Age of Affluence, Part I

As bad as things are—and that's pretty bad, for sure—we still live an amazing age of affluence.

I mention this, specifically, in the context of diet and exercise. In 2010, when I was working away from home, I put on some weight. A lot of weight. Thirty or forty pounds. I have a reasonably large frame so I can put on some weight without it being too noticeable, but not that much. I was also far away from my treadmill desk.

My dad was deteriorating severely over this year, ultimately leading to a severe drop in my BTA (bullshit tolerance ability) and a permanent departure from this remote work location, but his impending demise dramatically underscored the options available to me: continue to take a lackadaisical (or no) approach to my physical fitness and be victim to an irreversible deterioration exacerbated by advancing age—or don't. That is, do. Something. About it.

Not to say my dad was ever fat. He got a little paunch from time-to-time, but in his last ten years he grew increasingly skinny. He was stubbornly sedentary, a fact that distressed my mom no end while they were together. He would walk, that was about it. And unfortunately, his physical state would've required considerable effort to sustain, and (even knowing that) he chose to do nothing.

So, there's a stark choice for you.

I decided to exploit my absence by bringing all my own food and counting calories. This was pretty easy with Trader Joe's prepared salads and snacks. Without putting any kind of hard limit, I ate about 1,200-1,400 calories a day, Monday through Thursday. I brought the Wii and did a little bit of exercise with that every day.

By the time I left 4-5 months later, I had lost about 25 pounds. The bulk of what I'd put on.

'course, I also no longer had the same kind of strict calorie control, and back at the old job, I ended up putting them right back on the first three months I was back. I stumbled across a recommendation for a book by Rob Faigin called Natural Hormonal Enhancement in some dark corner of the Internet and decided it sounded interesting.

NHE is a very wonky book. It's barely padded at all with the sort of philosophical advice that dominates most diet books. Basically, it's a series of recommendations, succinctly stated, and footnoted out the wazoo with the studies that are being used to come to those recommendations. (I think the book has a serious cult following, since it's out of print and costs at least $40-$50 on Amazon.com. You can get it for $30 from the author's website, extique.com.)

Anyway, I knew my friend, Darcy was distressed that she had put on a few pounds when she was suffering back problems, so I talked over Faigin's recommendations with her. Nothing tests your understanding of a subject like trying to explain it to someone else, and Darcy had a lot of good questions. (Not that I could find always find the answers, but the book does a very good job of prioritizing what you need to do.)

We both lost quite a bit of weight quickly, too, which was cool. I got down below my pre-2010 weight. Ultimately we modified our diets to fit our lifestyles, and Darcy has done amazingly well in losing the weight. (I plateaued in terms of numbers on the scale, but my body fat has gone down, meaning the extra weight is muscle. But more on that in Part II.)

But I can't help but marvel at the situation: One of the biggest (heh) problems we have in the developed world today is too much food. Now, it's true that it's really the kind of food we have been told we should eat that causes the problem, but it's still an astounding luxury.

We can pick over our food in ways that would make kings of yore blush with its profligacy. Low carb? No problem. Low fat? No problem. Lacto-ovo vegetarian? OK. Vegan? Fine. Gluten-free? Can do! Allergic to shellfish? Peanuts? Soy? It's there on the label! Lactose intolerant? Anti-dairy? Done and done!

Of course, a segment of society hates on the fast food industry, but I note that when low-fat was big, they offered low-fat food. When they were accused of not offering healthy alternatives, they put salads, baked potatoes, fruit on the menu. These days you can get low-carb and gluten-free stuff from Wendy's for cryin' out loud.

All they wanna do is sell us a dazzling variety of foods we like and get it into our faces in less time than it takes for our credit cards to process, while being in constant price wars with each other.

That's pretty amazing, I'd say.