Second Helping (v1.0)
Bagel Defiance
Second Helping
“Russ, surely you can eat one white bagel.” Actually, I surely couldn’t.
I developed a daily ritual of dragging my bleary eyes and my Mitsubishi over to The Bagel Factory for a Whole Wheat Bagel with Lox and Light Cream Cheese, Easy on the Cream Cheese. I could say it in my sleep, and often did. While I was there, I usually chatted up owner Chris Sobota about the news around town in the restaurant world.
By the time I reached my desk at The Sun News to follow the leads Sobota offered for my food section, my death grip on the pristine white takeout bag was usually a wrinkled mess.
As I sat down at my desk and sifted through e-mails, my hand burrowed through the wrinkled bag in search of my first meal. Only it wasn’t the whole wheat bagel but the refined flour version. I flung it on top of my cooking reference material, dismayed my breakfast was postponed. The bagel was now off limits.
During and since my time at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, I’m regularly asked how I managed to lose 70 pounds while I worked as a food writer.
The short answer is it called for a healthy dash sense of humor and a dash of creativity mixed with an iron will. Today I’ll start sharing how I pulled it off in detail.
Here’s the first trick: When in doubt, feed the coworkers. “Hey,” I shouted to my network of beefeaters in the large open newsroom, “Does anyone want a bagel?”
By that point my comrades were accustomed to my feeding them every time I darted in and out the newsroom. It was pretty often I was bringing food into the newsroom after all – if it wasn’t small meals for myself in containers, it was take out boxes for them or things I had cooked that needed extra feedback.
But the mangled white bag wasn’t met with the usual excitement. “Russ, surely you can eat one white bagel. It really won’t kill you to eat something that’s not whole wheat.”
I held my ground after numerous protestations, and Lord Knows I knew how to be a stubborn eater. Always a heavy kid, I used to protest broccoli the same way. And I was like the Joe McCarthy of the onion – I conducted a witchhunt every meal, dissecting a plate of spaghetti or a hamburger to make sure a silver of an onion didn’t make it in.
So unmoved by my coworker’s practical advice, the staff continued on with their day with the bagel untouched. It wasn’t unusual for me to practically hear the conservations going on in people’s heads. “He’s obsessed. Why can’t he just eat the damn bagel?”
The second trick: pick and choose your food battles very carefully. When your job seems to fly in the face of your personal goals, few can grasp the amount of unreasonable behavior that’s required of you. Coworkers grow confused, your personal trainer is stupefied when you explain, no my Eastern European
Hercules, I really did have to eat that slice of pizza. Your family just gives up trying to cook for you.
They thought I was just obsessing in most cases: they didn’t understand who I was fighting with, and who I was fighting for.
They didn’t understand the five-year-old reaching for a box of Cheerios, securing it with one hand while I shoved fistfuls of cereal in my mouth with the other. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, appreciating the quiet of everything else around me. No chatter in my head, no anxiety, no fear. Just the crunch of cereal that drowned everything out. That sense of drowning, that numbness, persisted even long after I had no desire for it.
It took 19 more years before I woke up and something shifted. I weighed about 350 pounds at the time; I lost 110 pounds before coming to The Sun News, 70 while I worked there, and about another 30 of what I call the “hard fought pounds” (those gained back and lost again) as well. That decision fundamentally changed my life, and it was a decision that took 24 years to make in two seconds.
And though there have been many peaks and valleys since, I consistently understood one thing: That five-year-old? That box of Cheerios? These were the enemy.
So I never did eat the bagel. I don’t even recall what became of it. But I still felt I had won a battle that morning – no matter how appropriate the reactions of my coworkers were, regardless of how hungry I was, I held my ground. The enemy, that morning at least, was held at bay.
Being a shrinking food writer gave me plenty of those victories, and also plenty of setbacks. But the details of that profession – reading, talking and learning about utensils, recipes, restaurants for 10 hours a day, learning how to cook on my own, chronicling my cooking mishaps so my readers wouldn’t make them – turned out to be a tremendous gift to my getting in shape.
In one sense, The Enemy’s omnipresence required my full alertness. Every meal was a political decision: where should I eat today, what story should I tell about it, what menu item is the fairest to order from that establishment, and what’s the fairest for my fitness? I navigated a menu like a chessboard, and I thought and talked more about food that I had in my entire life.
But more importantly I became clear that every single person had a relationship with food. And in my case the relationship wasn’t very pretty. Despite my lifelong constant indulgences, despite how much I said I loved food, I discovered my relationship was dismissive and codependent, punishing and coddling all at the same time.
The two years I spent thinking writing about cooking tips and where to get great hummus – knowing full well that I actually didn’t like food at all – turned into a gift. Food wasn’t just a drug, a suppressant; food could be a skill to learn, a way to connect with others, a means of self-expression, something to savor and not just crave.
But more than anything else, I learned that food was a powerful tool. By the time I left The Sun News, it became my weapon.
