Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Weight Loss Plan

You want to lose weight, so here's what you do:

One. Punctuate meals with fresh lemon water. 

Two. Don't bring peanuts and almonds to your office. 

Three. Bring tempeh flavored with chili lime powder instead. 

Four. No sweets

Five. Shoot for no more than 2,500 calories a day. 

Six. Eat menthol sugarless lozenges after dinner to avoid seconds. 

Seven. No eating your daughters' leftovers. 

Dear Costco, Promise You'll Never Leave Us (Companion Video)

  

Dear Costco, Promise You’ll Never Leave Us

The other night I consumed a tub of Greek yogurt with peanut butter and honey so I'd have enough energy to watch a documentary about world hunger.

I wasn't really hungry. I was anxious. Whenever I get anxious, which is all the time, I eat like a demon.

Anxiety propels me to stuff my face even when I’m not hungry. The mechanical act of eating, using my greedy hands to lift food to my mouth and then hearing my mandibles and molars crunch the food matter into mush, has a soothing effect on my anxieties—like giving a rattler to a baby.

Anxiety compels me to engage in the practice of “preemptive eating,” the idea that I even though I’m not hungry in this moment, I might be “on the road” inside my car far away from nutritional resources so I had better fill up while I can.

This impulse for preemptive eating is completely unjustified when you consider that the farthest I drive is 5 miles. That’s not exactly undertaking a desert pilgrimage. But you see, my anxieties exaggerate the circumstances, so that I have food reserves in my car—cases of high-protein chocolate peanut butter bars and a case of bottled water. All that unnecessary weight in the trunk compromises my gas mileage, but my anxieties are a tyrant.

Anxiety is the reason that, in spite of my hardcore kettlebell workouts, I am a good twenty pounds overweight. Being twenty pounds overweight makes me anxious, and these anxieties in turn make me want to eat more.

Contemplating this vicious cycle is making me extremely anxious.

Good food makes me anxious.

Just thinking about good food can make me so anxious I’ll obsess over it in bed, so I’ll toss and turn all night like a heroin addict.

I suffer from food insomnia.

There’s one food in particular that keeps me up at night—chocolate brownies.

Chocolate brownies are the best delivery system for sending an explosion of chocolate into the brain’s pleasure centers. Chocolate brownies saturate my brain with so much dopamine that after eating a brownie platter it’s not safe for me to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment. When I was a kid, I took cough medicine laced with codeine, and there was a warning label on the back: “Not safe to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment.” Chocolate brownie mix should have the same warning on the back of the box.

The best brownies mix I’ve ever had are Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies from Costco. I’ve purchased the same brand from other stores, but the Costco version is the best. Costco apparently uses its special powers to have Ghirardelli make an exclusive proprietary formula that is far superior to other versions. This fact has been corroborated by conversations I’ve had with Orange County housewives.

I don’t live in Orange County, and I don’t normally have conversations with housewives. That I talked with them about the superior quality of the exclusive Costco version of Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies mix attests to the severity of my unhealthy dependence on food.

Costco does a good job of making you think about food. Before you even walk inside Costco, you smell the freshly baked cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and cream Danish. The smell makes you run inside the store.

Chronologically speaking, I am supposed to be an adult, but like a kid I’m running toward the Costco entrance while pushing an empty shopping cart. I must be a scary sight. This 240-pound middle-aged bald guy aggressively pushing his battering ram into a giant food larder where he will pillage the spoils. I’m like an Old Testament warlord about to ransack a defeated city.

Whenever I get close to food, I get anxious, and whenever I get anxious, I must run toward the source of my anxiety.

I don’t just run toward Costco. I run toward restaurants. I don’t mean to say that I casually run to restaurants after I park my car in the nearby lot. I sprint.

My wife has been complaining about this compulsion of mine since we first started dating many years ago. I’ll park the car, get out, and make a dash for the restaurant. This compulsion to sprint full-speed to an eatery is rooted in three things. One, I feel this need to be ahead of the line. Two, I’m always hungry, and I can’t wait to eat. Three, I suffer this paranoid anxiety that the restaurant will run out of the ingredients necessary to make my favorite dishes.

