Clothes Don't Make The Man

If you look at my Facebook page, you will find the quote “90% of my wardrobe is aspirational.”

Trust me when I say it was an expression of pure frustration that I blurted out to my wife one night as I was tipping the scales and no longer fitting into any of my usual shtunky, dumpy fat clothes.

Ever since I was a little boy, shopping for something nice to wear has always been a bit of a challenge.

While others would enjoy buying new clothes for school, I always seemed to come away from the experience traumatized. Every time I would go shopping with my mom, she would hand me piles of clothes and march me into the dressing room. You can imagine the embarrassment of exiting that little room with one or two items that fit.

After years of this, I came to look at shopping for clothes as my own personal version of water boarding. I became resigned to settling for whatever limited choices I could find that were available in my ever expanding size.

These days, as I have been navigating the downward slope, I have finally begun to find some excitement in what I wear.

You see, over the years I have assembled quite a wardrobe of nicer clothes that I purchased on a whim with the hope that one day I would actually squeeze into that 2X shirt instead of the 4X size I was wearing when I bought it.

I call this silliness aspirational shopping.

Yes, it sounds crazy, but when you are a Big and Tall customer and you see something that vaguely looks nice – dare I say "stylish" - you’ll plop down your credit card even if you can’t fit into it.

You do so, because as a general rule, most of what you find on the racks at these stores is way beyond pitiful. Beyond beyond, actually. It’s as though there isn’t a fat fashion designer in the entire world.

You get so desperate for something decent that when you see stuff you like, you buy it hoping that you will finally get your act together and lose the weight just so you can fit into something nice.

Now intentionally assembling an “aspirational” wardrobe is tremendously stupid if you are hoping it will serve as some sort of impetus to get you off your ass and start seriously dieting.

Trust me when I say it doesn’t work. Save yourself the hundreds if not thousands of dollars now.

Only now am I finally fitting into purchases that I made more than 10 years ago. And I am very much enjoying my new wardrobe. But there is a catch. I am also feeling a bit like a fat version of Benjamin Button. Pants, belts and shirts that are tight one week are like a big clown suit a week or two later.

As I have become leaner and leaner, I have grown out of entire portions of my wardrobe.

For weeks, I have been tossing things I can no longer wear onto a pile in my closet. This week, that mountain of discarded clothes grew beyond control and I forced myself to put all of it into a giant box.

As I was packing away this baggage from my larger past, a voice deep within kicked into high gear.

“Steve, are you really going to give this stuff to Goodwill? What happens if you gain your weight back? What will you wear?”

When you are big, no matter how well your diet is going – no matter how much weight you have lost, you live in constant fear of relapse.

I am a weight worrywart at heart. Given the yo-yo of my dieting life, I just can’t help it.

My cousin’s father had a saying that she has framed in her kitchen: “today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” In a nutshell, that captures my neurosis perfectly.

Once I hit a weight loss groove like this, it’s my nature to worry as I wonder when the other shoe will drop. Because in the past, when that shoe drops, it drops hard.

The difference for me now is the recognition that diets end. But when you are changing your life while also trying to keep your family on a new path, the commitment must be forever.

A few weeks back while watching The Biggest Loser, the contestants were forced into a challenge where they had to run over these huge dirt hills while dragging heavy sand bags representing all the weight they had lost.

So if a woman shed 150 pounds, she had to carry 150 pounds of weight in these sacks thru the challenge, dropping some of her bags only after she hit certain course markers.

At the finish line, the contestants were forced to heave their remaining weight sacks over a steep cliff.

It was a powerful moment as these much thinner contestants triumphantly threw their “fat” off the mountain.

Now it doesn’t take Dr. Freud to figure out the symbolism of such a bold act, so why do I feel so challenged by getting rid of a bunch of clothes now 8 sizes too big?

For years, whenever I lost weight, I never got rid of the old sizes. I always kept them on hand as a safety net for the inevitable day when I gained it back.

So now I have this huge overflowing box sitting in my room and I have been torturing myself with this question of whether to keep the clothes, God forbid my best dieting intentions get swallowed whole along with a few hundred pizzas.

I am who I am, and now the decision has been made. Today, the box is leaving the house. I can’t shake my past but I sure can give some of it to Goodwill.

The dieter’s roller coaster takes such a terrible toll on your psyche when you have lived your life resigned to an existence you genuinely don’t desire.

To me, the act of sending the box to charity is just as important and just as bold as those contestants throwing their fat off the cliff.

For the first time, I am saying to myself “it’s not coming back.” I find it much more insidious and even dangerous knowing that my emergency fat suit is tucked away on a hanger just waiting for my return.

I know I can’t afford to have those clothes in my life anymore.

Now if you know me, you may know I am a pack rat. I keep everything. Every closet in my house – upstairs and downstairs – is filled to the rafters with crap I can’t wear. Woefully out of fashion, I am sure somewhere in the house is some husky sized bell-bottoms from the 70s. It’s truly that bad.

