A man, his weight, and his secret desire to be pretty(er): vanity and weight loss Part 1

Continuing on the theme of exploring mannish views on weight and weight loss, I have been thinking a lot recently about vanity.  [If you happen to know me personally, I would greatly appreciate if you could extinguish the snickering and withhold any snarky comments that might be traipsing down your tongue.  Just because I'm an easy target doesn't justify shooting me.  At least not all the time.]

For ages, it seems, women have been dealing with all the issues of body image, which has all sorts of impact on how they think about weight and weight loss.  Much has been written about this in too many places to count.  That said, I would definitely support the school of thought that the media does no favors with its ritual practice of creating unattainable and unhealthy body image.    If rock hard abs in a bikini or size -2 dress is the only definition of weight loss success, I suspect we are all quite doomed to a life of abject misery.  And frankly as a population, we deserve much better than that. 

But what about men and body image?  How does this work with the swarthy crowd?

As I often do, I will attempt to explore this topic by looking at myself and then naturally extrapolating to all men on planet Earth (I cannot speak for men from other planets or universes.  I just haven't met them.)  My plan is to explore this in a few posts, starting with the beginning of my weight gain.

To put this in a framework, let's kick it off with a fun fact.  According to regular polling done by Gallup over the years, roughly 33% people who are trying to lose weight are doing it for looks, 33% are doing it for health and 33% are doing it for both.  Said differently, despite all the recent (and extremely justified) focus on obesity as a health issue, vanity still plays a big part in the mix.  According to Gallup, men are somewhat more likely to cite health as a driver behind their weight loss, but not nearly as much as you might think.  But what role did vanity play for me? 

As I laid out in my very first couple of posts, I did not grow up with a weight issue.  In fact, I struggled to put weight on.  It seemed that no matter what I ate, I couldn't gain weight all the way through high school.  What I now realize is that my life before college was actually pretty nutritionally reasonable despite how I might have imagined my occasional binge behaviors.

Then college happened, and I started to gain weight through a regular diet of campus starch, beer, pizza, fried chicken, BBQ (to put it in perspective, I went to college in North Carolina).  I went from 6'3" and 175 lbs in high school to 210 pounds freshman year of college.  Truth be told, I much preferred the way I looked by the end of college as I was able to finally escape the heroin chic look that I couldn't quite shed in HS.  I also stayed pretty fit, so it was all good.

All of this would have been great had I not continued to keep packing on the pounds over the next 15 years.  Like a lot of guys, I would gain about 2-5 pounds per year, and then sometimes go back down a few pounds.  It was a slow, but inexorable creep.  However, when my career really started to pick up after business school, I shattered every weight milestone I had ever known.  At my measured peak, I was clocking in at a not too healthy 242 pounds (see reprint of the "who ate dave" picture to the right).

So how did that make me feel?  I've thought about that quite a bit over the past year.  I would not say that I was obsessive or grief stricken about my weight.  As a pretty tall guy, I was able to hide it with the right kind of clothes.  Also, it seemed that many of the guys I knew were dealing with the same issue.

Yet, I knew deep down that something was wrong with this picture.  First off, there was the doctor and life insurance person giving me a hard time about my weight.  I don't think they were doing so because they were bored or evil/spiteful -- I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol.  Second, there was the inescapable truth that I had to see myself without the benefit of camouflaging outfits every morning in the shower and in the mirror.  I remembered the TV ads from years ago with the line "if you can pinch more than an inch...".  Well, I could pinch an order of magnitude above that.  I did not like that way that made me feel.  That thing that women do when they describe performing a cruel body critique in the mirror?  I did that too.  You know what?  It's kind of a crummy way to start the morning.

So, if it made me feel badly, why?  First, the obvious answer.  It's not a great look.  I guess that makes me shallow, but I feel honesty is useful here.  No matter how hard I tried to suck it in, my layers of flab were an inescapable and not awesome looking truth.  Second, I didn't like what it symbolized about me.  I did not view being out of shape to be a great statement on me as a person.  I felt like it was evidence of a lack of discipline and hard work.  In truth, I was secretly embarrassed by the state of affairs. 

When I got my offer to work at Weight Watchers in early 2000, I publicly talked about the awesomeness of the opportunity when describing it to my friends, but I also was secretly  looking forward to a possible fix for this hidden (semi-hidden, anyway) and vexing issue.  I wanted Weight Watchers to make me look good naked.  TMI?  Fine.  I wanted Weight Watchers to make me look good in a swim suit. 

Health was an awesome reason to get in better shape, clean up my diet, etc., but want for vanity was my secret X factor.

To be continued...

Cheers,

dk