Dieters

READERS: My friend Mr. Forthright sent me another excerpt from one of his books -- How to Lose Weight Through Hibernation, here's the part where he talks about how exercise made him fat. Check out the book by clicking the link here.

-- The Problem with Exercise --

Let me tell you my story. Ten years ago I was a lot younger than I am today. Around that time, I was what doctors like to call: morbidly obese. In other words, I was about to die from my own girth. I weighed around 900 pounds, and that was without shoes on. It was a precarious situation; my bed frame had to be custom made. Custom is, in fact, an appropriate word; the steel needed to fortify my bed posts passed through customs because it was imported from Russia, the only country that made steel strong enough for my obesity.

How did I find myself in such a predicament? It all started with a cycle I couldn’t break.

Years ago, when I weighed just 200 pounds, I decided I was unhappy with the way my body looked. I was bombarded on television and in magazines with images of the “ideal” body, and I was not that “ideal” man. I was average. And so, in pursuit of a good body, I decided to start exercising.

I had heard my entire life that exercise was the key to weight-loss. But here’s the thing they don’t tell you about exercise: it makes you hungry. Really, it does. Of course, they don’t want you to know that.

All that moving around can really take it out of a person. One minute you are running, the next you are craving deep-fried butter. Did you know that most gyms are owned by fast food restaurants? It’s true. They know that as soon as they can get you exercising, they can also sell you a double-double. Thus began my vicious cycle of exercising and then overeating.

The more I exercised, the more I ate. The more I ate, the more weight I gained.

Being the fool I was at the time, I thought the solution to my growing frame was more exercise. So, I exercised even more. But that was not the solution. EXERCISE MADE ME FAT. I went from two hundred to three hundred, and then pretty soon I was up to four and then five hundred pounds. I was losing the battle with my own body.

Those were difficult years. I became ashamed of the way I looked and rarely left the house, instead choosing to do a thousand sit-ups in the privacy of my room (and then binge on potato chips). I tried everything. P90X? The name proved prophetic -- my P (pounds) were X (multiplied) about 90 times. The Bowflex? After a month I had gained so much weight the machine’s bench was the only thing flexing. Nordictrack? I don’t have anything clever to say about the name and how it related to how much fatter I got, but let’s just say I was much too big to ever fit on a chair lift and go actual skiing. I’d stay up late, watching infomercials and making the seven, six, five, just four(!) easy payments to buy new machines while working out on the ones I already had for hours on end. But it only got worse.

I remember hitting rock bottom. I ran a desert marathon at a shade over eight-hundred and fifty pounds. As you might expect, I didn’t make a great time, on account of my weight, but I did finish. But to have the energy to finish, I ate over sixty PowerBars on the run. By the end of the day, I had gained over fifteen pounds. I went home and looked in the mirror and didn’t even recognize myself. If I had known what I know now, I would have stopped exercising that very moment. But I didn’t know any better. I was an ignorant fool. And so, I kept going.

Sure, my family tried to get me to stop. “We’re worried about you,” they’d tell me, “you’re so active.” But it was to no avail. I was an addict to my own destructive behaviors. And like I already mentioned, I was pretty close to dying, exercising myself to the grave.

But then something fantastic happened. I fell asleep.

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You can read the entire book by Mr. Forthright by clicking here.