The Secret of Losing Weight

I Will Reveal All For a Small Monthly Fee!

I wasn’t a fat kid. When I was in elementary school, I had a vigorous argument with a girl over which of us was skinnier. But around my college years, I realized that I could buy and eat all the fast food I wanted any time I wanted. I learned that if you called up Dominos, you would have a hot pizza in hand in 30 minutes. It was a tragic discovery. Food was pleasure. Is pleasure.

I had tried dieting—even joined Weight Watchers at one point—but couldn’t muster the necessary self-control. That is how I saw it; it was a personal failure. I had an impulse to exercise, but the impulse to gorge myself was stronger. When Covid hit and we as a society stopped going out, my weight ballooned even more.

Me at a Jamal Cyrus exhibit in August 2021

My clothes got tight; buying new clothes feels like a waste of money. I realize that “tight clothes” is a paltry reason for changing your life, and yet it was a big motivator for me. On New Years Day in 2022 that I made a resolution to control my diet, having concluded from experience that I couldn’t exercise my way out of obesity.

Even as I made my resolution, I planned for its failure. I believed that in a few weeks, I would fall off the wagon. New Years resolutions don’t last. On January 1, my bathroom scale recorded my weight at 293 lbs. My plan to eat less was simple—reduce the number of times I ate each day. I would have two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. I wasn’t counting calories; just limiting the number of times I ate.

I had a routine. I would wake up, weigh myself, and record the weight into an Excel spreadsheet. Within a couple of weeks I saw a decrease in weight. I think the habit of weighing myself daily and seeing progress was part of why I didn’t quit early on. Positive feedback helped me stick to the plan.

Me in April 2022

At some point, I decided I wasn’t losing weight fast enough, and cut my diet down to one meal per day. There is a name for this style of weight loss: intermittent fasting. I had tried it before, going as long as two days without eating. I knew I could do it. But I am not here to recommend intermittent fasting. What really was causing me to lose weight was a drastic reduction in calories, not the timing of when I consumed the calories. I was starving myself. My daily meal would be normal-sized, and I tried to make sure I was eating more-or-less healthy things. My one meal per day couldn’t be, for example, a gallon of ice cream. I ate grown-up foods—fish, vegetables, etc.

I weighed 288 lbs on January 20 and 287 on January 21. This got me wondering—where did that pound of flesh go? A pound of my body had literally disappeared. I assumed that what I had lost was fat. I also assumed that my body metabolized it somehow. But I was completely ignorant what that process was. I asked some friends and family, and my sister said something that shook me. She had read that lost fat was exhaled.

One of the most terrifying things one hears these days is that someone is “doing their own research.” That phrase seems to precede the most grotesque conspiracy theories. But researching the burning of fat was the only way I could learn about the chemistry and biology that was happening inside my own body. The extent of my formal biological and chemical education was two classes in high school. It was time to revisit these fields.

One thing I remembered from high school biology was that the energy that fueled a body was a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). It is the energy-containing molecule used by every living thing on earth. Every cell in your body uses millions of ATP molecules every second, and more are constantly being created. To stay alive, we must continuously create more ATP. One of the chemicals we use to create ATP is called glucose, which is the simplest sugar. It is made with 6 carbon atoms, 6 oxygen atoms, and 12 hydrogen atoms. Glucose enters our bodies through the food we eat, but usually in a more chemically complicated form called carbohydrates. When these foods are composed of one or two simple sugar molecules, they are called sugar. If they have more than two sugar molecules, they are called starches. As we eat and digest sugars and starches, they are broken down into glucose, moved about our bodies in our blood, and used to fuel our continued existence.

When you have too much glucose, some of it is converted into a chemical called glycogen, which is stored in your liver and in other parts of the body. If the glucose level in your blood gets too low, the liver reconverts the glycogen back into glucose. But if we store glucose in the form of glycogen, what do we need fat for? The problem is that we can only store about 300 grams of glycogen. If a human body has too much glucose, it will be converted into fat.

This description vastly oversimplifies what actually happens. It makes it seem like an algorithm. Eat carbs, create the glucose you need to refresh your ATP, if there is too much glucose, store some of it in the form of glycogen, but if there is too much glycogen, make some fat. My understanding (from “doing my own research”) is that all of these things are going on at various levels simultaneously.

