My Journey To Plant Strong, Part 1: A Less-Than-Optimally-Brief Personal History

April 17th, 1973.  A critical date in American, nay, Global History.  It was on that day that Federal Express officially commenced their industry-defining overnight shipping services.  It was also on that day, in Cleveland, Ohio, that my parents decided to celebrate this free-market liberation from U.S. Postal Service domination by bringing me into the world via Caesarean section.  Little did they know that, almost prophetically, I would grow to become both an impatient grump who wants things delivered when I demand them and an epicure who loves absurdly rich and fatty salad dressings, all the more so if they are anchovy-based.  These two less-than-savory (get it?  SAVORY?!) character traits, if they can both be considered such, have conspired over the years to strap me, like so much excess-weight luggage, to the brakeless mini-van roof of life, careening headlong down the Lombard Street of weight fluctuation.  Was that the worst embedded-metaphor sentence in history...or was it the best?

Throughout what I would consider a fairly run-of-the-mill upbringing, I can remember that I was always magnetized to food, and always somewhat uncomfortable in my own skin.  Like many of the more stylish, aristocratic babies of the early ‘70s, I was born fat.  Being fat did not bother me as a pre-toddler. Conversely, if my weight throughout life is any indication, I was hell-bent to stay that way through preadolescence and well on into post-pre-adulthood.

Though for the life of me I can’t imagine why, this disturbed by parents.  Perhaps they thought later on in life I’d develop debilitating health problems?  Is that why they (and by ‘they’ I mean my mother, at which point the author received a bitter phone call from his mother about how he is an ingrate, after all she suffered to raise him in an increasingly insane world, and how dare he write anything about her even implicitly critical) brought me to a nutritionist when I was, oh, maybe ten years old?  A nutritionist who attempted to teach me about healthy eating by having me play with rubber facsimiles of fried chicken (“bad" rubber food) and broccoli ("good" rubber food, I presume)?

And later to a therapist who would either brainwash me (in a good way, of course) or teach me how to brainwash myself into eating less, exercising more, and growing leaner as I grew taller (or was it taller as I grew leaner?) by way of endless repetition of affirmations (e.g., “I am a naturally thin person!)?  All I remember about this therapist, besides the homework assignments, is how hot she was.  If I close my eyes and explore the vault, I recall her looking like one of those women from the “Addicted To Love” video.  Except happy.  I didn't do a single thing she asked me to do to help myself, and therefore did not come to believe that I was a naturally thin person and could hence afford myself psychic permission to eat like one. But I had no problem visiting her at her office.  Let’s ice down some of those memories, shall we?

Unwittingly, these were the same parents who, dedicated to providing me with every single opportunity and resource in life, sent me to a premiere high school, and then to a premiere college, where all of the food was served buffet style.  This was not advertised in the promotional brochures.  So imagine my pleasant surprise upon arrival at the dining hall to learn that only the starting time of one's next class placed a practical limit on the number of times one could return to the beginning of the buffet line.  One of the most vivid memories I have of college is a plate filled with double-burgers drenched in nacho cheese sauce (this was several years before I started keeping kosher).  That plate always got refilled.  In a warped way lemmings are lucky.  Because they can’t go back to the top of the cliff.

Is it shocking that my weight has yo-yo’ed for as long as I can remember, my top weight steadily increasing with every failure?  Unlike many whose blogs I've read and whose stories I’ve heard, I have not tried every single diet solution known to man.  I have also never taken a diet drug.  I once (literally, one time) took a body-building supplement at a time when I was lifting weights a lot, but what I suspect was a combination of caffeine and a palette of other stimulants freaked me out so intensely that I had the bottle of pills arrested for assault and battery.

I bought weight-loss pills at my local drug store once, when I was 15, but can thankfully acknowledge that, having gone another year without losing all the weight I wanted to lose before shipping off to summer camp, where I would have to run the emotional gauntlet yet again for four weeks straight in a bathing suit, I narrowly avoided becoming a speed addict when I flushed them down a camp toilet.  How any pharmacy could look itself in the mirror after selling Crank Lite over the counter to a 15-year-old boy is beyond me.  But sell the amphetamine-laced diet pills they did, and again let us take a moment to thank God that He planted in my body-conscious and girl-crazed teen-aged brain the seed of fear that I’d become a toothless, bloody-eyed drooler, albeit a thin one, if I went ahead with my plan to lose weight via psychostimulants.  Thank you, God.  Oh, thank you.  And once again for good measure, thank you Lord.

