What It Means to Lose 25 Pounds When You Weigh 460
It may not sound like much, but go pick up 25 pounds at the gym, and imagine carrying that around all day
My family doesn’t have a lot of Christmas traditions. We open presents on whatever day everybody can get together. Mama has always had an artificial tree. The ornaments are whatever’s on sale at Kmart. But we always had my sister Brenda’s peanut butter logs.
Nobody remembers exactly when she started making them, or where the recipe came from. We’ve had them at Christmas for as long as I can remember. Every year Brenda and Mama would coat them together, getting chocolate all over their hands and the stove. They’d pack the logs in cookie tins. We’d get them out after the big Christmas meal. If you wanted to take some home, you had to hide them. Otherwise, they’d be gone by dark.
But then, on Christmas Eve 2014, Brenda died from a leg infection caused by her excess weight. She was older than me, but I was even bigger than her. On New Year’s Eve that year, I weighed in at 460 pounds. I had always known I had to lose weight and get in shape or I wouldn’t live much longer. But Brenda’s death set that feeling in stone. I went to her funeral and saw my future.
I set out to find a way to lose weight in a steady, sustained way. No crash diet. No fad of the month. Just make sure my calories in were less than my calories out. Little victories, every day.
I craved a Big Lebowski life. Drift along, hang out with friends, keep a cocktail in hand at all times.
A year later, not long before Christmas 2015, my wife found Brenda’s recipe in our recipe box. We decided to make some and take them to the family as a Christmas surprise. I was worried about two things with this plan. One, we might ruin Christmas. Two, I might eat all the logs before we got to Georgia.
That’s the kind of thing the old me would have done. Most years, over the five or six days around Christmas, I’d eat 25 or 30 peanut butter logs.
In 2015, I had four and a half.
Years ago, I saw the author Tom Wolfe speak. His novels tend to be about people…
