The Runaway Body
When a couple tackles their weight issues together, things get complicated.
From READER’S DIGEST, JAN 2014
The first thing you notice about Andrew Mclane is the tattoo on his left bicep. It’s densely inked, like the designs on partially shrunken balloons. The tattoo is half the size it used to be because the arm is. The arm dropped eight inches in circumference in a year.
Andrew, a 28-year-old realtor, stands six-foot one. He’s wearing a T-shirt that shows off his pantherish physique. Next to him in the restaurant booth here in sleepy Parksville, on Vancouver Island, sits his wife, Dani, a doe-eyed brunette who teaches elementary school in nearby Port Alberni.
Three years ago, the couple vowed to make 2011 their “Year of Health.” They weren’t kidding. Together they shed more than 300 pounds in twelve months. Dani lost 60. Andrew lost 250.
Sounds like a simple story, but it’s not. Partly, because weight issues are never simple—they are a tricky brew of self-image anxieties, cultural cues, and the vagaries of human physiology. And partly because couple issues are never simple either.
*
Andrew doesn’t really know why his weight issues began, only when. It was around age 15, about the time he unexpectedly got cut from the baseball team. Absorbing that sting, and with time suddenly on his hands, he took a part-time job at Parksville’s Japanese restaurant, working in the kitchen amid the smell of tempura and cleavered jewels of sushi. By age 18 he was approaching 280 pounds.
The local men’s store had a Big and Tall section and the next year Andrew bought his first suit there, to launch his career. (He would become, at 19, Canada’s youngest realtor.) He looked sharp and had a swaggering confidence. That’s what caught Dani’s attention when Andrew’s profile popped up on an Internet dating site, in response to her own ad.
She was striking. (She’d been a sporty kid like him, though by now was carrying a little extra weight, too.) His profile was cryptic. “If you like Will Ferrell movies, we’ll probably get along,” it said. Dani drew him out in subsequent correspondences, and the two felt a certain comfort with each other when they finally arranged a face-to-face date.
“I wasn’t shocked when I met him,” Dani says, even though Andrew had posted only head-and-shoulders photos, which concealed his now 350-pound girth. “I didn’t feel like he’d misrepresented himself.” She saw great eyes, a great smile. An easy energy came off of him, the kind endemic to people who go places and get stuff done. Andrew took her to the restaurant at the swanky Ti-na-mara resort on the oceanfront. She was too nervous to touch her pasta. The next day she called her grandmother and said, “Grandma, I met him. I met him.”
Meanwhile, Andrew says, “I called my sister and told her the same thing: ‘I’ve met the future Mrs. Mclane.’” Six and a half months later they were married, on the beach at her parents’ place. They were both 23.
*
People who love food so much that it’s an issue have a certain private bond, solidarity in a culture where almost all social life revolves around eating. Drinks and dinner were Andrew’s idea of quality time. Whatever restaurant served the most scrumptious food—best pint, best burger, best steak—that was where he was headed. Back then, “full” was not the nirvana he was looking for. “Stuffed” was. “The feeling of being so full that you can’t move,” he says, “that was bliss.”
Dani battled some of the same temptations — the crazymaking “food noise” that crescendoed when she came in range of certain treats —though she didn’t indulge herself the same degree. She’d actually been starting to turn her health habits around when she met Andrew. But at this stage, food issues were a conflict they didn’t need. They were a team. And for awhile, they just raised the white flag and had fun.
They honeymooned in Vegas, land of limitless choices and supersized portions. Back home in Parksville, down-time revolved around meals out and parties in. They lived large, within a growing circle of friends. In the Parksville Christmas parade, they were the guests of honour: Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. “I didn’t need a pillow,” Andrew says.
They loved each other for who they were right now, not for who they might become. When they looked at each other they did not see potential, the way realtors sometimes tout an undervalued property with “good bones.” They each were invested in the person in front of their eyes. Still, they had to wonder. Was this who they were going to be, forever? Dani had never thought so; she imagined they’d one day reclaim their sporty youthful ways and live a different kind of life, one less constrained by gravity.
