Embrace the Suck Read online

  The plans had one key point in common. “Don’t try to eat like this all the time,” the instructor said. “You’ll go crazy. It doesn’t work. Allow yourself to cheat. Be good eighty percent of the time and you’ll see results.” He mentioned that a lot of people were rigorously strict from Sunday night to Friday at 5 p.m. and let their hair down on the weekend. By letting their hair down he meant they had some drinks, maybe ate a baguette, had a burger on an actual bun or a handful of M&Ms.

  It would have all sounded completely nuts to me had it not been for the experience of my colleague João Correia. João and I had worked together at Bicycling magazine, where it was perfectly acceptable to conduct a business meeting while out on a ride. That meant donning bike clothes. Nobody looks good in bike clothes. They’re built for comfort and function while on the bike; like most athletic apparel, they don’t flatter anybody who’s not a professional. Even though João could rip the legs off most of us on a ride, his ample girth puffed against his kit as if it were a sausage casing. Too much high life entertaining clients had left him sixty pounds over the weight he raced at thirteen years before, when he had been a promising young rider on the European junior circuit.

  But when a client noticed the natural form and ability lurking beneath the insulation and challenged him to get in shape, João threw himself at the task, working with a trainer as well as a nutritionist, who told him to “eat like a caveman.” So he did, cutting out the pasta he loved so much, snacking on almonds and blackberries instead of panini, and skipping the sugar he usually put in his espresso. (I don’t know a single person who ever accepted the Taliban-like edict to give up caffeine.) The diet, combined with his rigorous training, allowed João to drop the sixty pounds in just five months. The transformation was so profound that people who hadn’t seen him in a while walked right by him without even recognizing him. And the same client helped João realize a dream of racing again professionally in Europe, a dream he thought had been lost to his weight gain.

  After João’s transformation, I asked him if people treated him differently now that he had returned to his racing weight, and if it bothered him. “It bothered me more when people who hadn’t seen me in a few years as I put on the weight would say, ‘João, is that you?’ as if I had become a different person when I gained the weight. I was still the same guy. I just wasn’t as fast.”

  It reminded me of something that happened when I was in my early thirties. I was swimming with the local YMCA masters team, and we went to the state championships, where I won five medals in my age group, and the team won more than twenty. The director of the Y was so proud of us that he took the team photo we had posed for on the pool deck after the meet and blew it up to poster size and mounted it just inside the door of the pool, for everyone to see.

  There I was in all my pre-swim glory, in shorts and flip-flops and a pair of sunglasses and nothing else but the medals draped around my neck, my spare tire there for all to see. At the office one day, a woman I had worked with for three years came up to me and said with more of a sneer than she should have, “I saw your picture at the Y. Nice. I had no idea you were so … so …” The look on my face must have given her pause. “So, beefy.”

  It shouldn’t have mattered. I knew I was beefy, or whatever other word she wanted to use. But her words killed me. They shouldn’t have. I had just won five medals and swum two races faster than I ever had, before or since. But she wasn’t seeing that. She was seeing the beef.

  In a very gross simplification, both the Paleo and Zone diets work by jiggering hormones released by foods we eat. Certain foods can release a flood of insulin, which makes the body store fat while signaling the stomach to keep eating. (It’s more than just an old advertising jingle that nobody can eat just one Lay’s potato chip. The flood of insulin released by foods like chips only makes you want to eat more chips.) Sugar, in all its many forms, is one such food, as are processed carbohydrates and dairy foods. It’s extremely counterintuitive, but the Paleo Diet holds that if you must have dairy, it should be heavy cream, and that you should stay as far away from “processed” skim milk as possible. The goal here is to eat only foods that don’t mess up your hormonal balance by sending insulin coursing into your blood, but that do fill you up and make you feel satisfied. Vegetables and meat do this nicely; an apple can make you want to eat another apple. But eat that apple with some almonds and you should feel satisfied by the healthy fat dampening the insulin response.

