John J. Ordover - Lie There and Lose Weight: How I Lost 100 Pounds By Doing Next to Nothing

Lie There and Lose Weight

How I Lost 100 Pounds By Doing Next to Nothing

by John J. Ordover

To my wife, Carol Greenburg, my love and inspiration, without whom nothing is possible; and to our son, Arren Isaac Ordover, for whom everything is possible.

Wilder Publications, Inc.

PO Box 632

Floyd VA 24091

2017 John J. Ordover

Cover Image Andrew Richter

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-1874-0

On October 13th, 2015, I set myself the goal of losing 100 pounds and keeping it off. This was after years of going up or down 50, 60, 70 pounds and reaching my highest weight at 305.6 pounds. It took me a year to lose those pounds, and it was tough going every single day of that year. It is tough now keeping it off.

Losing weight, no matter what any book, magazine article, or television commercial says is an incredibly difficult thing. Along the way I learned a few tricks and figured out others that helped me take the edge off, which Ill share here, but there is nothing I know of that can make losing weight easy or fun. Im sharing what I thought and felt as I lost weight in the hope that it will be of some help to others trying to do the same thing.

I documented my struggle starting on October 13th, 2015, on the Facebook Social Network Service. The support and advice I got from my Facebook friends was instrumental in my being able to get through this challenge and right on through to today. Male or female, there is so much shame connected to being fat in our society. Going public with my weight struggle was hard but it helped immensely.

Interacting with other people with the same struggles or who are professionals in this area also taught me what I needed to do to succeed, and Im sharing that here as best I can.

That there was always someone on Facebook willing to listen if I wanted to complain, or who agreed to reward me in various non-monetary but significant ways for making certain goals, was wonderful. So this book is in part a compilation of my Facebook posts over that year (and a bit more) and includes some quotes from my Facebook friends as well. I thank them for allowing me to include their encouraging words.

October 13, 2015

Week 0: 305.6 pounds

Starting new weight loss program. Goal is to lose 100 pounds then see where I stand.

Anyone who knows me, heck, anyone who has ever met me or heard me speak, would expect my writing a book that is entirely about me to be not only easy for me but inevitable. I love to talk about myself, love to be the center of attention, Im quite loud and quite talkative. If it seems Im the kind of guy whose favorite topic of conversation is himself, that conclusion is quite probably correct.

Nevertheless it turns out writing entirely about my own physical and emotional experiences, really letting people behind the wall, is a struggle. Id much rather go with my naturally bossy nature and just tell people what to do. Its far easier to point out other peoples flaws and challenges than it is to take a hard look at my own. Its a lot more fun to tell other people what to do than to do it myself. Despite the self-restraint required I will not be telling people what to do in this book.

That said, heres the one thing you must do: consult your doctor before starting any weight-loss plan. See how easily that comes to me?

Heres what Im really not going to do:

Im not going to tell you what diet you should be on. Any diet that restricts calories will work as well as any other and it is likely you already have all the information you need to go on a diet. Anything that worked for you before will likely work again. The challenge is sticking to it.

Im not going to provide you with recipes, or limit your food choices, or tell you to adopt one program or another. While Weight Watchers worked well for me, nothing in this book is drawn from their program, and no advice I give is under their direction. Any opinions I express in this book, living or dead, are not necessarily something Weight Watchers endorses or agrees with.

Im not going to use euphemistic terms like lifestyle change. Minimizing my struggle with euphemisms didnt work for me. For me a diet by any other name was still a diet and calling it a lifestyle change wouldnt have made it any less unpleasant. Plus, I wasnt heavy-set or overweight or even obese. I was fat.

Im not going to tell you I had gastric bypass surgery because I didnt, although Im often asked if I did.

Im not going to try to sell you anything, or rather anything other than this book which you already bought, or at least someone did, or you wouldnt be reading it. Or maybe you stole it, in which case shame on you.

In a country with more fat people per acre than any other, everyone who struggles to lose weight feels entirely alone. At least when were not looking out of the corner of our eye and thinking that guys fatter than Ill ever be! only to wake up a year later fatter than that guy and scanning for someone even fatter.

What I am hoping to do by baring my inner self on these pages is connect with the isolated fat person who feels imprisoned, limited, or undeserving of love: you are not alone, you are not unloved, you are not less than human.

October 20, 2015

Week 1 of my new weight-loss plan: lost 2.4 lbs. At that rate, only 41.6 weeks left to go.

So how fat was I? I topped off at 305.6 pounds but numbers dont really paint a picture. I am 5'11" tall with a normal frame. At 300 pounds plus I wasnt stuck in my house or anything, and fit through doorways, but I was certainly fat enough people seeing me walk down the street would think, and sometimes say, look at that fat guy, howd he let himself get that way? Or old friends would think or very helpfully say youve packed on a few pounds, I see or other such comments. I recall being singled out as a funeral broke up by someone pointing at me from not as far across the room as they thought and saying Well, John probably knows all the good places to eat. Charming comments like that. I fit in theater seats but only barely, in airline seats I needed a seatbelt extender. So howd I get that way?

Getting fat was not a goal I set when I was 14 (until then I had been average-to-skinny) but something that came with adolescence. Pounds came with the pimples. The appetite of a pubescent boy is legendary, and when mine came on it came on hard. I went from a skinny nerdy kid to a fat nerdy kid in one year. From my point of view I was only eating when I was hungry and only as much as I wanted to eat (more on that later) but pow, I was growing out as well as up. Doing that for forty years, with only short breaks for temporary weight loss programs, was what got me to three-hundred