Andrew wasn’t so sure. Within two years of their wedding, he had packed on another 100 pounds. He was now crowding 450. Even the Big and Tall section had nothing for him now. He had to order his size-60 jackets online.
“When we held hands, we weren’t totally together,” recalls Dani. When she hugged him, it was like hugging a tree. She couldn’t get her hands all the way around.
At the end of a day of showing two-storey homes, Andrew felt as if he’d run a marathon.
One evening, he went to Vancouver to treat himself to a Canucks game, which he describes as “60 minutes of pain.” The cup-holders carved into his hips. He thought, Forget playing sports, I can’t even watch sports.
One night he came into the TV room while Dani was watching The Biggest Loser—a reality show about people who compete to drop the most weight. “Do I look like that?” he asked.
Dani shook her head no. “Because to me he didn’t,” she says. “Love is blind, I guess.”
But Andrew knew. He wasn’t as big as those folks on TV. He was bigger. “I weighed more than every single person on that show,” he says.
In the fall of 2010 Andrew started on diet shakes and dropped a few pounds, then round about Dani’s birthday in October he fell off the wagon. “I went back to my old habits,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m dragging her down.’”
*
“Sizeism,” it’s sometimes said, is the last acceptable form of prejudice. It seemed, for Andrew, that public humiliation lurked around every corner. When you’re that large, it’s not just little kids who stare. Dani, feeling for him, started soaking up his worries
—about whether the stairs on this walk-up, or the chairs in this restaurant, would hold him. “I didn’t want to travel, knowing how anxious it made him,” she says.
Things came to a head around Christmas of 2010. “We’re really worried about Andrew,” Dani’s friends told her. Some kind of intervention seemed imminent. It didn’t help that Dani was feeling discouraged about her own weight — 240 pounds on a five-foot-four-inch frame. A couple of days earlier, as she cheered the kids from the sidelines at her school’s annual “Run for Fun,” a man walking by said, “You might think about joining them.”
Enough was enough. The issue of children had been coming up — Andrew wanted them — and somehow it was the springboard for everything she now needed to say. She sat Andrew down. “ I don’t want to have kids with someone who’s gonna die before he’s 40,” she said. “I don’t want to be a single mom.”
She upped the ante. “You’re ruining us,” she told him.
“It was a day I wouldn’t wish upon anybody,” Andrew says now. “I realized, my wife’s going to leave me, and I’m going to be sitting there feeling sorry for myself.”
*
Beth Alden, a no-nonsense and almost evangelically inspiring trainer, runs boot-camp style weight-loss classes based on close support and mutual accountability.
Dani had found Beth online and urged her to take the two of them on as clients. Beth had remembered running into Andrew in Parksville years before. He was a big personality, she recalled, so headstrong she wasn’t sure he was coachable. But this time when she met him something had changed. “He wasn’t the same person,” Beth says. “I looked in his eyes and I saw desperation. This was rock bottom.” Plus, what she learned of his family made her hopeful. His sister was a dancer. His dad was not a heavy man. “I told him, ‘You’re not a big-boned guy,’ Beth says. “You shouldn’t be this size.’”
Dani had signed up for Beth’s 12-week-long “Biggest Loser” program. But “at 460 pounds, you don’t want to work out around anybody,” Andrew says. He opted for personal training twice a week.
And so they started their journey at the gym on parallel paths — she in the group setting she preferred, and he on his own trajectory. They started very slowly, a tactic guaranteed to produce “small wins” that would leave them feeling good about themselves, then gradually ramped it up. Beth believes in high-impact interval training—revving the heart and resting it, over and over. The idea is to throw as much productive confusion at the body as possible, with a variety of resistance training and straight cardio and stretching routines. Counting his runs, his gym work with free weights, and his cardio sessions in the garage on an elliptical machine he and Dani had purchased, he was soon working out six or seven days a week.
Beth would have him haul sandbags equivalent to the weight he’d lost so far, so he’d understand what he had been carrying, and feel the joy of sudden freedom when he dropped it to the floor. She prepared him the way a Jedi master prepares an apprentice—coaxing him to anticipate challenges he might face.