My pack rat mentality goes well beyond lunacy, but it is perhaps the surest sign that I have lived my life in perpetual hope that one day I would be able to correct my behavior and set a new course.

And I truly believe for the first time in my life, I am going to be able to stick to this life change. Why? Because I am eating my way thin for the right reasons instead of starving myself with fad liquid diets.

As I have been rummaging through row upon row of hangers in my closet trying to discover what still fits, it really is amazing how much your clothes tell you about your life.

Forget that I have no fashion sense.

That is either a given or a true restriction of shopping at Rochester’s Big & Tall.

But as I was getting rid of my jumbo sized pants, I began pulling hanger after hanger off the racks. To me, the sheer number of pants I had in those sizes meant I had been in that weight zone for years.

As I moved down from size to size, I could tell that I put that weight on quickly because I only had a one or two pairs of those smaller sizes.

I am currently very close to a plateau size that is almost 10 inches smaller than where I began my journey.

What do I mean by plateau size?

I mean that as I hit this new level, it’s the mother lode of clothes from the early to mid 90s. I must have been that size for years and years judging by the number of pants I have waiting for me.

Fitting into clothes I purchased in the 90s and beyond is like stepping into a time machine.

This week I literally had to scrape a huge layer of dust off a suit that had been hanging in my closet for almost 13 years. It was a suit I bought around the time I lost a bunch of weight for my wedding. When I bought this particular two-piece, I had just been promoted and wanted to wear more dignified duds.

To me, the clothes tell a story of a distant past.

So as I once again fit into these old friends, I am transported to another time in my life when I am sure I was just as committed to weight loss and keeping it off permanently as I am today.

You all know that I have always yearned to be thinner and my collection of clothes is also a vivid reminder of how that commitment can fade.

I probably only wore that suit a few times before it no longer fit and the irony now is that I may only be able to wear it a few times more before it becomes a baggy shell.

I have far too many memories of growing out of clothes as I moved up the scale, but this is really one of the rare times I can recall the process in reverse. And that is as exhilarating as it is foreign.

Right now everything old is new again.

My friends think I have a whole new wardrobe. Little do they know I spent the money years ago. In this economy, it’s the kind of shopping I like most.

For years and years, my wife and I had a code word for fat people. Whenever we would see someone obscenely obese, we would whisper “truth” to each other.

It was an acknowledgement that said basically, “Yes, Steve, you are fat, but look at him. You are nowhere near as fat as that guy over there. Truth.” Well, I am finally getting rid of my “truth” clothes.

I want to lose another 100 pounds. My doctor thinks that’s ambitious but we will see. He says go for what is maintainable, not what is attainable. In a few more weeks, I should be half way to my goal.

I know I still have a long, long way to go, but I look forward to the day when I can shop in any clothing store I want.

As proud as I am with all the success we have enjoyed, for me the true measure of my life change will be when Rochester is no longer my clothes store, he’s just Jack Benny’s butler.


 Copyright, Steve Elzer, 2009
All Rights Reserved

Do You Want To Know A Secret?: A Special Mother's Day Message

(In celebration of Mother's Day, Amy has written this week's Elzer Family Update. This is my wife's first post and I love her as much as I love her unique perspective on our diet. There is no question in my mind that without Amy's passion and desire for our success and her endless devotion and support, we would all have quit this program on Day 4 or 5. On this special day where we honor the family matriarch, I thank Amy for holding my hand during this difficult journey and I send all my love to my best friend and soulmate. The photo above is a tribute to Amy and her mother, Mary. -- Happy Mother's Day!!!! )

“What’s your secret?” that’s something Steve and I have been hearing a lot lately.

It’s a question that always gives me pause.

I have to think about it each time it comes up in conversation. Is it the diet, is it the increased exercise, or are the planets in just the right alignment?

Like Steve, I have been heavy from childhood and I have tried numerous diets. So what is so different this time around?

Let me be clear about this; Steve had an epiphany, I did not. He was in pain for weeks. Pain, that the kids and I could not understand, suffering that we could not help him with. He lay in that bed upstairs, in agony, examining and re-examining his life and his choices. You all know what he decided to do, but how in the heck did we become involved?

When I said those fateful words in the doctor’s office that day, “okay, we’ll all do it!” I had no idea then what it would mean. Actually, I may have said it hoping Steve would reject the idea and go it alone as he had in the past.

Sure, the kids and I could stand to lose a few pounds, but I didn’t really want to diet. I didn’t really think at my age it would be easy or productive. I thought I’d have to starve myself, I thought I’d be deprived and who needs that? Rather, I had been subscribing to a “love me as I am” policy. I have a husband and children who love me as I am, what would be the point? Nope, dieting was not for me!

I decided I would just be happy the way I was!

“People come in all shapes and sizes,” I told the kids when they asked me if I thought they were fat. “You are so much more than how you look on the outside,” I would say. “You are funny and smart, you have lots of friends, you are beautiful…” I was becoming Stuart Smalley!

But my “Daily Affirmations”, weren’t helping, we were just getting bigger and bigger.

