And in breaking news, I’ve lost 40 pounds since the first leg of my three-part DMB vacation, and by August, I’ll have lost 20 more.

Seriously.

Some people say that getting heavy, fat, morbidly obese is a slow process. It’s like watching water boil, you can’t really say when it happens, it just, well happens. I share this story not because I have a secret, an inspiration or a manner in which you too can lose the weight equal to what, a two-year-old in a the same amount of days? I tell you this only because I like saying the phrase “I lost 40 pounds in 40 days, and I don’t care if you can or not.”

You say you used The Secret? Here’s a secret: quit eating.

The question to be asked in lieu of the secret, of course, is how. Oprah Winfrey has become a billionaire by being a fat Black woman who has tried – and failed – at every New Age diet under the sun. She has empa- and sympathized with all shades of fat girls, yet her Scrooge McDuck pile of cash has left her just as fat, 20 years later, as when she started. Tom Arnold penned the best book title of all time, and it’s relevant here: How I lost eight pounds in seven years … (or something like that – it’s like 12 feet away, and thus too difficult to fact check).

As a disclaimer, I would offer a caveat as a lover of women: men and women lose weight differently. Women, especially during and after childbirth, gain more weight and are hard-pressed to lose it. I love the female form and would note that I would never describe a woman to her face as Reubenesque, but have always enjoyed such form. Life is not fair, and that I’ve lost my weight in the manner I have – through virtually no sacrifice, illegal drug consumption or waterboarding – proves it. Ergo, my XX readers should know that the term “fatass” is used to describe me, and me alone.

==

I didn’t do it through hard work, I will tell you that. I shoot my free throws and I occasionally jump – not skip, jump – rope, but fact is I have a terrible, terrible lifestyle that consists of driving a car most of the day, smoking cigarettes and watching the Web version of Captain Kangaroo by night. In short, I’m glued to one screen or the other, sedentary, for most of my waking hours. I don’t shoot free throws to lose weight, I do it as a twofold habit, one nervous and the other ingrained – the rope jumping, well, other than swimming, there is no better cardiovascular exercise.

“So, fatass, how did it happen?”

Excellent question.

==

When I was a high school football player, I played at 210, 215 pounds, little of which was fat. Even then, though, I thought I was fat. I was looking through some pictures with my father a couple years ago, and there’s a photograph of me, 17 years old, standing next to him. I don’t care who your father is, if he was and/or remains in your life, he’s the baddest man on the planet. Forget Jules – my dad’s wallet didn’t have to have BAD MOTHERFUCKER stitched onto it, it was just there in spirit, and I knew it. To this day, if I crossed my father, a non-violent, kind, caring man, he’d still beat the shit out of me.

[He probably wouldn’t, but I know he could, that’s the point. –CBK]

He’s a half-inch taller than me, and has what I would call a soccer build. He eats like a bird, exercise-walks twice-a-day, and is the epitome of health. In the photograph, there I am, my arms the size of something I can’t even describe, and even though my father is taller, I look bigger, because I am. I’m ripped. I don’t have six-pack abs, but like most guys who play football in high school, I do have a build that older people pay lots of money to get. I don’t look freakish because I never used those kinds of drugs, but my upper body is the lovely triangle so many shoot for; in the picture, I’m unintentionally New Order’s best song (on their part and mine, I assure you). Yet, when I saw myself in a mirror, I saw a lumbering fatass.

I was a classic purger when I played, though. I would over-drink the H20, and when the time came for sprints, I’d puke as much as I could, often while in full sprint. I didn’t do this because I wanted to lose weight, I did it because I thought it would look good in a Nike “Just Do It” campaign. As I’ve noted to others since I was 15, few things feel so good as a good morning vomit.

Apologies for that one.

The most famous of eating-disorderettes, Tracy Gold, had a TV movie about her life, and there is a scene where the skeletal Gold looks in the mirror and sees a lumbering fatass. I’ve never had an eating disorder, and although the scene is a landmark of pop culture obscuratti, I know exactly what she saw, because never in my life have I looked in the mirror and seen something described as other than fat. I was always the biggest kid in my class – not fat, just big – and year after year, view after view, I could see nothing more (never less) than a lumbering fatso.