“Friends are going to call and say, Hey, you look great, just come out for a drink with us?” she’d tell Andrew. “What are you gonna do? You’re going to have to say goodbye to some of those people who don’t want you to be skinny because they’re not.”
Failure, Beth told Andrew, was not an option. “Here it is. You were a successful athlete in high school. You’re a successful realtor. And you have bombed with health and fitness. We’re gonna succeed here.”
Dani, meanwhile, already nosing below 200 pounds—down more than 40 pounds from that Black Friday of the ultimatum. She was taking three classes a week, plus The Biggest Loser sessions on Wednesdays, when Beth sometimes led the group on field trips to do cardio in the woods or on the beach.
Beth took them both shopping, to get them in the habit of buying from the perimeter of the grocery store and avoiding the inner isles where the process food lurks. She encouraged them to carefully read labels. (“Do you understand what those ingredients are? If not, put that back.”) They made a pact to purge junk food from the house.
The experiment was working — for both of them. But it was obvious that something different was happening to Andrew. Something profound.
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“The only way I can explain it,” says Dani, “is you know how when you’re taxiing in a plane and the pilot suddenly hits the throttle? It was like, Hold on.”
That first month Andrew dropped 35 pounds, and began tweaking his routine. He figured out that he lost more weight if he trained at night. He vowed no eating past six p.m., He packed healthy bag lunches every day.
After the second month he’d lost another 30 pounds. A kind of upheaval was taking place inside his body as it adjusted to the different fuel, the different activity levels. He had listened to what Beth said and internalized it. As the management gurus say, he had committed not to a goal but to a system.
At the end of each month his clothes no longer fit. “At first I took them in to get hemmed, thinking maybe it’s cheaper,” he says. “But by the time they finished the hemming I’d shrunk so much that they were too big again, so I’d just end up throwing them out.”
By summer he’d lost 100 pounds. Fat was melting away. It felt amazing. The same brain reward circuits that used to light up when he gorged on pizza were now being activated by the exercise. “I traded a food addiction for an endorphin high,” Andrew says.
The 150-pound mark happened to fall around his 26th birthday. But Andrew kept it quiet. “Even losing 150 pounds, I still weighed 310—it wasn’t enough,” he says. He stayed under cover—no photos on Facebook, no clues of the transformation-in-progress. He pledged to be totally metamorphosed before the big reveal. “I didn’t want to disappoint people.”
By New Year’s Eve, 2011, he was down 200. “People wanted me to celebrate. But I could not turn it off.” Like a nerd at a high-school bush party, he drank water out of beer bottles.
Identitywise, “it was a very confusing time,” Andrew says. Occasionally, he’d prop up a picture of his old, enormous self next to a mirror, then look back and forth between the two. “You don’t know which you are,.”
Indeed, it’s hard to believe Andrew 1.0 and Andrew 2.0 are the same person, when you diagram the differences before and after.
From 460 pounds to as little as 193.
From size XXXXXXL to size medium.
From no chance at a push-up to handstand pushups.
He came down five hat sizes. His fingers, once as thick as tailgate-party smokies, are now as slender as votive tapers. He can wear his wedding ring again. His hands feel totally different now, Dani says, when she holds them. When she gives him a hug now she can feel his bones.
He lost 3 ½ pounds of skin.
His feet, he has noticed, are incongruously flat. They got squashed, the arches fallen, from carrying all that weight, and they remained kind of compressed, even though they don’t have that load to bear any more.
*
As his miraculous transformation unfolded, Dani’s pride in her husband was tempered by the reactions of everybody around them. She and Andrew had left the starting line together, but the difference in their pace of progress was lost on no one.
At the gym, “I was making friends, feeling great about it all,” she says. “But then it was like, Oh, are you still working out? And I’d think, Yes. Yes, I am! I’m trying so hard! But now there was a different standard. People were measuring me against him.”
