WHAT MAKES YOU FAT?

Five Years Ago & Five Years from Now

What is overweight? It’s not what the scale indicates. It’s the extra roll of fat around your stomach, the jiggle in your thighs, and your second—or third—chin. Large, non-fat people, like some professional football players and members of Olympic teams in some sports, just look big, but you wouldn’t call them fat. If you refer to an insurance company, actuarial chart of “healthy” height vs. weight, these athletes would be classified as obese! We know they are not. So pay less attention to the scale as an absolute measure of your fat-ness, and use it just as a barometer of weight loss—to keep track of where you are compared to where you started.

You may be ten, twenty-five or fifty pounds overweight, or more. Make losing that amount of weight your long-term goal. You have accumulated your fat over the course of years; you have not acquired it overnight. Do not expect to lose it overnight either.

WHICH BRINGS US TO…

Health Rule #1: It is not healthy to lose considerable amounts of fat-weight too quickly.

Rapid weight loss almost always results in rebound weight gain which, in too many cases, over-shoots your original weight and leaves you worse off—fatter—than you began. Further, toxins accumulate in the body, often in fat tissue. We’ll discuss this in much more detail later, but losing fat-weight too quickly pours these toxins into your system where they can cause sudden onset of disease. You should not lose weight any faster than your body can reasonably eliminate these toxins. Makes sense doesn’t it?

As a reminder, this is a book about health that results in weight loss, so you must strive to become healthy, not skinny. The objective is to deal with the root-cause of your fat, not with the fat. For example, how do you get rid of that annoying sound that your car engine is making? Turn the radio up real loud, right? Wrong. You deal with the root-cause of the noise, because if you don’t, you will likely have a large scale, mechanical break-down. In turn, this will require massive repairs. Or even worse, you will be forced to buy a new car before you are financially comfortable to do so, which will cause any number of other problems in your life. Get the analogy?

If you ignore the root-cause of your weight gain, and just treat the fat as a free-standing, independent issue, then you won’t be addressing the health-cause of your fat. This can ultimately lead to massive mechanical failure of your heart or other organ systems. Even with insurance, the financial burden is equally massive. Should money not be an issue for you, consider the stress on your family which can result in affecting their health. Ultimately, you could die prematurely. Look at the word “pre-maturely,” which means, before you’ve reached your full maturity and potential, and for a person to do that to him or her self is unconscionable.

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Health Rule #2: Don’t live by the numbers

If you feel you must lose twenty-five pounds, the first question we’d ask you is: How do you know you must lose twenty-five pounds? Perhaps twenty would be enough to make you look and feel as you’d like—maybe it’s thirty. “Pounds” look different from one person to another and, logically, a pound looks different on a person six-foot tall person than it does on a person five-foot tall.

Let’s not forget all the internal fat you’ve accumulated around your organs, including your heart, which is far more important to eliminate than your chubby thighs. You still have a chance to find the love-of-your-life with fat thighs. You have no chance if you’re dead.

So don’t live by the numbers or by your waist size. When you begin to lose weight, you will see some difference in the way your clothes fit, to be sure, and you’ll be encouraged. You may not see as much of a difference in your clothes as you’d like, and as your scale would indicate, when using the Health-First-Weight-Loss-Second program. Don’t be discouraged. If you have engaged in some mild exercise, as discussed in a later chapter, you will be losing internal fat—the far more important fat to eliminate—before you drop to a size 2.

Now let’s discuss the topic indicated by the title of this chapter.

How long has it been since you were at the weight you wish to be now? Some of you might answer that you’ve always been fat, or perhaps your weight gain has been gradual over years or even decades. Have you considered yourself “fat” for two years? Five years? Ten years?

Five Years Ago: As an example, let’s consider five years as your answer and twenty-five pounds as the amount of “overage” you wish to reduce… we want to keep the arithmetic simple.

Starting five years ago, could you have taken some action to make small, temporary changes in your eating and exercise habits in the course of the year that would have returned you

to your January 1^st weight by December 31^st of each of those five years? Obviously, YES, you could have. But you didn’t. Why not? We’ll discuss that in a subsequent chapter as well.
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