The Story of a Year (and change)

Today I completed my 52nd week of three-days-a-week gym workouts. It took a little more than a year to accomplish because of some disruptions to my schedule over the last 13 months, so let’s say it’s been a year and change. I’ve also been on a primarily plant-based diet for over 14 months, so I want to mark the occasion by reflecting on how I got to this point in my health journey. Back in December of 2022, before I commenced this major change in diet and exercise, I’m sure I was highly pessimistic about ever getting to this point.

I guess my thinking really began to shift sometime in the middle of 2022, with feelings of increasing unease about the trajectory of my health. I had been gradually gaining more weight, was seriously out of shape despite a few half-hearted attempts at getting exercise, and drinking too much. None of these things were new, and more often than not I felt bad - not sick exactly, but definitely not in the best of health. When the pandemic first hit two years earlier I had not responded well. I read stories about people who were suddenly working from home for months - as I was - using the situation as an opportunity to get more exercise and pursue other healthy activities. Rather than follow their example, I became a couch potato and was mostly in a state of depression, and this had lingered into 2021 and 2022.

I was certainly aware of things that could help, especially making lifestyle changes in the area of diet and exercise. To contribute more to domestic labor I’d been trying to cook dinner at least a few times each week, and I’d often (though not always) pick a vegetarian meal to make, saying to my wife that I felt the need to “move toward” a plant-based diet. But none of this had coalesced into a firm commitment.

As the summer of 2022 wound down I decided to have a look at the most recent book by Gary Taubes, an author I’d first discovered in 2014. Back then I’d read his book Why We Get Fat (2011), a shorter version of his book Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007). Taubes’ argument, which I found convincing, was that the American diet, revolving as it did around high levels of carbohydrate and sugar consumption (and often delivered in the form of highly processed food), had resulted in widespread obesity in the U.S. and an increase in many health problems. He recommended a sharp reduction in both carbs and sugar. Since this was simple enough, I decided to try it, and I got pretty dramatic results, losing lots of weight in about six months. But I didn’t stick with it, and within another year or so most of the weight returned.

I subsequently read most of his next book The Case Against Sugar (2016), which was also convincing. I had previously found - somewhat to my surprise - that cutting sugar consumption was not very difficult. But that’s not to say I’d been doing it, even though I knew I could.

So in the summer of 2022 I borrowed a copy of his book The Case for Keto (2020) from my local library and began reading it. When the fall began I also took advantage of the fact that both of my daughters would be away at college, as this would provide an opportunity to get a lot more control over meal-planning for those months, so I started cooking vegetarian meals more exclusively.

By October, however, I began having reservations about Taubes’ arguments, particularly the high-fat consumption component of a ketogenic diet program. I didn’t doubt the testimony Taubes had collected from numerous doctors about the effectiveness of a keto diet in helping their patients with weight loss and related health issues, but my experience with high levels of fat consumption wasn’t in accord with the outcomes he documented. So I couldn’t bring myself to adopt his recommendations.

Wanting a little more context for my concerns, I sought out reviews of Taubes’ book and found some of these in video format on YouTube. One in particular, an 18-minute analysis by scientist Chris MacAskill on his “Plant Chompers” channel, was especially helpful, as he called into question much of the research Taubes used in the book and the way it was represented or, as MacAskill argued, sometimes misrepresented. During the last minutes of the video, MacAskill did a quick comparison of The Case for Keto with a book I’d never heard of called How Not to Die (2015) by Dr. Michael Greger. I was intrigued enough by MacAskill’s claims about the comparative merits of Greger’s book that I decided to check it out.

That turned out to be a major turning point for me.

At almost 600 pages, How Not to Die is a long tome, but Greger is a compelling writer and he does a good job of condensing and synthesizing the thousands of references to published research found at the end of the book into a powerful argument about the sources of the major chronic illnesses responsible for premature death in the U.S., things like heart disease, an array of cancers, diabetes, Parkinson's, and high blood pressure.

The first two-thirds of the book are devoted to detailed discussions of the major chronic illnesses in the U.S. and how these are related to diet. In the course of 15 chapters Greger presents substantial evidence to illustrate how the “Standard American Diet” (with the fitting acronym SAD), which is heavy on animal products of all kinds, processed foods, and foods high in sugar and sodium, contributes significantly to each of these illnesses, placing enormous stress on the body and resulting in inflammation, obesity, and a mounting series of health problems that frequently result in early death.

At the same time, Greger also documents how plant-based diets and regular exercise have been found to prevent, mitigate, and reverse each of these health problems, enabling people to stop taking (often harmful) medications, restore their health, and lead longer and better lives.

In the final third of the book, Greger introduces what he calls his “Daily Dozen,” focused on the types of foods that have been shown to have the most beneficial health impacts. These include beans, berries and other fruits, cruciferous and other vegetables, flaxseeds, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, whole grains, and beverages like tea and water. Combined with regular exercise, a diet centered around these foods can lead to much-improved health.

One of the most compelling aspects of Greger’s approach was the way he situated weight issues in the much broader context of an argument about health in general. The major focus of the book was on health, not weight, and particularly the role of diet in either increasing or decreasing the risks of major illnesses. A weight problem was just another consequence of a bad diet, and not necessarily the most serious one, but as Greger noted at several points in the book once a person begins to suffer from obesity it can in turn become a contributing risk factor for other major health problems. This centering of health as the proper focus of dietary practice shaped my own thinking quite a bit.

