After last month’s weight freakout, something’s shifted in my attitude

By David McElroy · July 18, 2018

When I got disgusted with myself last month about the way I had been eating, I felt that way because I’d gained weight since January. I was also concerned about the health aspects of my diet, but that was ultimately secondary to my fears of looking like a beached whale.

About five weeks later, I’ve gone through a change in my thinking. I’m not sure what finally clicked, but I suddenly reached a point at which it was more about the devastating effects of sugar on my body’s organs than it was about an embarrassed ego.

I can’t tell you why my point of view changed, but it’s what I’ve been needing for a long time. We’ll talk about this in six months or a year, though, to see whether it continues.

I’ve dropped about 25 points since that night, but that seems relatively unimportant compared to the other changes I know this is bringing to my body — and I now understand that if I take care of keeping my body healthy, the excess weight will continue to disappear.

Here’s what I’ve realized about myself.

I saw excess fat as the problem, but the truth is that gaining weight was just a symptom of the real problem. I was ignorant about what was going on inside my body — how high sugar consumption was driving up my insulin levels and causing damage to various parts of my body. As long as my body was able to compensate for that damage — which our bodies can do for years — I was oblivious to everything other than the weight.

Now I see that the weight is the least of my concerns. I realize that I’ve been slowing killing myself. Looking better in my clothes suddenly seems unimportant — but the irony is that if I quit killing myself in this way, the weight issue will continue to take care of itself.

I’ve given lip service to the health aspects of my weight issue for a long time, but I suddenly realized what my priorities were. If I could have continued to eat the typical American diet — supplemented by extra large servings of ice cream, of course — I would have been happy to continue, just as long as I could have gone back to the weight I was 10 years ago.

At this point, I realize that if I could be healthy and fat — or unhealthy and normal-sized — it would be far preferable to remain chubby. But the happy reality is that better health and better physical appearance go together.

I credit a couple of podcasts I’ve listened to with changing my thinking, because they’ve given me hard science to explain the real effects of excess sugar — how sugar is an insulin problem, how I suffered from “metabolic syndrome.” I finally understood that eating sugar sends hormonal signals to the cells not to burn fat. I finally understood that my pancreas has been straining to produce enough insulin to deal with all the junk in my body. I finally understood that diabetes and various other diseases were natural consequences of what I was doing to myself.

I have always intended to live a very long life. I’ve always had a strong gut feeling that I’ll be around past the age of 100. I now understand that the changes I’m making now will make that possible — and I more fully understand that eating the way a typical American eats would put me in line for low quality of life for the last decades of my life when they arrived.

I ate a half gallon of Blue Bell cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream that night when I got disgusted with myself. That wasn’t so unusual, but something about it upset me and caused me to write about it. Then I’ve taken continuous action for something like 37 days — if I’m remembering the weeks correctly — and that’s changed a lot.

I want to live a long time. I have a lot of love still to give — and hopefully receive. I have a lot of things I want to accomplish. There are a lot of places I still want to see.

To do those things, I need good health. The changes in my attitude lately will bring those things to me — as long as I can stay focused on healthy instead of what my ego fears for my appearance.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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