To help remedy this compulsion, my wife has agreed that we can go to restaurants as early as 5 P.M. before the restaurant gets crowded. But this measure hasn’t abated my compulsion to sprint to the restaurant in which I often barrel my way past a throng of pedestrians who stare at me as if I were a bat out of hell. My wife never runs with me. She shakes her head in disgust, and eventually catches up with me in the restaurant lobby before giving me a look of shame and admonishment.

Her displeasure with me doesn’t end there. When we sit at the table with our menus, I’m always quick to determine "the greatest dish on the menu" so that I can announce my decision upon the server’s first request for our order. My wife is never done studying the menu and must always ask that the server come back in five minutes or so to give her more time to decide. This always drives me crazy because I have a fear that the server will not come back or be delayed an annoyingly long time. I have traumatic memories of servers not returning until a half hour after sending them away because people at my table weren’t ready to make their order, and these memories have convinced me that I must order my food upon the waiter’s first table visit.

I also have painful memories of the server leaving the bill on the table and not returning for forty-five minutes, so I always give my credit card to the server before he has time to lower the bill to my table.

This technique further reinforces my stressful approach to dining out. Restaurant dining is less of a relaxing, leisurely event and more of an obstacle course inhabited by dragons that I must slay with all the weapons at my disposal. My poor wife returns from our “evenings out” in a state of utter exhaustion because, let’s face it, my generalized anxiety disorder, a diagnosis my therapist assigned to me, sucks the energy out of people.

My poor wife will come, plop on the couch, have a few glasses of wine, and convalesce in front of the living room television. Peering at her glazed, tired eyes from the hallway, I have a deep pity for her. She looks like she just survived an invasive medical procedure that didn’t go as smoothly as expected, and she’s waiting for the pain meds to kick in. In those moments, I’m tempted to come into the living room and apologize for my behavior at the restaurant, but I know from past experience that she needs distance from me, and that the best thing I can do for her in those moments is make myself disappear.

To my defense, over the years I have improved my behavior somewhat. I no longer order meals for both my wife and me, inhale all my food in a few minutes, and then hungrily take half of my wife’s entrée. You see, I have matured somewhat.

But I still sprint toward restaurants. Recently, my wife, our six-year-old twin daughters and I went to the mall to eat at The Lazy Dog Café. When we got out of the car, I suppressed my urge to sprint toward the restaurant as I held my daughter Natalie’s hand. Fifty yards ahead of us, Natalie recognized a classmate from her kindergarten class. She wanted to catch up with her classmate and say hi to her. In my gut, I knew my daughter’s classmate and her parents were going to Lazy Dog Café, and I didn’t like that they had a head-start on us. You see, they were no longer pleasant acquaintances for me to get to know better. I now saw them as competition for restaurant seating.

Holding my daughter’s hand, I ran toward the family, and said to the father, “Are you going to Lazy Dog Café?” He said he was, upon which my daughter and I sprinted toward the restaurant, leaving my daughter's classmate and her parents in a cloud of dust behind us.

When my wife and my other daughter Julia caught up with Natalie and me in the restaurant lobby, my wife said, “You just embarrassed yourself. Now that family knows that you were racing to get a seat before them. You always have to have the advantage.”

My competitive nature at restaurants, not surprisingly, raises its ugly head when I shop at Costco. When I smell all those cinnamon rolls and chocolate chip cookies, I plow over the other shoppers toward the baked goods area. I feel I have to fill my cart with all the desserts before the other customers get to them first—as if Costco is going to run out.

I’m actually competing with the other customers as if living out some sick Paleolithic drama—only instead of hunting for animals, I’m filling my cart with baked desserts.

At this point, I am no longer shopping like a rational human being. I am frantically loading my cart as if hoarding food provisions for the Zombie Apocalypse.

Then when I get all the food home, I suffer the two major anxieties. Anxiety number one: How am I going to fit all this shit in my kitchen? I now have the task of being forced to eat food in order to make room for the new Costco freight. You know how disgusting this is? There are millions of people starving in the world, and I’m force-feeding to make room for the new food cargo.

