I'm not the biggest loser on campus

Note to readers: I have some good news and bad news for those of you who used to read my columns. The bad news is that when you write a blog, it turns out, there are no limits on the length of the column you write. These columns could be longer than what you are used to. The good news is that they won’t be going through an editor, which means there will be more typos in them than usual. I know how much we all enjoy finding typos in published material.

I am not the Biggest Loser on USU campus. There are a number of people who would argue with that statement but they shouldn’t waste their breath. I can prove them wrong.

Just over two weeks ago I entered USU’s Biggest Loser contest. It’s exactly like the one on TV except that you win free socks instead of $250,000 and at the end of the contest you don’t get to rip up a giant picture of you when you were fat. Actually, there are more differences.

This one is run by wise, skinny, healthy people who believe that you should not lose more than two pounds a week and that you should make “lifestyle changes,” which is code for, “No more eating out of buckets.” And they do have some nice prizes like free meals on campus if you don't say the word mayonnaise and stuff like that that nice people have donated to help us out.

Last Thursday they announced our rankings after the first week and I was in second place, which means that I lost some weight and did what they told me to do. You get more points for being obedient than you do for losing weight.

We have classes where imported wise healthy people talk very slow to us, trying to help us understand that food that tastes good is bad and that weight lifting must be slow and painful if it is to be done correctly. We all know these things but we take careful notes and do our best because we want to be skinny people too.

I have thought of challenging them on key things they teach us that just don’t make sense but when you weigh roughly the same as a Volkswagen bug, it’s hard to effectively win such an argument.

I now have a nutritionist who is helping me change my ways. She is the most amazing listener that I have ever met and very good at her job. She has, however, lost touch with some of the basic joys of life.

For example, here was something that was a part of her PowerPoint presentation one night. I’ll test you with it. She put a picture of an advertisement on the screen. A pizza place was offering a large pizza, four cookies, bread sticks and two litters of Pepsi for $14.99.

Quick. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, it’s a good thing. It’s a joyous thing. Turns out, she said it is an evil thing, in fact it is a package deal full of evil. She was so outraged by it that I think she wanted us to storm the pizza place to demand the ad be rescinded. I finally asked her to remove the visual aid, a request she probably interpreted as evidence that we could no longer bear to see such advertising filth. I didn’t look around but I’m guessing there were other members of the group trembling, clutching their little water bottles and crying just like me.

The most difficult change of all the things she has asked me to do is to no longer eat while I’m watching TV or reading the newspaper. This is a change that just feels unbelievably wrong. I feel like a Republican at a soup kitchen or a Democrat on a budget. I’m grumpy. When I’m eating, sometimes I just start talking to family members who are around, which upsets and confuses them, driving them from the room. And other times I’m forced to just sit and think while I eat. I think about important things like, what would happen if the characters from Lost suddenly came across the characters from Gilligan’s Island?

I paid to be a part of this program and they have connected me with a trainer who makes me do the strangest, most humiliating, painful exercises I have ever done. I like him, in part, because I think he time traveled from the 60’s and has long hair and a beard. He also laughs a lot, encourages me and never calls me names. I do fear the laughing part may be sparked by the fact that it seems likely many of the exercises he has me do are only for the entertainment of the other trainers in the gym. For example, there’s one he calls the “fire hydrant” and I don’t think I’m the fire hydrant in the drill.

They also had us work out once with the Army ROTC guys. They were surprisingly kind for military types and they never shouted at us or made us do push ups while they were spraying us with a hose. We worked out at an indoor track and I was concerned that people would think that the Army was so hard-up for recruits that we had all been accepted into the program. I mentioned this to one of them and he said, “We’d be proud to have you in the Army.”

Wasn’t that nice?

I found out that these guys work hard in college exercising, studying and stuff only to graduate and go overseas into life-threatening, scary situations. It made me want there to be fewer life-threatening, scary situations in the world.

They invited us to work out with them every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. and I have several times planned to go but, it turns out, 6 a.m. is very early in the morning. My hope was that I could go, work hard and earn their trust and then teach them things that would help them. For example, they do lots of exercises that are very painful and when they count, they count wrong. For example, four push ups equals just one push up. This was a problem I picked up on right away because my push up count, which is not high, was even worse in the military world.

I woke up this morning with a number firmly fixed in my head: 12.6. When you haven’t stayed on a diet for more than two hours or consistently lost weight in years and suddenly you start making progress, you become quite fixated on the amount of weight you have lost. Today if someone asks me my name there’s a very real possibility I’ll say that I’m, “12.6.”

Today I’m at the 12.6-pound mark. This is something I can’t stop myself from telling people. I can work it into any conversation and I know I should just keep it to myself because people look at me like I’m a Volkswagen that thinks it is a Porsche because it lost a hubcap. It’s not much but I’ve noticed that my shirts don’t rip if I laugh and the car has stopped scraping the pavement when I turn to the left.

I’ll try not to make my blog about the weight loss thing all the time but sometimes there are victories I have to share and my understanding is that blogs are for people who want to pretend they are sharing with others. That’s me. Today I want to share the fact that I’m not the Biggest Loser on the USU campus, but I hope that soon I will be.