2009: A Fat Odyssey (and, a Living Alternative)

While weight-loss isn’t the only goal of my whole-health fitness journey to 30, fat-loss certainly is. Remember when Alf Temme told me “You are most likely 70 to 75 pounds overweight on FAT and about 20 to 25 pounds UNDERWEIGHT on MUSCLE”? Well, it turns out he was pretty accurate. I got the results of my pre-ROM body-fat analysis from my chiropractor, Dr. Joe. The State of my Fat Union is:

“33.2% body fat from a formula developed by the US Navy. Breakdown is as follows: 86.6 pounds of fat and 174.4 pounds of lean mass to include muscle, water and bone.”

33% – I’m 1/3 fat – literally! Ugh. Isn’t that, like, a couple of spare tires? So by most metrics, I’m “supposed” to weigh around 178 pounds. I put that in skeptics’ quotes because I weighed around that in high school and my then-sweetheart, now-wife tells me I was too skinny back then – she uses adjectives like ‘gaunt’ and ‘scary.’ So I’ve thought that if I weigh a nice musclebound 200, I should be just fine…I’m presently hovering around the 255 mark.

What’s been important to me in this journey is not to take the easy road of fat-fretting. Our culture plumps us up by selling us more and more artificially-engineered empty calories (anyone who hasn’t read the works of Michael Pollan in this regard absolutely must), then it offers us, should we so choose, a ‘dessert’ of self-loathing and fad diets, often propped up by industrialized food’s first cousin, the pharmecutical industry. Well thanks, Global-Industrial Food & Drug Complex, but I’ll pass. In fact passing on this cocktail, and passing well, is what this journey is all about.

• Instead of hating my body into submission, I’m working to love it into an expression both of my inner life and of God’s life.
• Instead of bemoaning the fact that I’m a desk-jockey, I’m ROM-ing it & trying to take walks with my family when I can.
• Instead of drugs & fad diets, our whole family is re-designing the way we eat – eating more fresh & local foods.
• Instead of burning the candle at both ends, I’m making a sincere go at crafting a daily rhythm of prayer, movement, and spending time with people who matter.

And my crazy hope is, at the end of it all, that 33% number will vamoose! Thanks for being around for the journey.

Related: zoecarnate.com’s incredible, edible sites.