If you, the reader, ever decide to delve into my crime memoir I Built This Prison, you will find out (fairly quickly too, I must say, as I go into the whole "fat pig" thing as early as page 12 and then really expound on the matter in chapter 4 - Bucket of Tears... and Blood) that I have been struggling with my weight since my toddler years... Nearly six decades now, dammit!
Pear-shaped, as the Nature supposedly intended, plus the squatty stature, plus the slowest metabolism in the history of the universe, plus the propensity for depressive eating... Dieting, severe dieting, extreme dieting... No fats, then no carbs...Atkins in my 30s for so long - I'm still working the accumulated cholesterol off with pills... Counting calories, like forever... Still voluptuous even in the thinnest of times... Then eating everything in sight for days, weeks, months, years... Terrible self-hatred and low self-esteem... Couldn't even blame it all on genetics - no one else in the family ever got THAT fat... A lifetime of endlessly galloping that vicious circle - both vicious and circular - with no escape...
And I'm not making national news here by telling you that with age, not only losing, but even just keeping the weight off becomes a virtually impossible ordeal for pretty much everyone. (Except maybe for Calista Flockhart, or Lara Flynn Boyle, or Meredith Grey... Sorry, I mean Ellen Pompeo.) It's not just the loss of the lean muscles and the further deceleration of the metabolism either. Nowadays, getting older comes with more uncertainties, more stress, more anxiety, more depression - hence, higher levels of cortisol. And it's no joke: even with my notoriously ravenous appetite, it used to be so much easier for me to stay hungry. At 20, I was able to do a seven-day water cleanse... I can't even think about it now. Seriously: as years went by, fighting off hunger got progressively harder and harder.
Unless, of course, you are forcefully placed under the special conditions of deprivation... In nearly three years of my imprisonment, which happened to stretch between the 57th and the 60th years of my life, I ended up losing 70 lb. After 16 months of being out on bail and battling my criminal-proceedings anxieties with some pretty grotesque overeating, I went in as a blob of fat size 24, but came out as a yoga-practicing size 14.
Don't get horrified (Why would you? But just in case.), thinking that NYS DOCCS starves people in prison. They don't. Well, the food is pretty awful (it's prison food - there is a special section about it in Part III of I Built This Prison called Our Daily Bread and State Mandated Waste); and its level of nutrients ranges from low to nonexistent; and the last meal of the day they serve you is the 5:30 pm dinner, which technically imposes 14 hours of intermittent fasting during the most difficult hours - in the evening, after work/school/programs... Nevertheless, I totally could've (and many do) gained, not lost, 70 lb.: people get packages full of carbs with long shelf life; buy a lot of bread, pancake mix, pasta, and boxes of Little Debbie treats at the commissary, thus mitigating incarceration with indulgence...
But I didn't: I didn't get food packages and I had strict rules about my commissary buys: mixed-greens salad pouches were the highest priority, then whatever proteins I could get within the imposed limits... Little Debbie was classified into the same mortal-enemy territory as the most antisemitic of correctional officers... I think the psychological reality of the Bill's of Rights loss as a punishment for my crime helped me to be as vigilant with my diet as I used to be very long time ago - during the periods of intense romance in my youth.
Plus, I was made to walk everywhere - pretty long stretches on a large campus sprawled over the cheap land of Western New York. While writing I Built This Prison, I used Google Earth to calculate the distances I actually covered on an average prison day: it came to 3 miles... Just imagine - if you walk on your treadmill at a brisk pace of 3 miles per hour, it would take 1 whole hour to match that effort.
Stay on that regiment for 3 years (not 3 weeks or 3 months) and you get the 10-sizes body reduction... Then I came back into the "free" life...
I'm not going to keep you (oh, the hopeful me!) in suspense: 18 months later I was back at my pre-prison weight! Who does that?!!! And yes, I overindulged at the beginning... NYC and its limitless options, you know... I forced myself to never think about it while I was behind the barbwire and 370 miles away... But when it's right in front of you and most of it is literally at your fingertips inside your iPhone? For a life-long epicure like myself? After prison?...
...I don't know about you, but I loved all of David E. Kelly's Law-in-Boston shows, including The Practice. (I don't think it can possibly be qualified as a "spoiler" 22 years after its airing, so I'm not going to apologize for it): Season 7 finds one of the main characters, Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams), in prison, serving a life sentence after being found guilty of a first-degree murder. Her husband Bobby (Dylan McDermott) comes for a visit and brings her a burger... Watching her devouring it within seconds, he marvels, "I've never seen anybody eating a burger this fast..." And she goes, "I'll talk to you after you go to prison..." Or something to that effect - I'm not going to look for the exact quote... But you get what I'm talking about, right?...