So pills were never part of my obsession, but several of the more popular weight loss programs were.  Not far down the road from that vaunted Chicago-area institution of higher learning known as Where Weissology Went To College, there was a Jenny Craig...outlet.  Store?  Training center?  What does one call the real estate where Jenny hawks her wares and services?  Jenny Craig...what can one say about Jenny Craig?  God bless my parents for, among other things, paying for all those boxes of food.  Looking back on it now, it doesn’t strike me as so healthy to train people to eat only out of a cardboard box, but maybe they don’t do it that way any more.

Anyway, I walked into Jenny Craig in Skokie, Illinois in 1994 because I was 80 pounds overweight.  I kept walking in because my Jenny Craig coach was a delicately beautiful faux blond whose black roots were somehow sexy underneath all that bleach-yellow.  Believe me when I tell you, I’m not trying to work hot chicks into my personal history.  It’s just the way things unfolded, organically.  I promise.  I am not the Woody Allen of Richard Simmons stories.  After all, both my childhood therapist and Jenny Craig handler were older than me. Rimshot!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.  I lost a lot of weight on the Jenny Craig program.  I dutifully (obsessively?) box-cut and microwaved my way to something like a 60 pound reduction.  After which time I assumed I was cured, and dutifully stopped visiting my lovely coach at the JC compound down the road from school.

I’m not exactly sure when I gained all my weight back and then some, but it didn’t take long.  Then I moved to Los Angeles, California which, anyone can imagine, is the single best place in the world to be fat and self-conscious.  When you cross the border into California for the first time, you get your passport stamped and you get a lifetime membership to the 12-step program of your choice.  Mine was Compulsive Eaters Anonymous (CEA).  As they say in the 12-step rooms, “it works if you work it.”  It worked when I worked it.  It stopped working when I stopped working it.  I vacillated between working it and not working it several times over the span of my five-or-so years in L.A., and then moved to Israel to study in seminary in Jerusalem.  In Israel it didn’t even take me a full year to stop working the CEA program completely.

You know what the best thing about living in Israel is? The spiritual high one gets from being immersed in one’s cultural heritage round-the-clock. You know what the second best thing is? The Yemenite restaurant right next door to the artisan bakery, both right smack in the middle of my bike ride to seminary each day. What more could my arteries want than a sandwich consisting of deep-fried falafel balls wrapped in pan-fried bread, slathered with sesame paste and olive-oil-drenched chick-pea hummus? How about the same thing again on the way home? Could the arteries also want that? I could never say for sure what my arteries really wanted, but I was willing to test all hypotheses, as long as it involved some form of frying.

Quick quiz:  What’s the most responsible and forward-thinking action a guy could take approaching the birth of his first child in order to ensure many decades of healthfulness in order to guide the child for as long as possible along the path of life?  If your answer is to mentally map every vending machine within a ten minute walk of the maternity ward, then you’ll have stumbled upon my approach to my wife’s labor with our older daughter, our very first child, born in Jerusalem in the summer of 2004. Do you know how they say Kit-Kat in Hebrew? Keet-Ket. Say it with me, “While you have more false contractions and fail to dilate further, I’m going to spend 5 shekel on another Keet-Ket.”

If it weren’t for the fact that the bike ride home from seminary was uphill, we’d have had to rent a separate apartment for my gut.

Three years in Israel. Return to America, summer of 2005, to start business school. Back to the 12-step programs. It worked as long as I worked it. Then I stopped working it. Again.

Second child, first boy, born in 2006. Second year of business school. Graduation. Consulting job. Third kid, second boy, in 2010. Stress. Responsibility. Sleepless nights. Global travel for work. Eating like crap, feeling like crap. Garbage in, garbage out.

Acid-reflux. Sleep apnea (undiagnosed). Glorious snoring, which Mrs. Weissology loves so much! Aches. Pains. Festering disease. And no more bike rides to push back on the abuse my body was taking.

What would be the thing to shepherd's-hook me off the Bizarro version of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride that I was on? In Part 2 of this post, I’ll let you in on how I got plant strong. And then got plant weak. And then got plant strong. Then plant weak again one more time. Sound familiar? You'll also learn how I met the famous guys in white lab coats and the Healthy Girl, and how I introduced my boot to the heiney of processed foods and animal proteins.

So stay tuned, and share your thoughts. Can you relate to the self-perpetuating cycle of failure? I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Escape From Oatland

In the dream he is living in a massive bowl of oatmeal.  A bowl of oatmeal the size of Oakland.  Oatland.

