It’s Thanksgiving weekend. Saturday now and so the body feels clearly over the slight (heh heh) “lapses” in diet control that occurred with the family on Thursday afternoon. Though I didn’t do too badly, actually.

One of the shifts that’s been occurring is that of course the whole family seems more interested in eating closer to a plant-based, lower fat diet. While we had the usual turkey (of course, a nice Vermont free-range non-injected non-pen raised bird who no doubt died self-actualized and content), even the in-laws basically don’t eat meat, fat or much by way of carbs as a rule.

So it’s not like I have to go it alone and haul a bag of my own sad little salad off to feasts. There were a lot of healthy veggie dishes at the dinner.

Though I did have a bit of the traditional fare, I couldn’t really eat as much as I would have a year ago. And that was fine with me. I thought it was actually a good thing that by the end of the “pre-meal snacks” of olives, deviled eggs, nice cheeses and so on, I felt stuffed. I’m happy to have finally hit the 20 pound weight loss mark, which I did on Thanksgiving and the scale shows me is still where I am two days afterward. My goal is to get down to 200 by the end of the year — thirteen more pounds to go.

Psychological impact of the weight changes

This brings lots of nice changes. It’s not just being off insulin (which happened fast, and I’ll discuss later.) It’s not just the physical measurements. There is a set of psychological changes that have been occurring, and one of these in particular that I want to talk about in this post.

For instance, the sense of my body, how it moves through space, seems to be different. It seems to me that my body moves more easily. Likely true — stick 20 or 30 pounds into a backpack on your shoulder, and see how different it feels just to get out of a chair and walk across the room — that’s the literal difference between myself a couple of months, and two years, ago, and now. I seem to walk faster, and there is a sense of a lighter, smaller upper body which is of course true. It takes a large weight loss in a short amount of time to notice this difference. I have noted more energy which seems to be a function of both exercise and blood sugar control, though the latter is still very much a work in progress. My face is different in the mirror.

Clothing is looser, which has a definite impact on my sense of self. I find things in the bottom of my dresser that I bought when I was a bit lighter, some things like rain jackets I’ve owned for ten or twenty years, and I’m realizing that I’d stopped wearing them because they’d gotten too tight. So while I’m holding off on buying new clothes, I’m actually finding some “preserves” tucked away that may tide me over, and that I can enjoy for the first time in years.

I also feel like people are reacting a bit differently to me. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I’m getting flirted with a bit. Which may seem to be kind of juvenile for a 60 year old guy to even think about. Except that having been heavy since childhood, I know for a fact that this was a big developmental deal. Decades of being the “invisible fat person” (or even, I think, the repulsive fat person) leave marks in the psyche. And because I’ve had a couple of brief periods of temporary thinness, where I had those reactions in the past, I know very well that I was not imagining it.

During my brief weight loss in my early twenties in grad school, women who were previously “way out of my league” started hitting on me. Okay, not like thousands of them, but enough that I could definitely tell that despite all the well-meaning “it’s not your looks, it’s your personality that matters” talk fat people all hear, bottom line is, it’s your looks.

Thanksgiving thoughts of childhood

On Thanksgiving, middle-aged people think back to childhood. I thought with some longing about people who were my whole world back then, who are now long gone. Grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts. Even my once “baby” brother, who died relatively young a few years ago, a casualty of decades of extremely heavy drinking, heavy smoking, obesity and finally, of a horrible, fast-killing cancer.

During my childhood, one of the “facts about the world” I learned was that 60 was old. I mean, really old. As a child growing up in the 1960s, though adults never talked about it, I gradually concluded that when adults hit the age–60 milestone — if they made it that far at all — they didn’t have long to live. Whether it was relatives (my grandfather died in his early sixties when I was about eight), or famous people I’d seen on TV who I heard had suddenly died, the message was clear. We all have about sixty years to live. That is why, for instance, when the Social Security Administration was founded and set a retirement age at which people could get government benefits, they set the retirement age in the early sixties. Because frankly, by that age, more people were already dead than alive.

Of course, nowadays, dying at 70 is considered premature by many people in this country. One of the reasons we are more used to hearing of people passing at 85 or 90 nowadays is that people have in the main stopped smoking. Cigarettes were the primary reason, it turns out, that adults were dropping so young.

The lethal threat of diabetes

But weight, particularly weight that causes diabetes and similar problems, is still the big threat. In fact, diabetes is likely to replace smoking as the thing that will kill you in your middle-aged years. And even little kids are getting it. I did not know any children who were diabetic when I was small. And aside from just me and a very few peers, I didn’t know kids who were overweight, either.

I’ve certainly known that the heavy, razor sharp sword of a searingly painful premature death by diabetes has been dangling by a thin thread over my head for years now.

A few years and thirty pounds ago, my usually very pleasant and optimistic doctor — the kind of guy who I’m convinced would tell you that you have “just a little bit of Black Plague — nothing to be too concerned about” — made an uncharacteristicly blunt comment to me: “Guys like you don’t live to be very old.” He was referring to the obesity and diabetes, of course. And it’s true.

On Thanksgiving, I thought about that. About how the difference between my very likely developing — in the next couple of years — a host of crippling and terminal medical problems, and living perhaps thirty or even forty more years, is this weight loss project. Because that is the very real difference in probable futures for me. I can be statistically pretty sure of developing some horrible conditions relatively soon…or I can look forward to probably decades of… well, something better than I’ve perhaps known before. Like getting hit on by ladies in nursing homes, maybe.

So these changes, and hopefully, the gift of decades of life to come, are truly something nice to give thanks for on Thanksgiving.