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"There are a lot of things you could say about my journey to 300 pounds, but I think my wife put it best: I enjoyed every ounce.\r\nThat's not to say there weren't moments of concern, efforts made on  my behalf, earnest discussions about heart disease and diabetes, even  the occasional \"I'm worried about you, man\" talk from friends.\r\nBut I wasn't having it. That wasn't me. Even at 6-foot-1 and 300  pounds, having not completed a day of vigorous exercise since the  presidential fitness test, I was somehow immune. Sure, I was fat,  technically obese, but I carried it well, like a slightly bigger Dude from 'The Big Lebowski'. I  wasn't the guy hiding doughnuts in the closet, and I wasn't remotely  embarrassed about my weight. As far as I was concerned, it was a  testament to a life well-lived. I wore it like some people wear tattoos &amp;ndash;  as monuments to all the awesome shit they've done.\r\nIt takes a certain level of commitment to get as big as I got. You  always have to be up for a good time, and I rarely disappointed. I  travel frequently for work, and I was happy to lead an ever-changing  bacchanal around whatever city I happened to be in. (Suffice it to say  that if you're in a city for a few nights, you're not asking anyone  where to find the best quinoa salad.) Bone-in rib eye? Sure, haven't had  one since Tuesday. Mashed potatoes? Well, I am having the steak. But  let's get the au gratin too, in case we want to mix it up on the potato  front. A few beers with that? Sure, after the martinis and wine. Oh, and  some appetizers for the table. But let's skip dessert. I'll be eating  again later.\r\nCan I trace all this back to a starting point? I can. It was college.  I entered at 167 pounds. Then came the all-you-can-eat meal plan and  the $2-pitcher nights. I was 240 when I left. To quote Dean Vernon  Wormer, \"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.\"  My college self would agree with exactly one-third of that. Even then, I  was settling into the idea that since I was destined to be heavy, I  might as well enjoy the hell out of it.\r\nThe early 2000s were a good time to be a big man. Hip-hop clothes were forgiving, to say the least, and Tony Soprano gave every guy having a tough time getting up the stairs a reason to  believe in his latent sex appeal. And the extra weight seemed, for a  while at least, to have no real impact on my health. In fact, my annual  physical was a source of reassurance. My blood pressure was low, my  cholesterol normal. The only number on the rise was my waist size. The  results always confirmed my suspicions: I was one of those guys who was  heavy yet miraculously healthy. In order to give some insight into how  these visits went, I've included an excerpt:\r\nDoctor: You know you have to do something about your obesity. Me: Yeah, I know...I'm trying to be better with the eating, and the drinking is definitely a factor, too. Doctor: How many drinks are you having a week? Me: [Lying] Oh, I'd say 10 to 15. Doctor: Wow, that's a lot of calories before you go to bed. You've got to cut back on the drinking at night. Me: So you're saying I should do most of my drinking during the day? Doctor: I'm just not getting through to you, am I?\r\nSo I continued to live every day like it was Thanksgiving and Oktoberfest wrapped up in one, all the while quietly pledging that I  would get it together someday and lose the weight. Eventually, this  literal gravy train would have to end. And so, to prepare myself for the  healthy deprivation to come, I told myself I was going to have \"one  more bad meal.\"\r\nIt's amazing how long that final bad meal can last. In my case, it  lasted close to two years. In fact, it kind of turned into a World Tour  of Bad Meals. Geography dictated appetite. I knew where to go to get the  highbrow, lowbrow, and middle-brow; the saltiest, tastiest, fattiest  shit in every city I visited. A new bacon-themed place in New York? I was there. There was a hole-in-the-wall po'boy spot in New Orleans I just had to try. Chili dogs in Detroit, Cubanos in Miami, and a  signature cheeseburger in just about every city I went to. At last, back  in Los Angeles, I could finally lighten up with a few baked-crab hand  rolls.\r\nThe wake-up call came in June 2010, and surprisingly, it came from my  dentist. I have a great dentist, but during checkups, she does a  strange thing &amp;ndash; she takes my blood pressure. Mine was high, much higher  than it had been the previous year. She told me to get myself to a  doctor. Now.\r\nWithin a day or two, I was in my doctor's office, and he was handing  out ultimatums the way cooler doctors dole out Vicodin (just kidding,  Doc!). He gave me a month to lose 10 pounds. So I began, in earnest, a  program that I thought worked best for me: I ate and drank what I wanted  for 28 days, and on the 29th, I pushed my appointment back another  month. I let the good times roll for another three weeks and then  crammed for the exam with a week left. I showed up six pounds lighter  than the month before.