His commute to work is long, a long walk through the oatmeal.  The bathroom at work is the same distance from his desk as his office is from his house, and he must walk through the oatmeal to get to the bathroom.  Room-temperature oatmeal.  Viscous and thick.

He has to go to the bathroom all the time.  Urgently.  Right now.  Ten, maybe fifteen times a day.  Immediately upon evacuating his bladder, his throat dries up, as if he had swallowed a bucket-full of sand.  The nearest water cooler is the same distance from the bathroom as the bathroom is from his desk.  Nothing but oatmeal between him and the water cooler.

No amount of water, no matter how cool and ostensibly refreshing, will kill his thirst.  He must drink, yet he cannot drink enough.  He drinks, slogs through oatmeal to get back to his desk, sits down to work and immediately must again use the bathroom.

In the dream this continues all day long, this insistent and incessant back-and-forth between the water cooler, bathroom, and desk, until the whistle blows and it is time once again to walk home through the oatmeal.  How many times will he have to use the bathroom on his way home today?  How much oatmeal will there be between him and the bathrooms he finds along the way?

He arrives home, exhausted from a day of labor - the labor required simply to get out of bed and get dressed, to battle through enough fatigue to accomplish something at work and not risk getting fired, to shake himself awake during his commute so that he doesn’t drown in the oatmeal, only to be found dead, soaked to the bone in the gluten-scum ballast...

He hasn’t even attempted to pursue extracurricular activities today, such as, oh, being an engaged father, a passionate husband, a devoted servant of God.  He is beyond the point of deluding himself that he will attempt any of these in the sparse moments between the time he turns his key in the door and the time he lays his head down on the pillow.

He lays his head down on the pillow.  He must immediately run to the bathroom, slogging through the oatmeal.  Then he is getting back into bed for the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth time.  His alarm rings almost before he even fell asleep for the first time that night.

But this is no dream.  The persistent, oscillating ache in my muscles and joints.  The interminable thirst.  The constant need to run, not walk, to the bathroom.  The comprehensive lack of desire to do anything, no matter how important.  The fog that passed as consciousness for months, if not years, on end, that I mistook for mere fatigue.  Weight loss without trying to lose weight...loss of interest in food...

Weiss, you have to see a doctor.  Because if you don’t, and God-forbid you croak, then you deserve to be called a massive butthead.  “What can I say about my husband now that he’s prematurely dead?  I can say that he had an opportunity to be the husband and father God expected him to be, the husband and father that we needed him to be, and he blew it.  What a massive butthead.”

So I’m at least enough of a narcissist not to want to be called a butthead in public with no recourse for defending myself.  I went to see Dr. Goldfarb on Friday, August 24th as much to prevent that from happening as to beg for his help in air-lifting me from Oatland.

For how many years had I prepared myself for this?  For how many years had I built this house, heavy brick by heavy brick?  Heavy forkful by heavy forkful.

It was time to start over.  To tear it down and build it back up.  But how?  That story needs to be told.  It involves a little boy, a Healthy Girl, some guys in white lab coats, and lots - I mean LOTS - of photosynthesis.

8/31/12: Text Message Of Dooooooooom

This is a photo of me at my younger son's bris, weighing somewhere around 285.  Pounds.

Text Messages You Don’t Want To Get From Your Doctor #427: “Call me NOW.”

Which is the text message I received from my doctor just four days ago, Monday morning, August 27th. I responded as Hellboy would have: “Oh crap.”

Just a few days earlier, Friday, August 24th, I had paid a visit to the aforementioned great and powerful Dr. Nosson Goldfarb complaining of extreme fatigue and general feelings of physical, spiritual, and emotional yuckiness.

In fact, I had felt like absolute garbage for the previous 10 months. Maybe even longer than that. I blamed the fatigue on my younger son, not yet two-and-a-half, who has clubbed feet.

“Hey Dan!” you’re thinking, “How do his clubbed feet make you tired?” It’s the braces. He wears braces on his feet. The braces on his feet get tangled in the blankets of his bed at night and prevent him from turning over.

Do this: tonight when you get into bed, tie your feet to the ends of a broom. Let me know how that goes for you.

Next imagine that you’ve only just toilet-trained. Your parents didn’t make you do it, you decided to do it out of the goodness of your heart (and the swampiness of your cloth diapers). You’re so proud of yourself! You are not yet two-and-a-half and you’re crushing this whole personal development thing. You’re able to warn your Mommy that it’s time to go, you’re able to hold it in until you both sprint to the potty. You go to the toilet with relatively little mess. You are, in short, the man. This isn’t beginner’s luck, this is expertise. You could be a motivational speaker for kids twice your age. Okay, so you can’t speak so well, but man, you’re ripe for the potty.