  It sounded easy. Eat this stuff, skip that stuff, and you’ll lose weight. But when I surveyed my diet, I realized I was about to have my cheese moved in a pretty significant way. It’s not as if I subsisted on fried chicken and lemonade, but I ate bread at every meal, loved cookies and pasta, and drank skim milk every morning. Among my ex-wife’s many parting words to me were “I hope you find someone who will be sure to bring vegetables into your life, because I’m sure you won’t find them on your own.” I could live without soda and salty snacks and ice cream, but I had a drawer of candy in my office, and drank at least one beer or glass of wine every night, sometimes more. When you start reading labels, you realize: sugar is in everything we eat. Everything. Salad dressing. Condiments. Marinades. Yogurt. Cocktails.

  During my time at CrossFit Morristown, the box sponsored a two-month nutrition challenge. I jumped right in. We were given notebooks and told that we would write down every morsel of food and every drop of liquid we put in our mouths for the next month. Karianne, the box owner, would then review them and offer us advice on how to improve our performance. We were also given a list of approved foods, almost all of which were minimally processed, if processed at all. We were to be on the lookout for food with ingredients, especially sugar, and we were to eat things as close as possible to the form in which nature provided them. She advised us to empty our cupboards of all the bad foods she was sure were in there, as if Passover were about to start and we needed to get rid of leavened food. But I had decided I could suffer through this alone, and not subject my grade-school children to a life without pizza or Cheez-Its. The snacks and food might call out to me from their boxes and wrappers, but I would be strong. The stuff could stay.

  Day one was a nightmare. Gone was my breakfast of a sandwich of almond butter on whole wheat toast, a glass of skim milk, and a glass of orange juice. In its place was three ounces of Canadian bacon, half a pint of raspberries, and a handful of almonds. That was at 7:30 a.m. By nine I was starving as I drove along Interstate 78 on my daily commute. I pulled into a Turkey Hill store, a sprawling emporium of snack foods, but not exactly a place filled with fresh fruits and lean meats. But if you look carefully, as I did, you’ll find nuts, bottled water, and jerky.

  I didn’t want meat to become the center of my Paleo experience. I wanted to be the guy who did this all with salads and nuts, even though it rarely occurs to me to seek out vegetables on my own, although I dive right in when they’re put in front of me. But I saw a bag of Oberto teriyaki jerky, and I pounced on it, knowing it would fill my belly well enough to get me to lunch. Plus, who doesn’t love jerky?

  I went on my usual lunchtime ride, a leisurely hour-long spin across flat Pennsylvania farmland, nothing too taxing. But my stomach growled as if I had just ridden all afternoon. Afterward, buying lunch in the cafeteria, I chose a chicken wrap with carrot sticks and bread-and-butter pickles rather than the chips or pretzels I usually got, and a bottle of sports drink to top off my fluid levels after the ride. That afternoon, as my coworkers celebrated someone’s birthday with cupcakes, I stood with arms crossed and made polite refusal after polite refusal, even though the cupcakes were made by a woman who would later leave the company to open her own now-thriving bakery. Sugar was calling me, and I was trying not to hear.

  That night, at the box, Karianne asked me how things were going. I told her about the breakfast and the jerky, and my lunch.

  “What kind of wrap did you use for that sandwich?” she asked.

  I told her it was a spinach tor
tilla.

  “Skip it. It’s poison,” she said. “Same for the Gatorade. You don’t need that for an hour ride. Water is fine. Bread-and-butter pickles are made with sugar. Lose them.”

  I had never heard something as seemingly wholesome as a spinach tortilla called poison, but then again I had never eaten Paleo.

  That evening’s dinner was half a roast chicken and a bag of spinach sautéed in olive oil. It wasn’t too far from my usual dinner, lacking only some good rolls and a glass or two of wine. Later, rather than lying on the couch and enjoying a few M&Ms or pretzels as I usually did, I ate some almonds and drank several pints of water, then went to bed early, praying that sleep would deliver me from the desire to eat a box of Triscuits or a bag of Polly-O cheese sticks.

  The next day wasn’t any better. The wind was out of the west, a zephyr carrying the scent of the blooming onions cooking at Charlie Brown’s, a local steak joint, and the garlic knots slowly baking at Hickory Pizza. Every desk in the office had doughnuts or Hershey Kisses on it, every meeting had cookies, every lunch had a mound of french fries served with it. But I stayed strong, ordering double portions of green beans and brisket to keep myself full. There were voices calling to me to eat. But there were voices calling to me at the gym, too, telling me to quit. I had learned to push them down, and I could push down the siren call of un-Paleo food, too.