Steve was desperately afraid the kids would have the same problems we did growing up. He wanted to spare them. I wanted them to be happy, enjoy their childhood, and more than anything else not become freaked out about weight or how they looked. I wanted them to focus on being good people, having kind hearts, and improving their minds. If they decided later that they wanted to make a change, then let it be their decision, not something we forced on them.

I was frightened of giving them the message that they weren’t good enough, that we didn’t love them exactly the way they were.

So what changed?

Okay, get ready to roll your eyes and cue the sappy soundtrack! Love. Yes, you heard me, love. It was pretty clear to me that I wasn’t going to do this for me, I had many opportunities to change things and I didn’t. I looked at Steve, saw the pain in his eyes, found myself glancing again and again at a sink covered in diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol medicines and I realized that he couldn’t do it alone.

If we wanted Daddy around for a long, long time, we needed to make damn sure he succeeded! I stepped into the breech for him, and I dragged the kids along with me.

I can’t help but think this makes me a fraud and a phony. I did this for them, not for me, so when people tell me I look great, I say, “yeah, but have you seen Lucas and Hannah!”

I expound on how my husband is no longer on any diabetes medication and he is being weaned off his few remaining prescriptions.

Sure, I’ve lost weight, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as what everyone else has accomplished. I search the internet for recipes, not because I like to cook, (and anyone who knows me, knows that I do not like to cook) but because I need to keep it fresh for them.

Everyday I rejoice at the hurdles they overcome, or steer them in the right direction when they just can’t imagine another day without a cookie or a slice of pizza.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that I’ve lost 50 pounds. I mean I really love it! I’ll admit I did a happy dance when I fit into a size that I haven’t been in over 10 years! But I realize that’s it’s not just about me, and in the past when it has been, it hasn’t lasted. So maybe I’ve had my epiphany after all!

The “secret” of course, is not the diet or the exercise: shock, surprise, those things work.

The key is the motivation, what gets you going, what keeps you going. It can be as simple and sweet as wanting to look good in your wedding dress or as complicated and intense as not wanting to be in pain or on medication the rest of your life.

My “secret” is my family, the transformation I see in them, the joy on their faces when someone tells them they look great, the delight over looking good in a pair of skinny jeans!

Ensuring their success, guarantees my own. No, I wasn’t going to do it for me, but I would do anything for them.

I’m a Mom, it’s what I do!

 Copyright, Amy Elzer, 2009 All Rights Reserved

The 69 Pound Haircut

Top photo taken September, 2008 - Bottom Photo Taken May, 2009

If you stick to any diet long enough, you reach a certain point when people start to notice change.

Beyond those who were aware of my progress from the blog and facebook, I started to hear comments at the end of the first month.

They began as a trickle.

Acquaintances would pass me in the hall and do a double take. They noticed something, but they couldn’t quite put their finger on it.

They looked and stared for an extra second or two, and I could tell they were stumped.

Gently they would ask questions like “did you get a haircut?”

It’s interesting how people who casually know you broach the delicate topic of weight.

When dealing with biggies, the small among us really do everything possible to avoid calling attention to one’s girth. Unless you bring up the topic yourself, the conversation is generally considered taboo.

Now it doesn’t make a difference that you are a walking candidate for gastric bypass. Any conversation that involves your looks is literally and figuratively like pointing to the elephant in the room.

But when you have been on the diet teeter totter for your entire life, you come to realize that the haircut question is actually a sincere acknowledgement that people are noticing progress.

Believe me, “did you get a haircut?” is a helluva lot better than the questions you receive when you know you have been a very, very, very bad boy.

The flip side to “the haircut question” is when your friends ask whether you have “lost a few” in some pseudo reverse psychology voodoo mind trick to get you to look at yourself in the mirror.

This very different encounter normally occurs weeks into the binge that will not end when you can barely squeeze into your elastic waistband pants, your buttons are about to burst and you are about to visit the neighborhood Big & Tall because nothing seems to fit.

Yes, in my experience, the larger I would get, the more I would hear the question, “are you losing weight?”

Strange, right?

Make no mistake, I knew these inquiries were really just code for “get a grip, man.” Adults are just too polite to state the obvious. Unlike little children.

Toddlers have no button that helps them edit their etiquette. That’s why little kids are the fat guy’s sworn mortal enemy.

When you are big and you step onto a crowded elevator and see a strange 3-year-old holding mama’s hand, your blood pressure spikes and little beads of sweat start to form on your forehead.

You offer the child your most friendly smile in the hopes that the cute little shit can just hold it together and keep his trap shut for four more floors.

But every now and then you get haunted by junior who looks you dead in the eye and blurts out “mommy, that man is really fat.”

Kids are viciously cruel in the most innocent way.

When you consider what my fat brothers and sisters hear from strange kids and even their co-workers, is it any wonder that when you are living La Vida Gordo you can be very schizophrenic about your appearance.

You can pass a friend in the hall and be thinking “please don’t look at me, I’m feeling large today” while also simultaneously thinking “why haven’t you noticed how much weight I have lost.”