Anxiety number two: Costco sells everything in bulk. I’ve already packed the freezer to the max. How am I going to eat all this before it goes bad? I have to eat huge food quantities at an accelerated pace. It’s like there is this invisible stopwatch ticking in the background of my brain, and I’m a contestant in The Amazing Race. Being in this mental state does not make me happy. It makes me anxious and downright miserable.

When I consider how debilitating these anxieties can be, I wonder if I should stop shopping at Costco.

Are you kidding? Costco is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m an exclusive Costco member who enjoys the privileges of membership. These nice people greet me when I flash my Costco card at the entrance. I get the lowest prices on the highest quality food, clothing, and electronics that the world has to offer. Friendly people give me free samples of pizza, tamales, crunchy salmon sushi rolls, spicy quinoa chips, guacamole, mango smoothies. I’m eating a seven-course meal while I shop. As if in a dream, I’m wandering inside this huge consumer Shangri-La.

But like every paradise, there’s a dark side. The Costco employees who work the cash registers tell me fights break out every day for parking spaces.

Imagine an environment where the anxiety levels are so high that fights break out for parking. What kind of anger, desperation, and anxiety are roiling at that parking lot? Is that the kind of environment you want to go to? Hell no, but you go anyway because Costco is your Shangri-La. This is the only time you, an unrecognized, lowly member of the suburbs, feels distinctive and important. You’re greeted at the entrance like you’re some kind of consumer lord, and you enjoy the special privileges of shopping inside a shopper’s wonderland.

Shopping at Costco is like being Dorothy in the Land of Oz. It’s an escape from your boring life. And like all escapes, shopping at Costco can be an addiction.

There should be a reality show about shoppers who are addicted to Costco. Imagine their back-story. At Costco, they feel special, and they enjoy this temporary spike in self-esteem. But then they return to their cookie-cutter tract home or their prison-like apartment complex where their life has all the vitality of a mildewed dishrag.

I want to stop for a moment and thank Costco for giving a morsel of joy and self-esteem to the downtrodden souls whose dreams have been crushed for all eternity.

Costco, we thank you, and we worship you. Promise you’ll never leave us because we really, really need you.

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My Wife and I See Moldy Food Differently

My wife Carrie throws away berries and apples when they're infested with mold and worms. For her, it's the spreading of disease. But if she isn't looking, I eat them because for me rotten fruit is an opportunity to build my immune system. 

Slater Kenny on HBO Real Sports Made Me Realize I'm 30 Pounds Overweight

 

Even with grueling kettlebell workouts I'm 30 pounds overweight. I need to be 195. I didn't see this clearly until I saw Slater Kenny, ripped of course, on HBO Real Sports. It's very clear to me now: Weighing 225 is not natural, healthy, or desirable in any way, shape or form.

Sometimes you need a vision before you can achieve your goal. After vacation, I plan on getting my daily calorie count down to 2,200 with drastic reducation in sugars and starches.

I See a Metaphor in There Somewhere

This morning, a pleasantly gloomy, humid morning in Torrance, I walked my dog Gretchen and when I returned my wife Carrie asked me if we should dress our twins in shorts or long pants for preschool. I said it was hot out.

She said, "I don't trust your sense of the weather. You run hotter than everyone else."

I detect a metaphor in there somewhere. 

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A Protein Bar Causes Anxieties in the Doctor's Waiting Room

In my messenger bag is a protein bar, as it’s called, a disgusting, noxious mix of processed ingredients, sugar, corn syrup, various proteins isolated through the use of solvents, most likely cancer-causing. It’s doubtful I’ll ever eat it, but it comforts me to know it’s there in case that while I’m waiting to see my doctor that if I get stuck in the waiting room for a longer period that I can handle (anything more than 10 minutes), I can comfort my hunger pains with something to avoid passing out, which is how I feel when I’m waiting beyond what I planned for an appointment. 

The most common scenario for the doctor, or therapist, being late is that the patient before me takes too much time. But there are other scenarios. There might be an electric blackout, or a lockdown due to a prison escapee on the loose; or a hostage situation, or an earthquake, with me trapped beneath chunks of concrete for several days before being rescued, surviving the ordeal only because I brought my messenger bag with my water-filled CamelBak and the aforementioned protein bar. 