  Still, it took supreme acts of consciousness and will to stay on the program. Rather than just blindly accepting foods offered to me, like those tiny packets of snack mix on an airplane or samples at the supermarket, I learned to carefully consider what was being offered and to say no thank you if it wasn’t Paleo. I carried around my own half-pound bag of smokehouse almonds, jerky, raw unsweetened coconut, and dried berries, figuring that if I became desperate and was faced with unhealthy, un-Paleo choices, I could always eat my own food. If my meal at a restaurant came with potatoes, I’d ask for a substitution of extra vegetables, or, if it was Saturday, a cheat day, take one bite of the mashed and enjoy. I opted out of the breadbasket and learned to stay on the perimeter of the supermarket, where the meat and vegetables are, the inner aisles being the pathway to processed sin. I drank only red wine, and only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, never during the week. Beer and I broke up. Like most breakups, it took a few times to truly take, and there were a few bouts of messy makeup sex. And I missed orange juice, with all its sugary tartness that could wake me up almost as well as a double espresso.

  Breakfasts became an orgy of bacon as the microwave became coated with a film of pork fat. I put olive oil on everything because it was a very Paleo fat and helped make me feel full, and devoured bowls of gazpacho, not because the cavemen necessarily liked cold tomato soup, but because its minimal ingredients were all unprocessed. I learned to like oysters, a very Paleo food. My food was minimally processed if it had been processed at all. I skipped smoothies, because so many of them were based on fruit juices and yogurt, both verboten foods. My main cheat food was my mother-in-law’s fresh chocolate chip cookies, which she baked only on Sundays and were gone, thanks to how fast they went at a big family dinner, by Sunday night. If I ordered a burger, I left the bun behind. I skipped cereals and rice.

  Here’s a page from my food diary for Monday, February 11:

  *

  Espresso, one at 8 a.m., one at 10 a.m.

  Raspberries, almonds, and a chicken breast at 7 a.m.

  Chicken breast, carrots, and celery at 12:30 p.m.

  Tacos with grilled beef, turkey, cabbage, salsa, skipped the taco shell, 7 p.m.

  8 almonds, 8 p.m.

  120 ounces of water over the day

  *

  After a week, I had lost four pounds. After two weeks, seven. After a month, ten. After two months, twenty. I lost so much weight that I needed to buy new jeans. I texted Anne from the dressing room of a Levi’s store: “I can fit in skinny jeans!” People commented, men and women, at my buffness. A colleague opened a meeting by saying, “Let’s talk about how skinny Madden is.” A friend’s wife gave me a look that made me wonder if she were the real Mrs. Robinson. I preened. And my WODs started to improve, especially anything involving pull-ups or running, because I had just dropped 10 percent of my body weight. Imagine doing all these exercises with a twenty-pound dumbbell in your pocket, then imagine taking it out. Yes, you’d be faster. And yes, people would notice. And yes, they’d say something you wanted to hear.

  No wonder people get so obsessed with this, I thought.

  I really and truly felt, for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t the fat kid in the class. I thought of my parents. Dad teasing my mother for her hamburger—no bun—served with tomatoes, lettuce, and cottage cheese while he enjoyed his Scotch and burgers served with beans and pan-fried new potatoes from a can, one of his specialties. Ma was pretty Paleo before the term had been coined.

  I wasn’t always good. On vacation in St. John, I fell hard off the wagon after a 3.5-mile swim, gorging myself on Double Stuf Oreos and Swedish Fish, and feeling dirty and slutty when I was done. To atone, the next day I ordered fish tacos, and ate the fish and cabbage and tomatoes but left the corn tortillas behind. I had had enough poison the day before. That experience made me realize something about the nature of exercise. The shorter, more intense workouts of CrossFit seemed to shut down my appetite, but longer, less intense efforts, like long rides or runs, left me famished. It was easy to undo the benefits of a two-hour bike ride in five minutes of gorging in the kitchen just after I had put my bike away. I could exercise less, albeit more intensely, and feel less hungry? Bring it.

