Part 2: Vitum Loses 85 Pounds...and the mistakes that kept me from doing it earlier

Continued from Never Trust a Skinny Chef. A Fat Doctor, however...

For several years, I was eating healthy, knew about the dangers of obesity, and yet found myself at 280 pounds... so overweight that I was considered class 2 obese. So why wasn't I losing weight?

There are three reasons - three mistakes I was making. Once I corrected these mistakes, and took on a lifestyle of a healthy, balanced diet and exercise, the results were amazing:

• In September, I weighed 280 pounds. By January, I was down to 230 - I had lost 50 pounds.
• In April, I met my long-term goal of running a 10 kilometer race, something I thought was a big deal
• In May, I blew that goal away - and successfully completed a half marathon. That's right, I ran for 21.1 kilometers. Never thought I'd pull that off. Ever.
• My weight now is 195 pounds. That's 85 pounds lost so far (I say so far because that puts me - believe it or not - still at an overweight BMI. 10 pounds to go.)
• Finally, I don't feel like a chump telling patients they need to lose weight to be healthy... and in fact, if I want to show them it can be done, I just point to the photo of me on my ID badge from September.

So, what were those mistakes that kept me from doing this earlier? Well, for three easy payments of $9.99 sent to.... just kidding! Here they are:

1. I thought QUALITY was more important than QUANTITY.


Healthy eating is important for disease prevention - I ate multigrain bagels and chose sugar-free fruit juice for years, never buying pop, chips, donuts or cookies... and only gained weight.

Consider this: I would go to Tim Horton's for a snack between morning classes and proudly ate a healthy 12 grain bagel with cream cheese, instead of what I really wanted - a chocolate glazed donut. Despite my choice being overall more healthy, I was eating 471 calories of healthy goodness instead of the 260 calories in the donut - almost DOUBLE! If I ate one of those bagels every day, and didn't jog for half an hour to burn off those extra 471 calories, I would gain almost 50...that's right, FIFTY... extra pounds in a year.

So, I changed my mindset to cut down on how much food I ate, instead of just choosing healthy foods. And wouldn't you know it, the pounds started coming off. That's why I like to tell people I started on the "put less stuff in me diet."

2. I used to only think of my weight when I stepped on a scale.

In order to actually make a difference and lose weight, my goal to lose weight had to become something I thought of every minute of every day, not just for the moment when I stepped on a scale in the morning.

I knew you had to eat less to lose weight, but I always found myself only thinking about this between meals, and forgetting about it when the food was in front of me.

So what had to change? Every decision I made, such as getting in the elevator, and every time I put something in my mouth, such as my morning coffee or cereal, had to be filtered through the perspective of "how could I change this to increase calories burned or decrease calories taken in?" The answers were easy - take the stairs instead, switch to milk in my coffee, only 1 bowl of cereal instead of 2 (okay, who am I kidding, 3). I just had to ask myself the question...dozens of times in a day, before I did anything.

My weight loss goals had to be something that influenced everything I did and every thought I had. Sure, it might sound a bit obsessive, but after years of unsuccessfuly trying to "eat healthy," for me, that's what it took - a complete mindset change.

3. I didn't use a simple strategy to overcome my hatred of exercise.

I hate exercising. I was able to run regularly for a while a few years ago, but that dropped off. I didn't really have anything to keep me going.

But now I found three things to keep me getting out there and exercising. First, I combined exercise with diet modification - and started to see results. Seeing the weight come off, and having people comment on it, is a great way to keep you excited about getting out and running.

Secondly, I began to time myself, and try to break my records. I got RunKeeper, a free app for my iPhone, and tracked how long it took me to run a certain time. The next time, I would try to run the same distance just a second or two faster.

Thirdly, I signed up for a 10k race. This gave me a goal to work towards, and an exciting event to participate in when the day finally came.

Now I just have to come up with a way to overcome my even more intense hatred of lifting weights...

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Never trust a skinny chef. A fat doctor, however...

U.S. President Obama with Dr . Benjamin, Surgeon General nominee. Source: The White House

Today's LA Times has an interesting piece about a new Surgeon General nominee in the USA, who herself is obese. Her nomination has generated discussion about whether or not doctors should be overweight.

Let me explain why this article caught my eye.

Last year, in a family practice rotation, I was in the room when my preceptor was counselling a patient on theimportance of losing weight to cut down his risk of heart and stroke (and countless other diseases). The patient was obviously feeling a bit sheepish about the lecture, and awkwardly tried to draw the attention away from his waistline. He pointed at me, and said, "Well, this guy will be needing to lose some weight too then, won't he?"

This was the first time somebody had said something about my weight since I was teased in high school, and afterwards, my preceptor apologized profusely for the behaviour of his patient. However, even though it was a bit more surprising and amusing to me than offensive, he did have a point.

At that point, I was 6' and weighed almost 280 lbs. That means my BMI was 38.0 - not just obese, but class 2 obese... and my disease risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes was a few pounds short of extremely high.

If you think this is starting to read like a diet book, it actually does. I had always "eaten healthy," and had even done some jogging in the past. My list of reasons to lose weight was long...pages long. But not long enough to get me to have a healthy weight.

At the start of third year, my list of reasons to lose weight got longer. I began to spend over 8 hours a day seeing patients....most of whom were fat, and most of whom were dying or very sick... because they were fat.

In fact, every ward I rotated on showed me new ways people were suffering from obesity. I expected to see fat people with heart attacks on the cardiology wards, but I began to see obesity-related diseases and complications in ALL of my other rotations, almost ENTIRELY due to the patients' obesity, in other words, PREVENTABLE - in orthopedics, ophthalmology, surgery, maternity, emergency, dermatology, anesthesia, and scarily enough, even in pediatrics.

I knew that obesity caused disease, but that didn't really frighten me. Until I saw the complications of the diseases first-hand. They can lead to heart failure (which is a slow death with fluid in your lungs just like drowning), heart attack (pain and sudden death), stroke (paralysis and loss of ability to speak), dementia (to the nursing home we go, and hand in your driver's licence and memories of your family and friends on the way), permanent loss of sensation (can't tell if you stepped on a tack, so it could stay in your foot for WEEKS until you notice - yes I have seen this happen), osteoarthritis (waking up with pain in your knees every single morning increasing until you can't walk anymore), limb amputation (I have seen black toes and feet from the arteries getting so clogged with fat that they stop supplying blood to the feet) and blindness (a complication of diabetes). All because of obesity...all almost entirely preventable.

Seeing all this helped me get my butt in gear. I took a close look at my lifestyle and eating habits, and was surprised to find some mistakes that I was making. That's right - I discovered that even as a reasonably bright, educated medical student, there were simple things staring me right in the face, easy things to change in order to lose weight, that I was oblivious to (I'll talk about these in another post shortly).

And soon, I began to see results. Dramatic results. I've lost so much weight that people barely recognize me anymore.

Continued at Part 2: Vitum Loses 85 Pounds...and the mistakes that kept me from doing it earlier

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