So by the end of 2022 I finished How Not to Die and was convinced that this was a program worth trying. Admittedly, I wasn’t quite all in because I was not yet willing to give up fish, my favorite food, but with the start of 2023 I said goodbye to almost all other animal products, retaining only fish, yogurt, and small amounts of cheese.

The next order of business was to start a program of regular exercise. I had to think hard about how to do this because fitting exercise into my schedule had proven difficult for many years. I had recently bought a new stationary exercise bike to replace an old one that had fallen apart, but this didn’t seem like enough. As it happened, my daughter Amanda - who had been running on cross-country and track teams for the last eight years - had just graduated from college and moved back home. When I mentioned my interest in possibly joining a gym, she informed me that she already had a local gym membership that she’d paused while in school, but she was also interested in resuming regular workouts. Her membership allowed her to bring a guest at no extra charge for every visit, so she invited me to join her.

Thus it was that on a cold and dark predawn morning in the middle of February 2023 we went to Amanda’s gym and I had my very first gym workout. Of course I had no idea what I was doing and just tried several different things without any clear notion of what I could handle. The result was a lot of aches and pains the following day. Thankfully, Amanda came to the rescue by handing me a document containing a sensible workout plan she’d designed for me containing three different workouts that I could do in sequence with each visit. This set me on a proper path for good exercise and ongoing development.

For about a month Amanda and I did the early morning visits three times a week, but she finally concluded she wanted to try a different gym. A friend had recommended the Planet Fitness chain to me, and there was one about five minutes from my home, so I went to check it out and it seemed like a good option. Plus, the price was right as a basic membership cost only $10 a month. Amanda and I signed up for separate memberships because our schedules would no longer enable us to go together.

Initially, going to the gym without Amanda was scary. I feared I might not be able to maintain the discipline of regular attendance if I was going by myself, or that I would cut corners on my workouts, and what would I do on days that I woke up and didn’t feel like going for one reason or another? I dreaded the thought of failing, and it seemed like the odds were against me. I was 58 years old and had never maintained a regular exercise regimen in my life. The likelihood that I’d be able to sustain this one seemed slim at best. So I fretted about it.

Ultimately, however, I forced myself to keep going. There were many days over the next several months that I would wake up and feel unmotivated. During the spring semester of 2023, however, I was teaching an early morning class three days a week, so in order to maintain my gym schedule I had no choice but to arrive at the gym at 5:00 am when it opened. Doing that would give me just enough time to get the workout done, get back home, take a shower, get dressed and make it to work for class. Essentially there was no time to think about not going.

After a few months, I started to notice the benefits of regular attendance and that became an additional motivation to stick with the schedule. By summer my initial worries began to taper off, so then I started getting concerned about complacency. I bought a copy of Strength Training Past 50 and took extensive notes so I could redesign my workouts to be more comprehensive. Amanda’s workout plan had me doing a little cardio plus four strength training exercises per session, so I began adding additional strength training exercises while tracking my progress in a log so I could gradually increase my sets, my reps, and the weight load for each exercise.

Currently my plan consists of two different upper-body workouts with eight exercises each and a lower-body workout with nine exercises, and in each workout I also do about 40 minutes of cardio on an exercise bike logging 11 or 12 miles per session. For most exercises I do three sets of 20 reps and I’ve been gradually increasing the weight load for each of these. While there are still some days I wake up with less enthusiasm about getting to the gym, I always go because I always feel better when I finish. The key challenge these days is scheduling because the workouts now take two hours to complete.

There is no denying the health benefits that have resulted from this year. So far I’ve lost about 50 pounds, with another 10 to go before I reach my initial weight goal, and today I’m in much better physical shape than I’ve been in over 35 years. I no longer suffer from hangovers, or aches and pains, and I have more energy and less fatigue. My mind is clearer and better focused, and I feel more confident about approaching almost any task I wish to undertake. At the end of this year I’ll schedule a comprehensive physical evaluation from my doctor so I can see how I currently stand in terms of blood pressure, cholesterol levels and other indicators of potential health risk, and I have good reason to be optimistic.

So now I’m on to the second year. I’ve tried hard to adopt what we call a “lifestyle change,” and for that to be real and meaningful it has to be permanent. For the last year I’ve been acutely aware of the differences between what I do now and what I did during my first 58 years, and I think it will remain the case that most of my choices about diet and exercise going forward will have to be deliberate and conscious.

Was this “easy” to do? Not at the beginning, and sometimes maintaining it requires a kind of conscious discipline that I’m trying to transform into a more taken-for-granted habit so I can stop thinking about it, but I don’t know yet if that will happen. Was it worth doing? Absolutely. Should you do something similar? That’s a question only you can answer, but the starting point would likely be a self-assessment. How do you feel today? Do you have health issues for which a change in lifestyle could make a big difference? Would you like to know more so you can be informed about your options? I can assure you there is plenty of helpful information available.

The dominant culture, shaped largely by the most wealthy and powerful institutions, makes it far too easy to follow unhealthy pathways and even promotes these because it serves corporate bottom lines, including those of the wretched for-profit “health care” “industry.” Those are exactly the pathways I need to reject if I’m to live the way I wish to in the final years of my life. I have nothing but gratitude for the opportunity to gain some insight into these issues, and now that I’ve experienced how good things can be, I’m never going back.