My Ever-Changing Attitude Towards My Body Weight

In the winter of 2004-2005, at the age of 28, I was getting ready to embark on a 23-day water fast in Costa Rica. Before the trip, I got stricter with my diet. I was told it was best to follow a diet of fruits and vegetables with no nuts, avocados or grains in the weeks leading up to water fast.

The day before my flight, I stayed at my girlfriends, who was going to take me the airport that day. Well, to be honest, it wasnt exactly my girlfriend. She was my ex-girlfriend, and we hadnt seen each other for a while. In any case, the point I want to make is that when she saw me take off my shirt, she told me, Wow, Fred, you got a six pack! I remember it clearly because its the first and last time in my life anyone ever made a comment about my abs!

When I arrived in Costa Rica, Dr. Doug Graham picked me up at the airport, and I joined the other members of my fasting group at the hotel in San Jose. The next morning, we had a big breakfast of fruit, and then headed off to Uvita, a 3-hour trip at the time. On the van, I asked Doug, when will we have our last meal before the fast? He answered swiftly, you just had your last meal at the hotel! To my disappointment, the fast had already started.

In Uvita, Doug weighed us. I weighted something around 139 pounds and some change.I was by far the skinniest person who would fast. Most fasters would reach a similar weight after the fast!

Im 510 (178 cm) so under 140 pounds at the time, was definitely at my most skinny weight. As I had recently learned, it was apparently also my six-pack weight.

My lowest weight, after 23 days of water fasting, was 115 pounds, right before I broke the fast. Then, it went up to 125 pounds, as soon as I started eating food and my glycogen reserves replenished. When I left the fasting retreat, after several weeks (because I also attended a walking tour event with Doug and another group), I weighed 130-135 pounds.

Me at my lowest weight of 115, in 2005, after my fast.

I was uncomfortable at that weight. Doug discouraged me to try to put on body fat. He told me to just put on more muscle! But I wasnt enthused to be at such a low body fat. I wanted desperately to put on more weight and look more normal.

Not everyone saw it that way. I remember meeting a Costa Rican, amateur cyclist, who told me enviously I had a Lance Armstrong weight. He was fit but with a bit of gut, and wished he could be in the single digits of body fat, like me.

My Relationship With My Weight

Because I started my interest for the raw food diet at such a young age, I dont think I developed a normal relationship with my weight, and I never had the motivation to get lean, like most people.

The journey that led most people to try a raw food diet was the following:

The Middle-Age Crisis Journey

• Eat a SAD diet and party in your twenties.
• Get fat in your thirties.
• Get sick in your forties or fifties.
• Go raw with the motivation to get fit, lean and healthy.

My personal journey was more the following:

• Eat a raw food diet in your twenties and early thirties. Struggle, get too skinny and give up too many times.
• Catch up on the action you missed when you were younger and get a little fat in your late thirties and early forties,
• Get motivated to get back on track at middle-age.

I have no idea how much I weighed when I was a teenager. But I know that my weight for most of my twenties as a raw-foodist was around 145 pounds.

After my 23-day fast, when I started eating again, I overshot my weight. Only later would I learn about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, when it was demonstrated that people under a long period of caloric deficit tend to overshoot their weight at the end of the starvation period and end up gaining 10 to 15% more weight than they started with.

In most of my early thirties, my weight hovered in the range of 150-155. I liked that weight because I was lean but didnt appear to be skinny.

At my weight of around 150-155, in my thirties.

At that point, my attitude towards my weight was to try to stay at a certain weight and not go under it.

For example, when I followed an 80-10-10 diet, I was counting calories but not to diet, but rather, to make sure I was eating enough! I tried to get at least 2500 calories a day.

At the age of 36-37, things started to change. When I got divorced and moved back to Quebec, I wanted a complete life change.One of my goals was to change my physique and look buff. So, I started seriously going to the gym and hired a personal trainer. I took the training seriously and gained muscle AND fat at the same time, an experience that will be familiar to many bodybuilders.

I reached the weight of 170-172 pounds, and I looked more muscular, but I didnt have a beach body, like my trainer, who was at the exact same height as me, but weighed 160 pounds. He told me that after training like this, I needed to go on a cutting diet and reach a caloric deficit to lose the extra body fat I had gained.

My buff-fat weight of 172 pounds, in 2013.

But my bodybuilding ambitions ended when I seriously hurt my back and put my training on hold.

What had happened in the meantime was that my body had achieved a new set point a new weight at which it naturally wanted to go back to. My new set point was 170 pounds or so.

My Attitudes Towards My Weight Today

With all these experiences under my belt, I have changed my mindset on what is a healthy weight. I realize that in my twenties and thirties, I was overly concerned about my appearance, hence my worry to look too skinny. I was also surrounded by people who were sometimes truly too skinny or obsessed by every extra ounce of body fat.

When I talked to people who had trouble losing weight, I thought they were crazy. I try thought that they must have been pounding the chocolate cakes non-stop to reach their obese weight. I didnt think that it could happen slowly to a person over the course of a lifetime and then it became very difficult to reverse course.

Now that Im on a new path of return to health, Im just like a normal person who wants to become leaner. Id like to go back to my old happy weight of 155 pounds, which seemed to have been the best for me. It may not be low enough for a six-pack, but it will be good enough for me.

But 155 pounds corresponds to a BMI under 23, which less than 12.5% of the American population has. According to Dr. Fuhrman, most of these leaner people are at their weight because of medical conditions or because they are alcoholic or smokers. He claims that only 2.5% of the American population has a BMI under 23 as a consequence of a healthy lifestyle. He also states that a BMI under 23 is ideal, which for me, would be at 159 pounds or lower.

Today, I weighed 164 pounds. If I told anyone that Im still trying to lose another 10 pounds, they would think Im absolutely crazy. I already look pretty lean at my age compared to everyone else. But I know that its only an illusion and that I still have a certain amount of body fat to shed in order to be at a true ideal weight.

In the almost 20 years that have passed since I did my fast in Costa Rica, the obesity crisis got even worse. Dr. Fuhrmans numbers make sense to me, and match what I see around me.

I noticed that due to the fat acceptance movement, more and more ads feature overweight or obese people. In the past, we tented to idealize leanness, and now this attitude is becoming associated with racism and misogyny.

There are good elements about helping people avoid the psychological stress associated with being obese, but my fear is that as fewer and fewer people are lean, well start to forget what a healthy human being should look like.

Have your thoughts about weight evolved over time? Comment here.

Frederic