This constant “notice me,” “don’t notice me” can put you thru hell. It’s like you’re dieting with Sybil.

In recent weeks, the changes we have been working towards have become much more apparent to anyone who knows us.

Each member of the family has been showered with affection as friends, school mates, neighbors and colleagues see the remarkable difference in our weight.

Since the last time I blogged two weeks ago, I have dropped another 7 pounds and the grand total is now 69 pounds since January. Amy has lost another 5 pounds and she has now lost 46 pounds. The kids have dropped more than 30 pounds a piece. So at this point, you would have to be the least observant person in the world to miss the changes that have occurred in all of us.

For instance yesterday I took Lucas to get a haircut. The stylist couldn’t believe his eyes. He told me Lucas looks like a completely different person. And he also said that he believed he could see the change in my son’s outlook and confidence. I totally agree.

When we came home, I was treated to a fashion show. While I was out running errands with Lukey, Amy took Hannah to the mall to buy some new clothes.

She said she was in tears as my daughter easily slipped into jeans 4 sizes smaller than when we began this journey in January!

And Amy too receives as much wonderful support and encouragement from her friends as I do from mine.

She said that one of the school administrators was marveling over her miraculous transformation and she asked Amy if it was “OK” to talk about how far she had come.

“OK?”

God, when you work as hard as we have and begin to achieve your dreams, you want to scream it from the rooftops. Or, you just start a blog ☺

Of course each one of us is paralyzed with fear that we will gain our weight back.

But for now we have finally come full circle, haven’t we?

We are well beyond “did you get a haircut?” and we are now at the point where people mean it when they ask us if “we have lost a few.”

 Steve Elzer, 2009
All Rights Reserved

Spicing up the Diet: Our Experiment With Cauliflower Crust Pizza

The photos above were taken last night as Amy experimented with our most daring and innovative recipe yet: Cauliflower Crust Pizza!  The Photos from bottom to top show the progression of the preparation step-by-step.  I have to say that I was intrigued and was really not sure what to expect but being the food-starved foodie that I am, I was game. The result was really pretty good. I kept saying "interesting," but I didn't mean it in a bad way. Amy tinkered a bit with the ingredients, using egg beaters instead of egg and non-fat cheese, but overall, it was really a fascinating and thoroughly original take on one of my classic comfort foods.  When you are dieting, you need to be bold and spice things up with food choices within your plan to keep the program fresh and alive. Too much of the same thing over and over again gets boring real fast.  Here is the recipe for anyone adventurous enough to try this at home. 

http://www.examiner.com/x-355-Low-Carb-Examiner~y2008m10d3-Loaded-low-carb-pizza-puts-Papa-Murphys-to-the-test

Amy recommends you double or even triple the "dough" recipe.

The Day I Survived An Hour on The Treadmill & Lived to Tell About It

Yesterday I spent an hour on a treadmill and it didn’t kill me.

After a very, very long hour as the seconds ticked towards the 60:00 minute mark, I began to smile.

There I was, drenched in sweat and throwing my hands above my head in a giant “V” for victory. I felt like Rocky at the end of his work out after running up the stairs.

In my mind, this personal moment of glory was recognition I had just completed a fete that I would have never deemed imaginable just a few short months ago.

When all was said and done, the digital display told me I had burned nearly 650 calories during this very productive hour of my life. It also indicated I had walked nearly 3.5 miles.

And for practically every step, I felt very much like a fat hamster wanting nothing more than to get off the wheel.

Let me state unequivocally I really, truly, bitterly hate exercise. And I mean that seriously. I hate it with all my heart and soul. But I have been forcing myself to go to the gym pretty routinely since I began this life change.

Who would have thunk that something as simple as diet and exercise actually works?

For many reasons, I never was able to successfully crack the code on this simple concept. But I guess my back trouble rang the bell and triggered a magic epiphany.

So for the last several months, I have been doing a lot of cardio and a modest amount of weight lifting all the while building up the amount of time I am able to stay on the treadmill.

Whatever I am now doing is seemingly working. My methods may be less than polished, but I am not doing this with a trainer.

The last time I worked out with a trainer, I just used the exercise as an excuse to leave the gym and eat more.

So this time, I am training myself.

I started working out on the circuit machines and on the treadmill gradually. But for the last few weeks I began hitting 45 minutes pretty regularly. I even started getting ambitious, futzing around with various buttons that control the speed and incline as I went for my stroll.

Now I know you will cringe when you hear this, but the treadmills at my gym have these televisions where you can watch your choice of shows while you are exercising. My preferred programming is The Food Network. Yes, other folks are watching ESPN, Extreme Sports and other Alpha Male programming like Fox News. I am watching cooking challenges.

Hey, as far as I am concerned there is nothing like Rachel Ray, Giada De Laurentiis or The Barefoot Contessa to get the heart pumping.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

On Saturday, I wanted to move the cardio goal post to a place on the field where I have never, ever been before. So I threw caution to the wind and went for it: a full hour.