So, as fat as fat can be - again! Weighing as much as my daughter and son-in-law together. Granted, they are skinny people. Still, two humans... I despaired, then got a grip, and embarked on the same course of actions I've always employed under similar circumstances in the past: stopped cheating with the calories counting and faithfully limited them to the maximum of 1,250 per day Sunday through Friday with a 1,500 allowance for the relaxation Saturday; got back on the rowing machine, and even bought a walking pad. Of course, who's got the time in the "free" world to voluntary walk 3 miles? At - what counts for me as speed-walking now - 2.5 mph, it's like 1 hour and 12 minutes!!!! But! I do 3/4 of a mile absolutely every morning - no excuses... A lot of foods got banished entirely and the ordering-out was pretty much outlawed... It's a hungry and emotionally draining life... Talking about the struggle being real!
And that's when the whole weight-loss-after-sixty factor became vividly evident... Here's the sad truth: After two years of sticking to that strict regiment... I've cumulatively lost 9 lb....
And yes, the vanity is still there: "It's not fair!!! I cannot fit my arms into my fancy suit jackets!!!" and stuff like that... But on top of that, there are far more detrimental aspects of being overweight in the twilight of your middle age: particularly the exacerbation of the natural body wear, which manifests itself through such unpleasantries as degenerative arthritis of your knees (a few episodes before the very end, Raymond Reddington [played by James Spader, who is 8 months older than I am] says, that it's the knees first and then the eyesight); or nonalcoholic fatty liver (and that's just heartbreaking - I've never drunk!); or the rising blood sugar (I don't even sweeten my coffee or tea and never drink soft drinks!).
The knee pain is particularly troublesome - it turns any type of stairs into a torture and completely removes the tiny grains of joy out of walking and rowing, turning any and all exercising into pure misery... So, a few months ago, during the semi-annual visit to my primary physician, I broke my "everything is fine as usual" routine and talked to him about the knee, and the walking, and the rowing, and the watching calories... And he went, "Well, there's Ozempic..."
"O-o-what?!" ...Now it seems inconceivable, but until he spoke that word I've never heard of it. Never-ever... Well, primarily, I guess, because I don't follow the mainstream celebrity gossip... AT ALL... But, once you know about it, of course, you see it everywhere...
The doctor said, "I know you always research everything. So, do that..."
The first thing I did, I mentioned it to my daughter. "Well, mom," she texted back, "Ozempic is the reason why Natasha Leone looks the way she does..." Damn! Having watched Poker Face, I was actually wondering about that... "Do you know its mechanism?" I, the life-long nonbeliever in weight-loss drugs, asked. She didn't.
So, I hit all my research buttons... What I found out was life-changing-ly revelatory... It turned out that semiglutide (Ozempic's chemical name) works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone GLP-1, which stimulates insulin secretion by pancreas and lowers blood glucose (hence its primary purpose as a Type 2 Diabetes remedy). But here's the thing: As the levels of this hormone rise, the digestive system sends a message to your brain, signaling that you are full. Reportedly, these mental prompts are quite similar to the effects of bariatric (aka stomach-stapling) surgeries...
You know how once in a blue moon you literally have an epiphany that you've been missing something most crucial from your life? Well, that's what happened to me when it became vividly clear that my endocrine system simply doesn't generate that GLP-1 hormone. Because, I have never experienced the sensation of that blessed fullness... If nothing else, I've been hungry all my life.
On the other hand, I'm quite familiar with the concept of fullness: Not only that I've met people who underwent the bariatric procedures and felt nauseous after drinking a full glass of water, but I've also known naturally skinny individuals and I've observed them getting full - literally unable to take another bite - after consuming modest quantities of food... It's the reason why always say that when a skinny person says that he ate a lot and a fat person says he ate nothing, the amount of food consumed by the former is still smaller than that ingested by the latter.
And now these people (I mean, Ozempic's manufacturers) are telling me that I can get full? And quickly? On small amounts of food? This medicine will curb my appetite and will make the dieting easy? I need that shit!!! Now!!! No, let me correct that: I've been needing that shit all my life!
And the doctor offered it! So, I can get the prescription and start my self-injecting weekly cycle, like, tomorrow! Right?
TO BE CONTINUED...
"The fact that I took it so personally day in and day out my whole life is a testimony of how severely self-absorbed I was. The prolonged nurturing of the scars caused by casual indignities was a very special pet in my menagerie of craziness. But even I would never claim that the pedestrian oppression of hierarchic systems was my exclusive prerogative.