Your balletically graceful use of the toilet and your inability, at night whilst your braces are on, to independently traverse the garbanzo-bean-carpeted hallway between your bedroom and the bathroom scrape the blackboard like a duet between James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti.

What would your strategy be? If you’re my son, the strategy is to scream until a parent carries you to the bathroom. How many times per night you ask? Enough times. Enough times to make Superman cry for his mama.

That’s how my son’s clubbed feet made me tired. This has been going on since birth, pretty much. As the months and years passed, I would just pound coffee and count the days until Shabbos when I could crash. My several feeble attempts to eat healthily would fall away for lack of motivation. Exercise, you may ask? To which I would answer, “I remember exercise. I also remember when Pearl Jam’s first album came out.”

As one could imagine, not sleeping, ingesting coffee intravenously, and eschewing exercise was less an approach to life than a pastime in the waiting room of death. Until about a month before the Text Message of Doom. About mid-July, I started to think that maybe - maybe - something else was going on. As I stumbled through my thirty-ninth year on this earth, approaching the end of the decade of life when my father’s father had a massive coronary, and approaching the beginning of the one in which my father’s father’s only son had coronary number one, it occurred to me that, given my genetic heritage, I’d rather hear bad news from a doctor than from the Heavenly Court of Judgment.

So I went to my dear friend and doctor, Nosson Goldfarb. The appointment was for Friday afternoon, August 24th, just a few days before the Text Message O’ Doom.

Nosson knows my history. He knows that I stuff every negative emotion either into my shoulders in the form of stress, or straight down into the digestive tract, planting the seeds of future award-winning ulcers.

He knows my challenges are emotional as well as physical. He took my blood and sat me down for some tough love. “Dan, you’ve got to radically change the way you eat, and you have to do it now.” This led to a conversation about all the stress in my life - round-the-clock risk factors, daily invitations to the angioplasty club, or worse. And what have I done to mitigate the stress? See above, in which I admit that I eat like crap and don’t exercise.

I left his office and went about the rest of my afternoon. Shabbos was coming and I still had some shopping to do for the kiddush we were about to make in our new baby daughter’s honor. Are you keeping up? Wife, four children, no pressure, Weiss, no pressure at all. How do you feel about yourself now? You’ve let everyone down by letting yourself get this far gone.

But you’ll change all of that. You’ll get on the right track and all will be well. You’ll get back on your Esselstyn/McDougall hybrid eating plan, you’ll exercise, you’ll win the lottery, you grow to be six-foot-four and lead the Cleveland Browns to their fifteenth Super Bowl title in a row. After Shabbos.

Sunday morning, August 26th, just five days before I wrote this post. My fabulous wife got right on the job, as she has done in the past, to help me eat in the Esselstyn way. You could cut the excitement with a samurai sword, except that there wasn’t any excitement. I was pretty ticked off, actually. Why? Because I’m the kind of person who wants to eat exactly what I want. But I complied. My wife is an excellent cook, so I didn’t really have to suffer.

Monday morning, August 27th. Dr. Goldfarb’s text: “Call me NOW.” The blood lab called Dr. Goldbarb early in the morning. They instructed him to call the patient - me - as soon as possible. My blood glucose level was off-the-charts high. Say it with me now, “Diabetes!”

My blood glucose level was over 500. My A1C was well into the double digits. “No wonder you’ve been feeling awful,” said the doctor. Yeah. For how many months had I ascribed this to clubbed-foot baby fatigue? What had I put in jeopardy by simply not knowing how sick I was?

And that was when the adventure really started. Wake up call? Yeah. This was the first time in my life where the specter of not making it through my forties became visceral. I’m grateful to God that I got this news via a phone call from a panicked lab tech and not from an ambulance driver, emergency room physician, or mortician. This is my opportunity to transform the way I approach life. Because this isn’t just about food. This is about how I deal with life.

This is a physical journey. An emotional journey. A spiritual journey. I’m going hard core plant-based here. I’m going to stalk this food problem, find out where it is hiding, flash-bang it out of its Saddam-like dirt-pit, and pistol whip it in front of anyone who will pay attention.

I hope this blog will be a way to keep me motivated - no, not just motivated, but excited, totally off-the-hook inspired. Because that is what it’s going to take. I’m an over-the-hill Rocky Balboa. This challenge is the much-younger, in-much-better-shape fighter. I’m going to have to use all of my wits and creativity to whup it in the hiney. Won’t you join me?