What is fat? It is a long molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It is stored in specialized cells called adipose cells. Within these cells are lipids, a class of organic molecule that doesn’t react to water. The kind of lipid in an adipose cell is called a triglyceride. A triglyceride is a molecule made of three fatty acids and connected to one another by an alcohol called glycerol.

When fat is needed, hormones and enzymes cause triglycerides to be released into the bloodstream. In the process, the fatty acids are freed from the glycerol. Fatty acids travel through the bloodstream and an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase causes the fatty acids to be absorbed by cells wherein they enter the mitochondria, tiny structures inside your cells. That is where the oxidation of fat happens and ATP is produced.

This process is organic and very complex, but basically a fatty acid is oxidized. That part is essentially chemistry. As I mentioned, I haven’t done chemistry since high school (and even then I was terrible). But I was curious what happened to the fat when it was burned. In essence, it combines with oxygen and the result is carbon dioxide and water. I wanted to know how much oxygen you needed to burn a fat molecule, and how much carbon dioxide and water are produced.

There are several different types of fatty acids found in the human body. The most common is called palmitic acid. About 30% of the fat in mammals is palmitic acid. I still was interested in my original question—if I lose a pound of fat, where does is go? To answer this, I had to balance a chemical equation: palmitic acid plus oxygen yields carbon dioxide and water.

We need 23 oxygen molecules to burn one molecule of palmitic acid. But how does this compare to actual mass; to grams and pounds? We have to use a technique called stoichiometry, which converts atoms of different elements to grams.

My calculation is that to burn one pound of palmitic acid, one needs to use 2.87 lbs of oxygen, and one expels 2.75 lbs of carbon dioxide and 1.12 lbs of water. Most of the weight I lost was exhaled, and some of it was urinated.

How many breaths are needed to burn 1 pound of fat? One breath is about 21% oxygen, but the body only absorbs about ¼ of that oxygen.  Every breath is about 1 gram of gas, so with a little conversion to pounds, we get 0.000116 pounds of oxygen in each breathe. This will vary among different people doing different activities, but assuming this is a roughly correct average, it takes almost 25,000 breaths to absorb enough oxygen to burn a pound of palmitic acid. This is about a day’s worth of breathing.

Our bodies do this without us thinking about it. And all these things our body does automatically just to keep us alive (breathing, the beating of our heart, digestion, keeping our bodies warm, and other metabolic functions) require energy, an estimated 2700 kilocalories per day for men. (For some reason, in the world of food packaging, kilocalories are just called calories.) A calorie is defined as the heat energy required to raise one gram of water 1º celsius. A kilocalorie is the heat required to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water 1º celsius. When your Twinkie is labeled 280 calories, it's really 280 kilocalories.

By simple Weight Watchers logic, as long as I consume less than 2700 kcal, my body will be forced to burn fat to provide the energy needed to maintain my life. And one ordinary meal is significantly less than 2700 kcal.

My routine is to weigh myself every morning when I wake up. I record that weight into an Excel spreadsheet and track my weight loss day by day. The result is noisy data, with the weight going up and down seemingly at random. That is in part because my body is not a scientifically clean laboratory. At any moment, my body contains food that I ate in the last 36 hours, not yet digested or excreted. The water I drink sticks around a while, too. To smooth out some of this jagged data, I made a parallel table that calculated the five-day moving average of my weight. And, of course, I graphed the results.

I’ve long been a fan of data visualization because even if the data is pretty simple (as this is: one data point added every day), it can show you unexpected results. On my weight loss graph, my weight drops like a stone from January until early June, when it flatline (and even jumps up for a few days in late July and early August. What happened?

The answer is embarrassing. I am a consumer of those THC gummies that are popular and more-or-less legal here in Texas. The problem with the gummies is that it takes hours for them to be digested and for you to feel the buzz. Another problem is that they aren’t really regulated, so you are never sure how strong they are. One day in June I took one late in the afternoon and waited for it to come on. After a couple of hours, I felt nothing. I took another gummy. Still felt nothing. Then right before bed, still feeling nothing, I took a third gummy. (Don’t do this!) While I was sleeping, all that THC struck me like a freight train.