Unlike lots of footballers, though, I hated lifting weights. Hated it, and still hate it. I remember a late fall workout where I was being ridiculed for my terrible bench press, and I remember promising myself I would never lift weights again once I was done with football. I was 6’ and about 210, yet I could only bench press 245 pounds. That may sound like a lot, but for someone my size in the sport I was in, no, not very much. I could clean* more than I could bench, which is remarkable for anyone at any age at any skill level. Thanks to my big legs, I could squat more than 400 pounds, and I could “box-squat” more than 600 pounds. I never cared about this, because I hated lifting free weights.

[*Cleaning is the middle point between a “dead” lift and a “snatch.” Cleaning involves a 45-lb bar with weights on each end. You stand in front of it, and you clean it e.g. you not only lift it by pulling it up with straight shoulders and straight legs, you jerk it up to your chest. As I recall, the snatch is where you actually lift it over your head. I could clean 275 pounds, meaning that I could take a 45-lb bar bearing, on each end, two 45-lb weights and one 25-lb weight, and lift it from the ground to my chest in one move. This was the only weight-lifting I was actually good at. That my terminology is probably completely off tells you two things: 1) I don’t care now and 2) I didn’t care then. –CBK]

My peak weight – the weight I would love to be – is 195. That’s when I look best. I now refer to it as my Class Reunion Weight. When I was done with football, that’s the weight I receded to, and I stayed there for years. In the late 1990s, I was living in Tulsa and my weight crossed The Threshold, the weight my face bloats and I no longer look like a person I would objectively call attractive. The Threshold is 240 pounds. I see pictures of myself from the time, and although it’s not as terrible as I think, it’s not pretty. My mom aptly calls my look, with pale face, sunken dark eyes, shaved head and a certain bloated appearance, my “Uncle Festus” look. She means Uncle Fester, but she is accurate – when photographed in that manner, I do look like a young Uncle Fester.

The Threshold, in the last decade, has become a line of demarcation for me: when I’m above it, I look terrible; when I’m below it, I look less so.

“So, fatass, tell us the story!”

==

I spent two weeks on expense account in Muskogee-OK in the late fall of ’07. For two weeks, I ate nothing but McDonald’s for breakfast and lunch, and nothing but pizza and chicken wings for dinner, night after night. If we were talking about drinking, we would call it a binge. I’ve not eaten three meals a day since college, yet for 14 days, I ate three of the unhealthiest, fattening meals you could consider to conceive of, day after day. I was a Caligulean gastro, friends, and my weight – then at 240, ballooned to 255 by the time I got home. Then xmas got here, and then I hit 260 – and I never looked back.

The summer of ’08, I was in the 260 range, and had been for six months. And then, I got The Shingles. Shingles, I would learn, are caused by stress, and Shingles. Combined with obesity, ain’t pretty. I went to my PA Gina, and she informed me that a) I had shingles b) I was overweight and c) I had officially hit the high blood pressure point (141/112 was my read).

I got sick last winter, and I was informed – a real lowlight – that I was still overweight (272), still high blood pressure but, happily, no shingles.

Before continuing the saga, here’s a few signs you have hit a point that you never thought you’d hit and to which you don’t want to return:

1. Your top button on your pants is removed from pressure

2. You huff-and-puff when tying your shoes

3. You’re winded from climbing one, sad flight of stairs

4. Your friends tell you that you ‘don’t’ look that bad’

In late April of this year, I was run down. Stressed, overweight, just feeling awful. I went to see Gina for a checkup. 273, high BP, and had officially entered Hypertensionland. She started me on water pills, which is a nice word for a pill that makes you piss more to lessen the pressure on your heart – in short, I take one pill a day, and I piss a lot. A compulsive hydration freak, I continued my 80-oz of water each day, but little weight dropped. This had ceased being about vanity and became a health issue. Fatasses who are 34 years old entering hypertension are to be mocked, not admired, so I went back to Gina right before the first leg of DMB and advised her that I wanted on Diet Pills.

==

On May 16, I dropped under 260 for the first time in 18 months. The Wednesday before Memorial Day, I saw a three-digit number than began with 23- for the first time in more than two years.

At my peak fatassedness, I hit 275. When I weighed on Friday, I was at 235.

