Victories & Defeats Fighting Fat Part 4

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"As long as I stay under 200 pounds I'll be okay" became my mantra during the 80s. An aside--there is a theory that if you keep your weight off for 5 years or more you will not regain ALL your weight back--it proved to be true in my case--I didn't gain it ALL back but did come close. I was still on the 'drinking diet' but now when I lost 5 pounds being hyper I would regain 6 the next day to 'sober' up with food. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale weighing 194.25 and 2 years later, to the date, I weighed 203.5--I had gone over that 200 limit, the clothes were extremely tight--for whatever reason I wasn't able to get back on the diet that I had my initial success with so I started a few more crazy diets--Atkins (sorry, when you sit down to eat a 3+ pound steak you aren't going to lose weight), the binge and eat all you want on one day and be on the diet the other 6, and on and on. By the way, though your stomach may physically shrink when you lose a lot of weight mine has never had a problem expanding to eat whatever I want. I knew all the 'behavior modification' tricks: drink a lot of water before eating (doesn't help me), put your fork down between bites (I just ate faster), leave something on your plate (I did--the design!), tell the waiter to box half your portion before he brings it to the table (like I wouldn't eat it as soon as I stepped into my apartment) and so forth. A few years earlier I had written a book (for my organization) on behavior modification regarding food and how to get motivated. I was a great motivator for/to other people but not myself. I decided to take a 'vacation' when I first moved down to Ft. Lauderdale--to check out the restaurants to see if I wanted to work there, to enjoy the beach, cruise and live on what money I had. Unfortunately the 3rd day after I moved into my apartment I discovered The Sandpiper--a great gay cocktail lounge with a piano bar and a fine restaurant. (They also had a unique bar--a large horseshoe shaped bar whose top was all glass and bottom an aquarium--try drinking and staying sober with fish floating under your glass!) It was the 'in' bar in the city and I was lucky to meet Gino and Michael within a month. Gino was one of my best friends as was Michael who, sad to say, died from AIDS a few years later. In 1980 I got a job with Dan Dowd's Steakhouse--I had worked for him in NYC. Though I thought I would have a hard time adjusting from being a STAR to going back to serving tables my first night on the job it was as if I never had stopped doing it. I still loved being a server. I, also, became friends with a few of the waiters and after work we would go to the Sandpiper to drink and eat (though we had access, and did, to all kinds of food at work.) By the way, in case you aren't aware of it, the restaurant business would be in very, very serious trouble if all the gay workers walked off the job--in the various restaurants (diners, delis, 5 star, Italian, steakhouses, etc., places I have worked there were always a minimum of 30% of the crew who were gay. It was August, 1981--I was getting fatter and drinking more every day and night--I had to do something about both, and figuring that the former was more of a priority and the latter 'not that bad', I decided to tackle the former 100%. (To be continued)