When I think of the possibility of surviving an earthquake while waiting for my doctor in the waiting room, I am presented with many moral challenges. What if a dozen patients, including myself, are trapped beneath the rubble? Am I supposed to share my protein bar with them? One bar for twelve people? Isn’t that too meager to do anyone any good? What about three people? Would I be big enough to share with two others? 

What if it was just me and a woman? Would her degree of attractiveness determine my generosity so that if I found her pretty I would share my protein bar with her, but if I found her not attractive in the slightest, I might eat the bar behind her back? 

What kind of person am I? I don’t know because all these scenarios are mere speculation. But I fear that if tested with these moral challenges, I would fall short, and this thought fills me with self-loathing. 

These pessimistic thoughts are giving me anxieties as I wait for my late doctor. I reach into my messenger bag, pick up the protein bar, and notice my hands are shaking, a condition made worse as I read the long list of chemical ingredients and feel the walls begin to shake . . . 

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My First Lesson on the Humiliation of Being Pitied

I was six years old and trying to tell myself that everything was okay as I walked with three boys to KR Smith Elementary in San Jose, CA. Normally, a Hostess apple pie or cupcake created anticipation for lunch, but not today because the smell of rotten tuna wafting from my Captain Kangaroo lunch box was so strong my companions kept nagging me to explain what the hell the horrible smell was. Finally, I relented and stopped in a field and to appease their curiosity.  I opened the lunch box and the rotten tuna sandwich, slimy and mixed with the mayonnaise, and had escaped its plastic baggie and had splattered throughout the insides of the tin pail. The boys and I gaped at the impossibly malodorous, black tuna juice, which was a combination of black ink streaks and odious chunks. The rancid tuna had coated my apple, my orange, my Hostess pie, and whatever else Mother had put inside for me that day.

One of the boys asked me if I was going to eat this and I shrugged. I assumed I had no choice. It was my lunch after all. So I closed the lunch box and we continued our way to school where I put my lunch box alongside everyone else’s in the designated coat closet.

During class, Mrs. Corey sniffed along with the other students as everyone tried to detect the source of a hellish stench. Crinkling her forehead, she demanded to know if someone soiled their pants or if someone brought a dead creature into her classroom. All of the students were squeezing their noses and making mock gagging noises. It was clear Mrs. Corey could not teach until the matter of the rancid fish smell had been solved.

The boys I had walked to school with pointed at my offending lunch box upon which Mrs. Corey walked cautiously toward it, as if approaching a landmine. She slowly opened the box and stared at the box’s contents as if witnessing an abomination from the bowels of hell. Then looking at me, she said, “Did your mom pack this?”

I nodded and Mrs. Corey winced in a way that seemed to castigate my parents, my extended family, and my ancient ancestors. With a sour expression, she then closed the lunch box, gave it to the teacher aid to place outside, and announced to the class that my food was unfit for eating and that she needed volunteers to take one thing out of their lunch and give it to me so that I would have something to eat during lunch time.

During the lunch break, I was too mortified and ashamed to have an appetite and I remained on my blanket while avoiding the odd stares from my classmates. It was my first lesson on how generosity, no matter how well-intentioned, becomes a burden when tinged with pity because the recipient of the charity feels belittled, humiliated and smaller as a human being than the giver. Charity is too often a bargain in which the recipient loses his dignity and feels bankrupted in so many intangible ways that accepting the charity becomes impossible. 

 

Is It Weird That I've Always Associated Days of the Week with a Specific Color?

This morning my wife Carrie, preparing to go to work, asked me what I thought of her orange top. I said, "It's Thursday. I don't wear orange on Thursday."

She gave me a weird look upon which I explained:

Since I've been in the third grade, I've associated colors with days of the week. Monday is brown or gray. Tuesday is blue. Wednesday is yellow. Thursday is purple or black. Friday is yellow or orange. Saturday is red. Sunday, my least favorite day, is black mottled with yellow. I tend to wear warm colors on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I tend to wear cool colors on Tuesday and Thursday. I'm more flexible on weekends. 

Am I the only person who has this "condition"? It sure made my wife raise her eye brows. 

