What four more months of shaking it like a Polaroid has done for me
BY CARL KOZLOWSKI
I can remember the moment when I decided to really get serious about losing weight. I had already been in a training program for about six weeks and had lost eight pounds – a drop in the bucket compared to my mammoth 6-foot, 3-inch, 320-pound frame. Because of my other career as a comedian, I thought I only wanted to lose about 40 more, leaving me at around 270 and able to stay hiding behind the mask of being the big lovable lug.
I figured that at least I wouldn't be morbidly obese like Chris Farley anymore, and in the relatively svelte range of Drew Carey. After all, Americans always seem to think fat is funny.
But then I looked myself in the mirror. I'd done it for years but must have been what I jokingly consider "reverse anorexic": instead of never looking thin enough, I never looked big enough. But this time I was sitting on the floor of a ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Pasadena dance studio known as the Athletic Garage, staring at myself in wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors as my T-shirt rode up and exposed my basketball-sized belly while I attempted to maintain a yoga position ("attempted" being the key word here).
It was then, finally, that I realized there was no purpose to being so fat, nothing happy or funny about what I was doing to myself and my health. I had always been a little bit bigger than most guys throughout my adulthood, but my weight had really soared an additional 50 pounds during the summer of 2000 and wound up playing havoc with all aspects of my existence: causing a nasty sleep disorder that resulted in lost jobs, failed opportunities, a wrecked relationship and ultimately, a totaled car.
Yet it was only when a guy named Joey Dowdy came into the PW offices early this past spring and offered to coach me in his holistic Bodytude program – an approach that forces participants to dig deep and get real about the reasons behind their self-destructive eating and exercise habits, while also having fun learning to dance – that I decided to really try and do something about it. I first wrote about the program and Dowdy – who was the original choreographer for the Backstreet Boys and now teaches at the Athletic Garage – in another Web-based article in April (http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/article.php?id=4594&IssueNum=69), when I had lost my first five pounds.
Now, four months later, I'm happy to report I've lost at least 25 more. This is another episode in my story.
"So much of being overweight is rooted in the psychological and spiritual parts of the self, and not just in the poor physical choices or circumstances someone finds themselves in," says Dowdy, who admits to having been overweight as a child himself before embarking on fitness as his life's vocation. "You have to give yourself a cut off point to let everything go. If you're holding onto job, stress, other things, you'll bring weight with you. But this approach [dance as exercise] is supposed to release that and work through it. It's about showing people that 'This is about me and having a good time and just enjoying myself.'"
Because of my gargantuan size at the start of this endeavor, Joey worked with me one-on-one for the first eight weeks of his program. Meeting at the Athletic Garage each Thursday morning for an hour, he led me through a program of stretches and dance moves that progressively enabled me to improve my cardio and pulmonary stamina while also being a lot of fun.
According to Elinor Peters, family nurse practitioner and certified diabetic educator at the Arroyo Seco Medical Group in Pasadena, people with serious weight issues have to realize that their problems are actually similar to those of alcoholics and drug addicts. They have to hit a rock-bottom point if they ever want to change – a point like my truly seeing myself in the mirror.
"I think that obesity depends on a person's readiness to make a change, so you have to figure out whether somebody really wants to make a change and give them an education on the benefits loosing this weight will do for them," explains Peters, who has teamed up with Dowdy in developing Bodytude to work with individuals like myself. "I'll often see great success stories with patients who have great stick-to-it-iveness. It took months and months to gain all the weight they did, so it's going to take months to take it off. You have to have patience to go through the whole process. Someone who thinks they can take care of it all in a couple weeks, they're not realistic."
Peters utilizes her background as a diabetic educator to coach people in proper meal planning, formally giving patients a meal plan. She also explains the food groups, pitfalls of dieting and things one must eliminate like regular Coca-Cola and high-fat foods at fast-food restaurants.
The idea is that this is a lifestyle change and that it's going to affect all aspects of their health — and she then continues to see participants on a monthly basis to discuss any problems they're having with the process. The core part of the meetings is showing her a "food diary" listing the types of meals one has in a month, allowing both the patient writing the entries and Peters herself to see where any progress or slip-ups occur in eating habits.
"I think people think they can intermix their old eating habits with the new ones and continue to lose weight," says Peters. "I find that a lot of people don't want to be on the meal plan for a week and they don't have the consistency and commitment to stay on it on a regular basis. That's the greatest pitfall in losing weight."
It is indeed a struggle to always keep making progress in the battle, for as the cliché goes, old habits do die hard. Any time you have a really bad or a truly great day, it's shockingly easy to want to turn to food to either lift your spirits or take them even higher.
It's also easy to neglect the good habits like increased exercise – for example, on a near-daily basis I've alternated working out to Dowdy's "World Dance Groove" DVD and hitting the gym – when schedules get tight. As a result, I've found that I've lost five pounds the first month, 10 more the second, then leveled off with no weight lost the third month and then shed 10 again in the fourth.
But in working with Bodytude, a big key to success comes not only from recognizing discussing the emotional and psychological issues that lead to emotional eating – and finding healthier ways to deal with them. As I adopted the mantra "I can do what I think I cannot," it carried over into positive breakthroughs in the rest of my life: transforming my standup act to a style that I'm finally truly happy about, managing to meet more people and prospective relationships, and just this week optioning a screenplay for the first time after years of trying.
Yet another bonus came in finally learning how to do the M.C. Hammer dance — the one where he placed his knees akimbo and shuffled rapidly side-to-side. I had wanted to learn it since I first saw it in 1990, and the day it became part of a class routine I was so happy I kept laughing for the entire hour. But the other key component comes from sharing the struggle with other participants.
Carla Flagg is one of the others that Dowdy is working with presently. A 37-year-old project manager for an architectural firm, Flagg has dealt with weight issues her entire life, recalling "I even gained 20 pounds quickly back when I was two years old." Yet she always loved to dance, even as she went "from being 40 pounds overweight to 60, 80, and 100 over."
The breaking point for her came in November 2005, when she survived a serious car accident and re-evaluated the way her life was going. She was 294 pounds at the time, and when she started working in Bodytude this past January, she was still 287 pounds. By the end of July, she was proud to be down to 261 pounds but hoped to eventually hit 160.
"This is the first time I've really been serious about losing weight, and talking with Joey, writing what you eat, thinking about your past and what I was doing wrong before but thinking correctly now has all helped," says Flagg, who came to Bodytude after knowing Dowdy for years in other dance classes. "This little plateau I've been at, it helps me see where I've been slipping – not doing enough exercise here, or eating too much here. It's like connecting puzzle pieces. Before I'd do one or another and it wouldn't really work and I'd give up. Not this time."
For more information on Joey Dowdy and the Bodytude program, visit www.worlddancegroove.com.
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