To co-opt the language, syntax and carriage of TDL, let me be clear: I did this using a prescribed, low-grade form of speed, an appetite suppressant that I take in the morning which enables me to eat little.

So, I did it dishonestly. At the same rate, my blood pressure has plunged, and that’s a good thing. When I was a the Wal-Mart BP machine last week, I scored a bombshell 118/78, the lowest BP I’ve scored in The Modern Era.

==

So, what is the point?

Being big sucks, and hating the way you look is an equal amplitude of suckiness. I wish I could tell you through hard work and mental toughness I’ve lost my weight, but that would be a lie. I’m also not ignorant to what will happen once I ditch the speed and start living like a relatively healthy chain-smoking 34 year old man.

Personally, I’ve always hated the way I look. I don’t have the eating disorder and I’m not a woman, so ultimately this doesn’t matter, but it’s still surreal to look in a mirror and hate what you see, no matter what you look like. I’ll never be cured of that. If this were a Lifetime movie or a post on Jezebel, I’d ask you for a bit of pity, but I’m not that and this ain’t it.

Yet, sobriety is the theme of the day. I found myself eating in the cafeteria of Laureate [ironic pronunciation: Lori Ate] Hospital a few years ago, and Laureate – in Tulsa – is one of the world’s finest facilities for eating disorders.

I wasn’t there because of an eating disorder, but I was in the cafeteria of a hospital renowned for treating women who cannot eat normally – either they don’t eat or they eat and purge. There are degrees of sadness, and if there are 10, I’ve been through eight. But, there is nothing so sad as seeing a girl of 20 who weighs 60 being wheeled into a hospital whose purpose is to teach her how to eat.

I have been around all kinds of addicts in my life – you have too, as you’re related to one type or the other. There are, in fact, two types of addict that should be pitied, because for the most part, they cannot be helped. They don’t crave opiates, speed or booze, which is why they’re so odd, because who among us does not crave the numbing sensation of a good old-fashioned physical high?

I’m unfair. They can be helped, they just cannot be cured. The addict to games of chance and the addict to food (or lack thereof) is a hopeless case, and in every cured gambler, in every reformed eater, lays in wait an addict ready to re-emerge.

In short: junkies and drunks have it easy. If you sense your child is an addict, steer them away from the dice and Cosmo and save yourself the headache.

The two addicts that are to be pitied and – just as important – avoided like lepers are the gambler and the disordered feeder. The gambler, for the sake of her disorder, is incurable. She can be put down to the degree that she’ll lay dormant in some sort of a hibernary stasis, but nothing cures gambling. Nothing.

The disordered eater is much the same. At Laureate and presumably other centers to treat such addicts, there are rules, and then there are more rules, and then, when the day ends, there are more rules still. You have to think Silence of the Lambs when trying to contextualize – don’t touch the glass, don’t go near the glass and – repeat – don’t touch the glass.

1. Chew your food

2. Leave nothing on the plate

3. No bathroom for 15 minutes

4. Different foods can’t touch each other

5. No sharing

6. No mixing portions

7. [Unwritten] NO MIRRORS

I recognize the obvious: it sounds like a send-up of a Chuck Palahuniak novel. Sadly, it’s not.

They [The Laureate Powers That Be] took us down to the ED clinic for a snack, and while I was down t here, I thanked grace that I didn’t have an ED.

==

For all you mommas out there, I’d say love your little pork-pie without overdoing it, Carrots instead of chocolate, skim instead of 2%, I’m hella-proud about my two-stone loss, but the loss is fleeting, and ultimately, it matters not. For all of my teenage years, I spent my summers working out in the early morning, and then playing basketball for the remainder, and not once - even without a shade of vanity – did I like how I looked in a mirror.

Part of this is to brag, to regale about losing 40-lbs, and part of it is to remember the lessons of the Laureate cafeteria: in short, what is worse? On one hand, we’re presented with a person who is overweight (bad) and on the other, we’re presented with a person who must be told to chew their food while being forcibly held down from not going to the bathroom after eating. Some lessons are best learned in theory rather than fact, and a trip to the ED clinic will prove that one.

To be clear though, I lost 40-lbs in 40 days, and I hate the way I look.