I even “jogged” on the damn thing for part of the time, though I use that term about as loosely as one can.

You look at most people jogging on a treadmill and you don’t see fat people. You see fit people.

They jog confidently with their hands at their sides extended at 90-degree angles. When they jog, their outstretched fists look like they should be connecting with a punching bag.

I, on the other hand, look more like a rather rotund fella moving at a pace maybe one or two notches beyond brisk. My fists are not moving back and forth against my side in that proverbial jogger motion because, let’s face it, my hands are too busy holding the rails in a death grip to make sure I don’t go flying off the back of the treadmill.

For those brief few moments yesterday when I bravely decided to juice up the speed and begin my “jog,” the look on my face was anything but confident.

Panic probably captures it more accurately.

I imagine in time I will become more at ease with jogging on a treadmill. But for my first experience, I was as clumsy as a virgin. And I probably lasted just about as long as one too.

My goal moving forward is to do what I can to increase my jogging on the treadmill, but for now, walking for 60 minutes is my new 45 as I step on the conveyer belt of torture.

And as hard as all of this is for a man who despises exercise, I welcome the challenge.

Never in a million years could I have dreamed of a day where I would settle into a routine of diet and exercise to lose my weight.

You see, when it comes to dieting, I have always considered myself more a short cut kind of guy. My motto was “when in doubt, take the easy route.” Probably a reason I flirted with the idea of gastric bypass. It’s also the reason I tried and failed at diets with liquid protein shakes.

I was a magnet to any plan that seemed like it was the path of least resistance.

But now my family and I are burning it off one calorie at a time and there is nothing easy about this route. There are no shortcuts.

I am not the only one exercising. Amy also regularly goes to aerobics classes and the kids get plenty of activity between physical education at school and their daily dose of soccer, softball, karate, basketball or whatever the sport of the moment is in suburbia.

Friday will mark the end of our third month following this regimen. And when I think about how far we have all come in radically transforming our lives it truly brings tears to my eyes. But then again, so does jogging on a treadmill, so just call me Mr. Weepy.

Those who have been following the blog probably sensed from my last post that I was a bit unsure of how we fared on our family vacation to Lake Tahoe.

I admit that I was nervous, apprehensive and more than anxious as we weighed in on Friday. For me, it had been 2 weeks since confronting the scale and while I knew I had been devout, I wasn’t sure about the rest of the clan. For Amy it had been 3 weeks since her last caloric confessional and for the kids, it was a month since they last met face-to-face with the all knowing and all telling.

To be honest, with all that time away from the scale, I was worried about whether the kids and Amy were sticking to the plan.

Why?

Well, I saw and heard things that gave me reason to pause. And watching the madness ensue with the cake was just one example.

A word to the wise: when your kids and wife are deprived of carbs and sugar for nearly three months, don’t be surprised if they attack their first chance at cake like a great white shark attacks a surfer when it discovers blood in the water.

So I guess after that savage scene of strawberries and whipped cream, I questioned whether we were lacking in real self-control – and when I say “we” I include me.

To say I was blown away to learn that my fears were unfounded would be an understatement.

Last Thursday night, I was preparing myself for weigh-in results that would have confirmed my suspicions of “rogue eating.”

But when I got the call from Amy on Friday morning, I was stunned to learn Hannah and Lucas lost 15 additional pounds last month.

So our family total since starting the diet together is 146 pounds. Add to that the 10 I lost while flat on my back and we have made a 156-pound dent in our weight loss goals.

Hannah & Lucas are now very close to completing this phase of the plan. They are shadows of their former selves with each of them dropping in the 30 pound range. Soon we are going to have a conversation with the doctor about a maintenance program for the kids.

And if that doesn’t fill me with enormous pride, nothing ever will.

I only wish I could have been in the room when they met their pediatrician last week for their annual check ups.

For years, we have been told the kids needed to drop a few. Well the two together have lost close to 60 pounds since starting this new chapter in their lives. Now the doctor wants to refer other families to our program.

Unfortunately, I wish I could say that others would be as successful as we have been but I can’t. Because it really all comes down to commitment and resolve. And, while I do believe it is a little easier to diet when you take on the challenge as a family and have a kick-ass support system of friends, there is still no quick fix to any of this.

At the end of the day, there is only one question that determines success. Do you want it bad enough? Are you finally ready to make a change?

That is the bottom line of any diet.

And like anyone who has battled losing weight their whole life, I have learned that any diet works as long as you stick to it. My God, The Cookie Diet works if you follow it faithfully.

The real question is what happens when you transition to other eating.

My hope is that we as a family have finally learned the fundamentals of real world dieting.

I see now how we can go on vacation or how I can attend a wine dinner or a nice night out with my wife without feeling deprived. And I see how all these traps are possible while still losing weight.

And that is a monster step in this process.

I still have more than 100 pounds to lose so I am a long way from reaching whatever finish line I have set. And the ultimate goal is to keep the weight off for good and that will be a struggle I will wage for the rest of my life. But I can’t even think that far into the future.