\r\nNot enough.\r\nHe said it was time to go on blood-pressure medication. I saw the  slippery pharmaceutical slope laid out in front of me. I was no longer  the bon vivant that L.A.'s panhandlers consistently referred to as \"big  man.\" I was a fat, middle-aged guy who was about to begin taking a pill  that I'd likely be on forever. It's amazing how the thought of taking a  medication every day for the rest of your life will snap your  43-year-old ass in line faster than a thousand well-intentioned chidings  from friends and family.\r\nI pleaded with my doctor for one last shot. He told me he would give  me four months to lose 30 pounds, but only if I really thought I could  do it. I'm sure neither of us thought I actually would. But I did. In  fact, I lost 60. Then, over the next six months, I went on to lose  another 40. And I've managed to keep it off.\r\nTo do this, I had to completely change almost everything about the  way I lived my life. I had to second-guess every one of my instincts and  toss out everything I knew about how to live. I had to say goodbye to  the Dennis Dennehy I'd come to love &amp;ndash; or at least throw him out of the  house until he learned how to act.\r\nThese are a few of things I learned while dropping a hundred pounds.\r\nAlcohol I stopped for three months &amp;ndash; the longest I'd gone without a drink since I  was 15. (If you're my parents, I'm just writing that for dramatic  flair. If you're anybody else, no, I'm not.) Maybe you don't enjoy the  drinks the way I do, but if you do, cutting out the alcohol is a  surefire way to get the weight loss to kick in &amp;ndash; and once it kicks in,  it keeps you motivated. I have lots of friends who drink like I did and  manage to stay thin. The lesson here: If you want to lose weight, you  can't necessarily live like everyone else.\r\nPortions I figured out that being full and not being hungry are two completely  different things. Once I realized that if I ate only when I was hungry &amp;ndash;  and just enough to quell the hunger &amp;ndash; it really cut down on my intake. I  started eating dinner like I did when I was a kid: a reasonable amount  of food and no seconds. If I went to a restaurant, I ate half of what  was on my plate, I almost always got the fish,  and I cut out appetizers altogether. Once you get past your initial,  excruciating desire to eat something immediately upon sitting down, the  sensation passes, and you don't have a problem waiting for the entr&amp;eacute;e.\r\nOnce you've eaten, you're not hungry I know that sounds simple, but it's something I had to constantly tell myself. When I was craving Chinese food or a porterhouse,  I reminded myself that if I had a salad or halibut or brown rice with  tofu and vegetables, the craving for steak would go away.\r\nAn eating routine Breakfast and lunch are basically just two meals to get you through the  day. No one says they have to be fun. I got into a routine of eating the  same thing every day for breakfast and lunch &amp;ndash; oatmeal for breakfast  and half a turkey sandwich on whole grain plus a banana for lunch. It  sounds boring, but breakfast and lunch are pretty boring...unless you live in Paris.\r\nThere are no cheat days In the first three months, I maintained laser focus. You have to if you  want to lose 30 percent of your body weight. Only after I lost the first  40 pounds or so &amp;ndash; and only then &amp;ndash; could I start thinking about  having a bad meal at some point in the future. When I was about nine, a  born-again kid who lived on my block told me that the Book of  Revelation prophesied that one day Satan would rule the Earth.  Terrified, I asked her when. Her response: \"Someday, we don't know  when.\" That's how you have to think about pizza.\r\nExercise From my vantage point, there are two kinds of people in this world:  those who don't like to exercise, and liars. Just accept that it's going  to be the longest, slowest part of your day. The good news is that when  you're done, it's the longest stretch of time until you have to do it  again. And if you keep doing it, you may even turn into one of those  liars. If you told me two years ago that I'd be waking up to do yoga  twice a week and actually looking forward to it, I'd have slapped you  with a Burrito Supreme. But this is my life now: steamed salmon,  downward dogs, a vodka and soda before a sensible dinner. It's like Ray  Liotta in 'GoodFellas' going from Friday nights at the Copa to his new life in witness protection, picking up his paper in his  bathrobe in Anytown, USA. Life's not gonna be as fun as it used to be &amp;ndash;  but you're gonna live."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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