In May of 2012, on the one-year anniversary of the project, Andrew ran the BMO half-marathon in Vancouver, crossing the line triumphantly in around two hours. “The thing is, that was Dani’s one-year anniversary too,” Andrew says. She had dropped 60 pounds! But no one mentioned it.
“I cried the whole day,” she says softly.
As her husband was riding his runaway weight-loss train, Dani had decided to return to school to pursue her master’s degree in education. “She was working till three or four in the morning and then going to work, day after day,” Andrew says. “People don’t see that. But there’s 200 pounds less of me, and that’s hard to miss.”
There is a phrase you sometimes hear coaches and teachers preach: “Results, not excuses.” It’s a tough law to follow, especially when legitimate excuses are dangling low on the tree.
The fact is, women really do have a harder time shedding weight than men do, as a rule. A 2010 Syracuse University study had both male and female test subjects walk and run a mile on a treadmill at the same speed; doing the same work, the men burned between 12 and 18 percent more calories than the women — chiefly because men tend to have greater muscle mass, and muscle metabolism more than fat does. Men and women also process food differently. When weight loss is the goal, women’s kryptonite tends to be fatty foods, while men’s kryptonite tends to be carbs. Which means that those rich meals Andrew and Dani so loved to eat may have cost her disproportionately more.
But Dani would not take that easy out. “I think that’s b.s., mister!” she replied, when Andrew blamed physiology for the difference in their results. “The bottom line is, you were more committed.”
Working on her masters degree “deflected attention” from her weight-loss goals, Dani admits, and the pounds she had so painstakingly whittled away started creeping back. Her fantastic efforts in the gym were being sabotaged by equally committed eating binges. If she stopped exercising for even a few days, a kind of vicious circle emerged. She lost exercising’s stressbusting effects. Awash in anxiety, she would “self-medicate” with food.
*
Dani began seeing a counselor, who helped her put a lot of this wild ride in perspective.
Imagine the two of you are in a dark cave, the counselor told her. There is a path out of the cave. Your path. It’s right there. But you can’t see it, because instead of looking down, you’re looking up into Andrew’s light. Trying to navigate by her husband’s light, instead of her own, would always spell trouble, she decided. They share much, yes, but they are utterly distinct: an apple and an orange.
For instance, Dani realized, she just doesn’t like exercising as much as Andrew does — probably never will. She doesn’t get the same payoff from it. Could be she’s just wired differently. “I wanted to love running but I just don’t,” she says — “not the way Andrew does.” And while she needed a community around her to motivate her to exercise, Andrew preferred to retreat into his bubble.
“Think of a marriage as a mobile, the kind you see hanging from the ceiling in a baby’s room,” suggested her therapist. When one piece moves, the whole system is set in motion.
No matter what the world may see, fundamentally Andrew has not changed, and she herself has not changed, Dani believes. But “what has changed is the dynamic of the relationship—learning how to be together in a new way.” Bottom line: They had entered this project together, and they needed to be there for each other now, too. “You have to be a team,” says Dani. “You have no choice. You can’t do it yourself.”
“If you think about love, long term—and it’s hard to, because we live in the moment most of the time—we just gel,” Andrew says. “Dani’s my best friend.”
For Andrew, the Year of Health was “a selfish time.” It had to be, both agree. He was utterly focused on saving his own life.
But now he has done it. He is down 260 pounds. His plan has simplified to staying the course. It won’t be easy: People who lose that much weight that quickly are often saddled with a side effect called “metabolic adaptation” (basically, the greater the percentage of your weight you lose, the more your metabolism slows). But he has several things on his side, including his youth, and his love of weight training, and the ferocious ongoing support of his wife — which it may now be his turn to reciprocate.
In mid-November, Andrew is scheduled for a final round of reduction surgery: a small eave of flesh that hung beneath his chest will be excised. After that, “there’s about a five-week recovery period where I’m not allowed to work out,” he says.
Dani is looking forward to it. The last time a similar procedure was done – on his stomach – Andrew and Dani went for strolls every day during the weeks and weeks of his rehab. Just walking, like in the old days, when a slow walk was all they could manage.
The difference is, this time it’s a choice.
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