Today I am encouraged about all of the results to date and for lots of good reasons.

*I have NEVER followed a food program for three months – EVER.

*For the first time in my life, I actually feel in control.

*It has been nearly 10 years since my weight has been this low.

*I am just about ready to get a new belt and I am close to 8 inches smaller than I was last December.

*Amy hasn’t been this weight since before Hannah was born.

*By now my pharmacist is wondering what happened to one of his best customers.

And the kids – well, they are my heroes.

So I guess I have no choice but to stay on the hamster wheel and keep eating the hamster food.

And if you happen to be at the Spectrum Club in Valencia and you see a guy trying to run on a treadmill a minute or two at a time, the panicked look on his face is the look of someone who finally gets it.

 Steve Elzer, 2009

Let Them Eat Cake: A Dieter's Journey While on Vacation

Many of you are wondering why I haven’t posted in the past few weeks. Some may even be wondering whether I am off the grid because I have completely abandoned the diet.

Fear not, friends. The Elzer Family is safe – I hope.

One word.

Vacation.

This is a word that may as well signal the onslaught of overeating.

For me and countless others, vacation ranks up there with all-time gluttonous behavior. Sure, it’s a time to relax, enjoy and just let your self go.

But unless your vacation includes a visit to a fat farm, it may as well be like a license to over eat and over drink.

I don’t know about you, but when I go on vacation I bring an unbridled appetite to every meal and a nearly insatiable thirst to every bar.

Vacationing is like eating on steroids.

Picture all the food you can imagine at a buffet AND Thanksgiving AND a Luau and then cram all that eating into the course of one week.

In previous years when we would board a cruise ship, trust me, the chef was relieved when the Elzers disembarked.

So when we took off on a Family Vacation to Lake Tahoe last week, I was a bit apprehensive about how this was going to affect our diet.

After all, I believe a good deal of our success these past several months is anchored in our regimen: we pretty much cook for ourselves.

But when you go on vacation, you have very little control over how food is prepared. Does the chef cook with butter? How much oil? What size are the portions? What kind of rich sauces do they pour over the food? Will the menu be so filled with temptations that we will fall apart like a house of cards?

About a year ago, we joined a fantastic vacation club that gives us access to spectacular homes all over the world. On our previous trips to New York, Laguna Beach and Hawaii, we pretty much ate like starved savages. This time out, we were going to continue to cook on vacation like we did at home.

Except for one tiny hurdle.

I was especially nervous because the first night of our time away was Amy’s birthday. More than a month ago she threw down the pre-cheat gauntlet. She said she wanted to enjoy a piece of birthday cake on our first night of vacation.

I remember thinking we were gonna be colossally screwed.

Cake is like a Lay’s Potato Chip. You can’t have just one bite – or one slice.

But how could I say no to my wife’s birthday celebration?

I sided with Marie Antoinette and shrugged.

“Let them eat cake.”

Now originally, I am sure Amy was thinking “give me the richest, most decadent cake you can find.” Yes, she had more than earned it. But then something wonderful happened. In the weeks that followed, I watched as Amy began searching thru every diet cake recipe she could find.

She even severely burned herself experimenting with the flourless, sugarless chocolate cake.

I should say here and now it tasted pretty damned good - especially when I snuck a fork full after Amy dropped it and it splattered all over the kitchen floor. Perhaps it was the kitchen dirt that added texture and flavor cuz it just didn’t taste as good the second time she made the recipe and it didn’t fall on the floor.

And the non-fat cheesecake was also pretty satisfying and tasty considering most everything in it was allegedly fat-free.

So, as Amy was packing the car for our time away, I saw the springform pan for the cake she planned to bake for herself and I simultaneously smiled and frowned.

I arranged a surprise for Amy – a real birthday cake.

Never before have I been so conflicted over a frickin’ cake.

I agonized over the purchase and I knew by bringing this monster of custard and whip cream into our world, it could lead to disastrous consequences.

Being the gambling man, I just hoped that we were strong enough to enjoy the celebration and move on like normal people.

When we arrived at our home away from home, we had brought a lot of perishable food with us in a cooler. The first thing we did when we got to the house was place those items in the fridge. As soon as the Subzero door was opened, the gig was up. The cake was discovered.

From that point on, the kids went into nearly fanatical excitement and anticipation over what is really just well constructed flour, eggs, sugar and cream.

I had become the agent provocateur among us.

What had I done? Why couldn’t I just let Amy make her guilt free dessert? Why? Why? Why?

I wish I could answer those questions honestly, but I am not sure I know the answer myself.

I guess the only logical response is that deep down inside, I wanted the real deal crème de la whipped cream. It was a vacation after all, and normally, I pack a suitcase full of wine and we eat out nearly every night to the point of excess.

Maybe Amy’s pre-cheat had turned into my attempt at sabotage.

When it came down to dessert time, Amy thrust the cake knife into my heart. Since I brought this evil into our home, she wanted me to divvy up the servings. Whatever I decided, she and the kids would live with.

