudge that reappears, and, above all, I hate running in races.

I hate running in races.  I hate running in races.  I hate running in races.

That was the rant I used finally, successfully to cross the finish line…

…and begin preparing for the Chicago Marathon in the fall. 

****