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It’s Official: The New Neighbors Don’t Like Me

About three weeks ago, I met a new family in the neighborhood. The mother, who I’ll call Harriet, has three sons, age 4, 7, and 10. They were playing on the front yard where a tent swing hung from their yard’s tree limb. My twin three-year-old daughters played on the swing and met the boys all of whom were friendly.

Everything seemed fine for a while, but my girls became obsessive about their swing and their family’s cat, who I’ll call Max. My daughters Natalie and Julia would stay in the yard for over a half hour, maybe even an hour, at least once a day. I’d take my twins there when the mother and her sons weren’t home, at which time the two grandmothers, who I’ll call Helen and Lillian, came out and talked to me. They seemed nice and assured me my daughters were welcome to play on the yard. A week later, I met the husband, who I’ll call Jack, and he too was amicable.

 

My daughters continued to say “Let’s go see Max!” every day (they still do) and I’d oblige them. I was gratified that I could take my girls to this family’s yard. It became part of my daughters’ daily ritual. It wasn’t easy watching them. The girls would get into the open garage and rummage through sundry items, they’d fiddle with the cat’s fountain-like water bowl on the front porch, taking off the top and exposing the hose, and in general caused chaos. But I assumed it was okay. After all, everyone thinks my girls are cute, right?

 

I don’t know exactly at which point it occurred to me that my girls and I were being an intrusion. The signs were initially subtle. I sensed that the husband and wife, who strike me as very smart, decent, warm, and nice people, were tolerating me and my daughters because my girls are so young and innocent, but in fact, I had soon worn out our welcome because I was being egregiously presumptuous.

There was one huge clue that I was playing the role of intruder. One afternoon, Harriet cheerfully told me that her nanny, seeing me sitting on the front porch, called Harriet and was so terrified about this stranger sitting in the yard she wanted to know if she should call the cops. I assume Harriet told her who I was. 

In spite of Harriet's warm personality, she and her husband's demeanor seemed gradually more guarded around me. And there wasn’t a feeling of comfort or openness the last two times I talked to them with my girls chasing their cat and pulling his tail and getting into their flower bed, etc. I sensed a coldness, especially yesterday when they were having a yard sale and the street was unusually busy with car traffic at which point their cat Max, running away from my daughters, went into the street and the husband Jack said he was concerned his cat might get hit by a car. As he was saying this, my daughter Natalie picked up an AC power supply that went to a toy car they were selling and was about to unravel the cord when I picked her up, rounded up her sister, and left the family. When I said goodbye to Jack, he seemed rather cold and distant.

I want to emphasize, I never felt Jack or his wife were cold or unfriendly; rather, I was getting the sense that I was being presumptuous, clueless, and intrusive with the way I brought my daughters to their front yard. Perhaps I was feeding off Jack and Harriet’s positive energy to compensate for my exhaustion as a 51-year-old father who stays home much of the day with his twin toddlers.

Worried about my diminished status, I took my daughters home and voiced my concerns to my wife. She agreed with me that I “should cool it” and not bring our girls to Jack and Harriet’s for a while.

This Easter evening, around 5:30 P.M., I was walking the girls around the block (and I had avoided taking them to Jack’s front yard) when Jack’s family was exiting his SUV on the street opposite their house. The family members were carting off Easter feast leftovers. Pulling my girls in their wagon, I looked at Jack and said, “Happy Easter.” Never making eye contact with me and with what appeared to be a sullen expression, he mumbled “Same to you,” and the frostiness was more evident than before.

So my intuition was correct. He and his wife are annoyed by me. Worse, I’ve become a pestilence. And even though I now see the error of my ways, the negative impression I’ve made has already been established and my guess is the door to that friendship with these new neighbors is shut and is unlikely to open again.

I hate it when I do things that make me feel stupid and there’s nothing I can do to redeem myself.

Because here’s the deal: Any attempts on my part at this point to ingratiate myself with Harriet and Jack will just dig me deeper into a hole. All I can do is take my stupid actions on the chin, as it were, and carry on. And it’s easier said than done. I’m one of those men who saddles himself unnecessarily with emotional baggage. And there lies the Man Points Violation. Not my stupidity so much, but my fretting over it over and over.

To be continued . . .