I has fat.

I’m fat.  Not as much as some people, but 285 is a bit large even for a 6′1″ guy like myself.  My wife is fat, too.  Granted, she’s pregnant, but that’s not really the relevant part here.  The relevant part is: she’s lost 60 pounds in the past year despite being pregnant for 6 months of it, and I haven’t lost squat.

What’s the deal?

Well, I’ve got the self-control of a crack-addicted howler monkey confronted with a bowl of Sweet-Tarts.  My momy (mother-in-laws don’t get a third ‘m’ in this house) is a certified nutritionist, and she’s set up my wife with this balls-out low-carb diet.  We’ve read up on all the good science (those of you who want to know what I mean, go to your library and get yourself on the waiting list for Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes and then Know Your Fats by Mary Enig — but watch out, they’re full of hard science!), and we know how it’s supposed to work.

Let me summarize for those of you who don’t know:

When you eat sugary food, your body releases insulin.  Insulin tells your cells to snap up as much sugar (to burn for energy) as they can.  Then, any excess blood sugar that your cells can’t use gets slapped into your liver, which converts the sugar into triglycerides (read: fat) and sticks that newly-created fat onto your gut.  Then, the incoming sugars have a place to go (your bloodstream) where they can hang out until one of your cells needs more of something to burn.  This excess of sugar between your bloodstream and your full-of-sugar cells creates a ’sugar rush’.  Because sugar is burned quickly, the corresponding crash when your blood runs out of sugar is fast and hard.

Because sugar is addictive and your body fears the crash, you are driven to eat more sugar before the crash happens and/or you become extremely hungry, irritable, and/or tired very quickly.  This creates the fat-generation loop: eat sugar, store fat, eat more sugar or crash until you do eat more sugar, start over.

Fortunately, your body can be switched over to fat-burning mode.  When there’s no sugar in your cells or your bloodstream and you’re consuming fats, your body will (grudgingly, if you’re sugar-addicted) switch over to burning fat.  If you’re a typical American with a sugar addiction, you’ll suffer a lot during this switch, and it can take up to two weeks if you keep a minimal level of carbohydrates in your diet.  (You can suffer for a mere 48 hours if you’re willing to fast for that long.)

Here’s the important part: while your body stores excess sugar in the form of fat by converting it in the liver, your body has no fat-storage mechanism.  This means any excess fat you eat gets excreted out your butt, not onto it.  (Aside: this is because the only fats your body can store are the ones it makes itself, which require a glycerol molecule (which your body makes exclusively from carbs) to accomplish.  So if you don’t eat carbs, you literally cannot create new fat.)

So, the deal is this: every person has a natural ‘carb tolerance’, a point at which their body is willing to say “OK, my blood sugar is low enough that I’ll turn to burning fat now.”  All you skinny people out there have high carb tolerances, and you’ll burn your fat reserves basically any time you haven’t just finished a Swiss Roll.  Even my wife can get by with eating a couple of pieces of bread and some fruit juice and still lose an average of a pound a week.

Me?  I can’t get that low.  I can seriously eat nothing but meat, cheese, and a tomato, and the tomato will send my body into “BURN TEH EV1L SUGARZ N0W!!” mode.  So, you combine that with the fact that I have the willpower of a wino in a $20-bill factory, and you can guess what my problem is.  That’s right!  I eat the damn chocolate anyway.  Someday, I’ll look at my wife and say “Wow, you’re skinny.” Maybe on that day my guilt will override my ecstasy at putting away 15 carbs worth of 70% dark.

I doubt it.  In the meantime, I’ll suffer through life at 300 lbs, firm in the belief that despite everything conventional medicine says, being fat is NOT a disease — it’s a symptom.  The disease is called “carb addiction”, and it’s responsible for a vast majority of the asthma, sleep deprivation, infertility, depression, body aches, personality disorders, Type 2 Diabetes, and most of the so-called “diseases of civilization” that modern Americans suffer from.

That said, I’ve had people read the literature, look me in the face, and say “I would rather keep eating pasta than get skinny enough to get pregnant and have a family.”  I can’t imagine a stronger argument for the extraordinarily addictive nature of carbohydrates.  So maybe it’s not just my horrible willpower.  Maybe I can blame it on the chocolate.  Maybe I’ll try hypnosis.  I hear it helps people quit smoking.  :)

Maybe I’ll just grow a backbone.