  Never, not once, during the two-month challenge did I ever feel tired or lethargic because of a lack of energy from a calorie deficit. In fact, I felt like I had more energy, and my mood was definitely better. Karianne urged us to look into periodic fasting, which was also part of the Paleo plan. But that smacked to me of food-weighing, and seemed like a recipe for crankiness, which I certainly didn’t need any help with. I skipped it, even though she swore by it because the cavemen probably lived in feast-or-famine cycles of food supply.

  CrossFit Morristown’s challenge experiment ended after two months. I lost a total of twenty pounds. Karianne urged us all to make this part of life. The word diet is derived from the Greek for “way of life,” and the Paleo plan certainly seemed like a healthy way of life, one that was allowing me to climb ropes with greater ease and even to run a little bit faster. But to paraphrase Lincoln, the price of leanness is eternal vigilance. It took an enormous amount of concentration and planning to always eat this way. You have to plan ahead, all the time. You have to be conscious all the time. I know that’s an excuse, and I know I’m lame for making it.

  The instructors at my cert were right: it’s nearly impossible to eat this way all the time, at least for me. It is exhausting. For me, it’s better to allow yourself to cheat, and to know it’s okay to do so once in a while, than to try to walk away forever from some of the things that give life its zest. There are zealots who would tell you that, yes, a piece of pie will kill you, actually. But I’m not one of them. I’ve decided to be pretty Paleo. I stick to the basic plan most of the time. I avoid sandwiches and pasta and rice and milk. I’ve added avocadoes to my diet, not just because they’re Paleo, but because they’re delicious. I don’t eat everything offered to me, and just because somebody put out a bunch of Girl Scout cookies in the coffee room at work, it doesn’t mean I have to eat them. The same willpower that gets me out of bed on a subzero morning to go do burpees has allowed me, most of the time, to walk past the offering of Halloween candy at the office reception desk. Not all the time, but more often than not.

  I’ve decided that having cookies in my life once in a while means more to me than taking a minute off my time in the Grace WOD, in which you perform thirty clean-and-jerks as fast as you can. I’ve regained ten pounds, but my new pants still fit. I’ve made peace with the fact that I have traded some speed and agility for the ability to take advantage—to
enjoy—some of the best things life has to offer me. Maybe that makes me a failure. Or maybe it makes me a well-rounded, happy guy who’s more self-aware than he thought he was. I think it’s the latter.

  Of course, I have to remind myself of that deal I made with myself when I’m lying on the floor of the Annex, wondering why I’m not getting any faster at Grace. But like my breath, that knowledge eventually returns.

  7

  The 20X

  Do you want to keep going, Madden?”

  The question came in like a distant AM radio station, broadcasting late at night. Filled with static, not entirely clear, alternately very loud and barely audible. It was the voice of Jim Rutan, the then-owner of CrossFit Honor, a box in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was asking if I wanted to continue with the workout I had started a couple of hours ago, in the predawn murk of a Saturday. He had reason to ask: I was, at that very moment, heaving the last bits of my breakfast onto the wood chips next to the front door of his place of business. Espresso, banana, granola bar, water, all in a pile, burning my throat on the way back up, staining my black combat boots and green fatigue pants.

  “Madden, do you want to keep going?” he asked again.

  The truth is, I wasn’t so sure I did. We were a couple of hours into this workout, but we had at least twelve more to go. I had signed up for the SEALFIT 20X Challenge, an all-day event I had come across online, taught by Commander Mark Divine, a former Navy SEAL, and a couple of his instructors, both also former SEALs. The come-on said that Divine and crew would show me that I was capable of twenty times more than I thought I was capable of, that the secret to being a high-achieving motherfucker was quieting, if not outright beating the shit out of, that little voice in the back of my head that kept telling me I was too tired or sore or fat or slow, that if I could just shut that off and let my body do its thing, I too could be okay. We would do this by completing three WODs in one fourteen-hour day, plus assorted other physical and mental activities. When it was over, I would be on my way to having an unbeatable mind. I would develop the mental toughness I needed, and that I knew I lacked. I was here for the mental toughness; I knew I could suffer through a day of this. I had spent the better part of the last few years beating down the voice that told me I was still slow and fat and didn’t belong, that I should go back to my Matchbox cars. It was working. Now it was time to kill that voice once and for all. That’s what I hoped to get out of the 20X.