This cake thing was turning into my own personal hell.

I doled out respectable pieces of the cake – which for the people that need to know - was a white cake with a custard filling stuffed with strawberries and frosted with whipped cream. Yes, we prefer whipped cream to butter cream and please don’t even get me started on this frosting debate which is actually legendary in our lives.

Anyway, the pieces were not too large, nor too small. Like the three little bears, the pieces were just right.

Racked with insane guilt, I took the tiniest sliver of slivers and confirmed the obvious. The cake rocked like few cakes before.

This sad fact triggered the inevitable.

“I want another piece, Daddy,” was the thrust of what I heard for the better part of the remainder of the night.

One member of the family actually started to take the cake to their room and threatened to eat what was left. Then this person backtracked and decided it needed to be immediately put into the garbage disposal.

A fine idea except for one simple fact.

I quickly explained that we were in Lake Tahoe and I really didn’t think the disposal would handle the load. To me, the cake would clog its little septic system arteries like a cardiac patient gorging on a diet of rendered fat.

As one too many members of the family started to freak out about the outcome of the cake, I erupted. “Enough obsessing with the cake! OK?”

I decided we would give the cake to our concierge – the woman who was so helpful in arranging for its purchase. So the next day, while we were on a day trip, we begged her to enter the house and remove the cake before we returned.

Now, truth be told, after the kids and my mother in law had gone to bed, I was genuinely tempted to ask Amy whether she wanted a second piece of cake. But I just bit my tongue on that one.

For the rest of the trip, The Elzers were exceptionally good at sticking to the program. Amy and I even managed to enjoy a date night out that remained pretty faithful to our diet despite the chef’s best attempts to prepare food his way instead of ours.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me during our time away was my commitment to work out at the gym literally every day. Hannah even joined in on the treadmill a few days.

But with all the good – and there is plenty of good in our lives - I really have no idea whether we are moving in the right direction.

It has been three weeks since the kids have stepped on a scale. It’s been two weeks for Amy and it will be two weeks for me later this week.

I know that cake aside, everyone has been as good as they possibly can be. But the kids have been getting antsy with the food choices and this change is hardest on them. And Amy, too, has been getting a bit bored.

The other night after watching a few things I didn’t quite like as extra ounces were put onto plates, I asked whether the diet was too hard as we entered the 11th week.

I was reassured that the resolve was strong but there is no question that with each passing day, it remains harder and harder to stay focused.

The program is no longer a novelty -- it’s truly a life change.

If I have any doubts or apprehension about our progress, it’s really because I have no idea how any of us have done in these last several weeks.

And isn’t that ironic? After years of hating the scale, I know now I need the needle to keep us focused.

To me that realization is like relying on an arch enemy to save your life.

So my nemesis is now my partner in this journey. And that is a completely new way of thinking for me. I still hate climbing on board that damned thing, but after several weeks of knowing but not knowing, I just need a definitive answer telling me where we really stand.


 Steve Elzer, 2009

Eating is Not Cheating

“Eating is not cheating,” he said in a thick Austrian accent.

So true.

Now this is actually fantastic advice to dieters everywhere and it’s a phrase that should sink into one’s soul if you’re trying to lose weight the good ol’ fashioned way.

Disregard that I first read this sage wisdom many years ago in the now defunct Premiere Magazine and it had nothing to do with dieting.

It was actually attributed to Arnold Schwarzenegger who indelicately blurted out this beauty of a barb when someone barged through the door of his unlocked movie trailer and allegedly caught him in flagrante in the midst of an extramarital affair.

To be clear, I don’t condone Arnold’s wacky view of cheating, but if you are dieting, I do encourage real world eating as soon as you feel able.

For many weeks, the family pretty much stayed at home and declined a number of invitations to eat out (and I don’t mean that in a Schwarzenegger kind of way).

At some point you need to break free of your kitchen and use your foundation and comfort with your food plan and eat in “the real world.”

After two months of almost exclusively eating meals prepared in our kitchen -- an environment that has been completely sanitized for our protection -- this week was a pivotal step forward.

More than ever, we really took our diet to extremes and discovered that eating truly is not cheating. We tackled Disneyland, a poker game, dinner with my brother and two long-time family friends, a few lunches out, and the best frickin’ wine dinner I have been to in about 8 months.

And with all the potential obstacles, traps and land mines we faced, Amy and I still managed to lose 4 pounds each this week. So forgive me if I am a little astonished by the accomplishment.

In the interest of full disclosure, Amy and I actually weighed in on Thursday because there was no way in hell I was going to attend the mother of all wine dinners and hop on a scale the following morning.

Sorry.

I may be fat, but I ain’t stupid!

When I decided to attend this genuinely obscene evening of food and wine, I knew there was every chance in hell that Evil Steve was gonna show up and crash the party, so I planned accordingly.

Now I sense you in front of your computer raising at least one eyebrow. Please don’t give me that look. It was a pre-cheat, for crying out loud. I did what every self-respecting cheater would do.