The next morning, I could barely stand up. I had to grab the walls for balance. I staggered into my kitchen to make coffee. The next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the linoleum floor. Agony radiated from my back. I had badly thrown it out. (The pain was probably mitigated a little because I was so stoned.)

I staggered to my feet painfully. Every movement I made was painful. After I sobered up a little. I painfully walked to the local drugstore and stocked up on every over-the-counter cure I could find: Doans, lidocaine patches, etc.

And during this period, I fell off the food wagon. I still only ate one meal per day, but I ate way too many snack foods. Ice cream and cookies were my special vices. And the graph shows this. In addition, my daily exercises necessarily changed after I threw out my back. But I tried to keep going. I hadn’t lost 50 lbs to become a sedentary slug. But I couldn’t do any exercises that involved bending at the waist—it was too painful. And a lot of my daily exercise regimen had involved such bending.

I had thrown out my back badly before in the early 90s. My memory was that what primarily improved it was time and lots of it. My doctor recommended that I do situps. The idea being that if my abs were stronger, they would take some of the work off the sacroiliac musclesin my lower back. I did that this time as well, mostly doing an exercise called a plank to strengthen my stomach muscles. At the same time, I continued running and walking up the stairs in the highrise where I live.

I felt a weird sense of triumph when I was able to walk up 20 floors. I felt like Eddie Cochran, who sang “Twenty Flight Rock.” The chorus is,

“So I'll walk one, two flight, three flight, four
Five, six, seven flight, eight flight, more
Up on the twelfth I'm startin' to drag
Fifteenth floor I'm a-ready to sag
Get to the top, I'm too tired to rock”

Cochran wrote that song about visiting his girlfriend whose elevator was broken. I have always assumed that when he originally wrote it, the chorus ended with “I’m too tired to fuck.”

When I weighed 290 lbs, I couldn’t run. Even dashing across the street to beat traffic was a challenge. I did a lot of walking. But as my weight decreased, I got more ambitious. I frequently walked around the perimeter of Rice University, a well-maintained path that was almost exactly three miles long. As I got thinner and was dragging around less weight, I started running parts of the path. The path around Rice University is a squashed pentagram. My program to run it was to take the smallest segments of the pentagram and run along them—it gave me a concrete goal and fit my analytic personality. I gradually was able to run along longer and longer sides of the path. I want to be clear that when I use the world “run”, I’m really talking about a fast shuffle, only slightly faster than my walking speed. How did I calculate that speed? I used a phone app called MapMyWalk. It uses your location to keep track of where you have walked and how long it took. Since I was doing a regular three mile course, I could see the time it took me decreasing. In June, I succeeded in running the whole way. I was extremely proud of myself. But a shambling zombie could outdistance me, so I knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be yet, and I’m still not.

But this also meant that all of my clothes were now too big for me. Any pair of slacks that I owned in January would now slide right off me if I attempted to wear them now. And even if I cinched them with a belt, they looked like baggy clown pants. My shirts were too big, as well. I was wearing XL and even XXL t-shirts, which now feels like wearing a tent. After I had lost a substantial mass and a lot of inches around my waist, I knew I must get some smaller clothes. Since I was only partway this journey, I didn’t want to spend serious money on them. I bought “new” jeans and shorts at the Salvation Army. As for the top half of my body, I bought several inexpensive plain pocket t-shirts from Dickies, a cheap brand of clothes aimed at working class consumers. As for my old fat-guy wardrobe, much of it has been donated to the Salvation Army. My closets are fairly bare.

photo by David McClain

I was hanging out with a friend of mine the other day at a zine festival; the crowd included a lot of attractive women. He wondered if people got laid at these events? Surely they do. I commented that with my new thin sexy form, I was owed! He snidely commented I should use that as a pick-up line. I countered I should just put it on a t-shirt: “I just lost 75 lbs. Please reward me with sex.” The idiotic things that straight males will chat about.

 As of this morning, I weigh 213.6. Can I get down to 200 lbs by the end of the year? That would be 92 lbs of flesh exhaled and urinated in one year. As a goal, it feels insane. But I know it’s possible.

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