I don’t like being told what to do or when to do it, but life demands compromises. So, I yield.

Early time commitments are my least favorite. I can be there by 1pm. If that doesn’t work, there will need to be some negotiating. My stubbornness about this has undoubtedly cost me career opportunities. I seem to have found my way to an occupation that, for the most part, allows me to get away with it, but I’ve avoided going down roads along that would have had me awake with the sun. My resistance breeds resentment in some folks who seem to feel that not getting up with the herd and racing to the trough is somehow audacious. Sorry, not sorry. 

Meals are one area where I’m forced to yield often. Generally, I prefer to eat when I’m hungry. But when you essentially work for yourself and carve your own schedule, it’s easy to forget to eat. The resulting one-big-meal-daily routine made me into a Chubba Bubba. It took a decade for my early-30s-buff to fully shift into a early-40s-bear, bypassing average weight midway. By the time I returned from Texas three years ago, I was the biggest I’d ever been: 240 pounds. Too big for me. 

The good news is that there’s been a shift in gay culture, revealing a large population of men embracing the average-to-chunky build that many of us settle into as we age. For once, a desirable physicality seems within reach. 

Except I really enjoy being thin. I have a friend who always comments that my 21-pound cat, Lulu, must be so happy in her overgrown state. For the most part she is, except when it gets above a certain temperature. And the grunting noises she makes as she claws her way onto my bed are undeniably hilarious. But I find no humor or contentedness in being overweight. Trust me, I’ve tried. 

There’s a lightness to being thin that I desire, a good-to-go sensation. I’m less sensitive to heat, and summer feels much more manageable. Exercise involves less huffing and puffing.  Life feels easier to manage. My mother, who’s been exercising regularly since Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton John made terrycloth headbands sexy again, has been known to say, “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” Evidently she’s never had a Wendy’s Classic Triple with bacon. 

Since leaving Texas, I’ve tried a variety of strategies to get my diet on track. A year ago last month, I attempted a ketogenic diet. This involves quitting all processed sugar and drastically reducing carbs, but you can eat fats galore. Ketogenic diet experts will tell you that you must consume worrisome amounts of fat, thus re-training your body to get its energy from fat rather than carbs (and shifting your thinking about fat as taboo). They maintain that high fat consumption isn’t dangerous when the carbs/sugar sidecar is eliminated. They say we’ve been duped about fat, that our dietary issues have been created by a food industry that lies to us for its own gain. I’m inclined to believe it. 

Monitoring ketosis is a pain (like a pregnancy test every time you pee with strips from the pharmacy) so I stopped after a while and just went with the belief that so long as I followed the diet, my body would eventually respond. Lo and behold, it did. It took a while to get going, but I lost over 20 pounds, and it happened pretty rapidly once it got started.

Some other things happened too. I stopped hitting the midday wall I’d become accustomed to.  I say midday as a generalization: It really didn’t matter what time of day it was, but whenever I ate my first meal, I’d go into a coma within an hour. Inevitably, I’d be sitting at my keyboard working on an assignment and my eyelids would droop. Sound in the room would change as well. I would fall into a trance listening to the whir of the air system wherever I was. It didn’t matter how much coffee I’d had—I would basically pass out. From the outside, I imagine it looked like a heroin nod.

My sleep improved. I could actually feel a difference between using stevia in my coffee (the only approved sweetener on this diet) and the occasions when I’d succumbed to using Equal or another form of sugar alcohol. I began curtailing my coffee intake earlier in the day. For the first time in well over a decade, I would fall asleep and wake up seven hours later without interruption. 

But I also became aware of an irregular heartbeat. It would come on and stay for hours. Sometimes a couple days. It had started well before the diet, so I knew they weren’t directly related, but maybe the increased fat was exacerbating an existing problem, or so I feared.  It has since gone away. Tests haven’t revealed anything noteworthy.

My weight loss occurred in late winter/early spring of this year. No sooner did I relax my vigilance about carb intake (ever so slightly) than the weight came back on. Maybe not all of it, and it took a little while. But by the time it was 90 degrees outside, I was beached. Again.

The diet I just tried (and may return to) was recommended by two friends that have both experienced miraculous weight loss, but it required a complete surrender of will where scheduling is concerned: six measured meals, daily, spaced 2.5 hours apart. Three to four ounces of protein, a cup of vegetables, and a cup of fruit. It sounded rigid, but not unmanageably so. I began shopping for it. In the interim, I decided to let myself visit with some old food friends—a break from all dietary restrictions just for a few days. 

There’s nothing like a processed sugar binge to remind you how poisonous the stuff is. A box of cookie butter cheesecake bites and some maple cream cookies later, I was flushed in the face. My heart was racing. Perspiration beaded on my forehead. I couldn’t sleep. The following day I felt as if I’d spent the night doing shots of Jagermeister. And the only thing that would make it go away was the hair of the dog: Down went a Nutella crumble from a local cafe. That zeroed me out, but, rather than counting my blessings, I decided to order a pizza.

With the exception of two or three random slices, I hadn’t had any pizza in a year. I ordered a medium with extra cheese and sausage and ate the whole pie over the course of, say, six hours. I awakened at 5am to the sensation of the entire pizza stuck down one side of my torso. Lodged. Clogged. Not budging. Cramps ensued. Should I go to the emergency room? My system seemed to no longer remember what to do with such a large quantity of bread.  

Copious amounts of water got the pizza barge moving again, but it was clear that I’d ruined an entire holiday weekend with bad food choices. I was excited to get back on the right road.

My excitement was short-lived, however, when I realized what a huge ordeal it is to eat every two or three hours. You become enslaved to food in a different way. Lots of Tupperware involved. So much thinking and preparation. And once the rollercoaster starts, you can’t jump off. Every time you turn around, it’s meal time again. Concerts? Movies? Appointments? Better not make any lengthy plans, it’s meal time. 

It feels odd, sitting in a cafe with a friend and suddenly busting out the Tupperware and eating your carefully planned meal in front of them, whether they are eating or not. It’s an equally strange sensation to produce your carefully measured meal at the table while everyone else enjoys different food. I felt like Fred Flintstone on a doctor-imposed diet, resentfully gnawing at my cup of greens while Wilma serves herself and the Rubbles a steaming brontosaurus rib roast that spans two yards in length. All the while thinking, “I chose this for myself?”

After just two weeks, I was exhausted from trying to keep up the routine. And then I came down with a bug and all dietary efforts halted. As I sat, grinning over my Wendy’s Classic Triple despite running a fever, I wondered if Lulu might be onto something.