Yes, I weighed in before the din-din of sin. Sue me in calorie court!

It was still 4 pounds in 6 days and we could have been swallowed whole by any one of our previous encounters with dining out this week. I just figured if something bad was going to happen, it wasn’t gonna be a Mickey Burger in the Magic Kingdom.

Oh hell no, friends, if something bad was going to occur, it was going to erupt like a volcano at the wine dinner.

It was my pre-cheat and I was going to own it – good, bad or ugly. And I have to say, the Elzer experience with pre-cheating thus far has been hard fought and frought with peril.

Those of you following the blog know that Lucas tried to pre-cheat and instead of pizza and cake he ended up with Strawberries.

Amy planned on enjoying dessert to celebrate a special occasion, and then decided to do the right thing and make her own dietetic fat free, sugar free, flour free chocolate cake.

I knew when I heard the shriek coming from the kitchen, it was not a good sound. By the time I arrived on the scene, Amy was literally sitting on the floor in front of a clump of chocolate mess and she was nursing a nasty burn on her arm. But damn if the cake didn’t look good! Apparently she decided to experiment with the recipe and, let’s just say it didn’t end well.

These are important and instructive lessons about fucking with the pre-cheat diet Gods. Apparently they don’t dig it when you play with the plan.

So I set out to conquer the wine dinner like an American taking on Germany in my very own Battle of the Bulge.

As you know, I had been thinking about how to outwit, outsmart and outplay this episode of diet survivor for weeks.

My first plan of attack was to infiltrate the enemy.

I used all my skill and cunning to discover the secret menu for the evening. I then had a serious heart-to-heart with the team at the restaurant - Campanile - to discuss what I will lovingly call “my food restrictions.”

It was an interesting conversation.

“Oh, really, you’re serving pasta. Nope. Can’t have that. And the duck in that great reduction sauce. We’re going to need to nix that too. Same with all the starches, so those mashed potatoes are gonna have to go.”

“Well, what can you have?” the friendly restaurant staffer asked.

“I should be fine with the veal in the first course. We’ll skip the pasta and you can just give me some simple vegetables in the second – but they can’t be starchy. And instead of duck, how about just a few slices of skinless boneless chicken breast.”

And this hysteria repeated itself thru the entire menu course by course.

I felt like I was living a scene straight out of When Harry Met Sally, and I sure wasn’t playing the role of Harry.

Even though all the food and the wines were supposed to be a secret, the staff was wonderfully understanding and especially accommodating.

When I showed up on Thursday night, I walked thru the front door of Campanile feeling pretty good about how I was going to get myself out of this fine mess I had committed to attending.

Note to Amy and Lucas: a successful pre-cheat requires a lot of advanced planning!

It was great reuniting with the guys and just moments after I sat at the table the first plate of Campanile’s famous grilled cheese sandwiches arrived.

Oye!

These little crusted morsels are legendary and I really had to muster every last ounce of will power to take the plate and pass it down.

Now I don’t know why, but I can honestly say that was the toughest single moment of the diet so far.

I wanted that damned grilled cheese panini with an intensity and passion that has thankfully not reared its ugly head in the last 8 weeks. And once the brain synapses switched from “must eat” to “must pass” I was in control and I remained in the driver’s seat for the rest of the night.

I had a few bites of this, a taste of that and all-in-all, nothing that substantially deviated from the established portions or plan.

“But what about the wines?” I hear you cry.

Well, I looked. I swirled. I smelled. I took a generous portion in my mouth and then promptly spit it into a cup. Through the course of the evening, I would say less than half a glass actually went down the gullet.

And with the wines I was drinking – or not drinking as the case may be – I should honestly be arrested for spitting in public.

Such a hideous waste of some truly magnificent gems. If there is such a thing as wine jail, they should lock me up and throw away the key.

If you are reading this far, I don’t mean to bore you with geeky wine drivel. But nearly 5 hours after arriving at Campanile, I left my friends and the restaurant completely sober and without guilt or regret.

So, amen and hallelujah, does this mean I can return to my life of 8 course wine dinners since I am clearly cured and so blissfully in control?

Fat boy ask what?

The answer is a resounding "no".

I loved returning to my wine group and participating in this very special evening, but there is no way in hell I am going to do that again anytime soon.

Volunteering for this kind of foodie torture is like an Iraqi detainee asking for a transfer from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay because he hears the Water Boarding there is a blast.

If you could read my mind when that platter of grilled cheese passed thru my pudgy little hands, you would know that on any given day, at any given meal, only one bite separates the old way of life from the new.

Once I cave to the cravings and allow myself that deviation, I know all too well it’s often very hard to recover.

That’s not to say that I won’t allow myself the opportunity to enjoy my food faves because at some point I will. But for now, I’ll stick to pre-cheating because I know that you can’t really control cravings. How you react is all about commitment and resolve to be the better you and that can vary by the day, hour and minute.

When you are working your way down on your weigh down, it's taken me nearly four decades to learn it’s not the pounds that count. It’s every bite.


 Steve Elzer, 2009
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