Why did I write this book?
Throughout most of my life up into my 40's I didn't have
much of a problem with weight. But things changed dramatically after my
heart surgery in 1998. Before the surgery, my eating habits were terrible by
any standard. I ate fast food often and without regard to calories or
cholesterol. There is no doubt that the fat and cholesterol in this diet
were what clogged up my arteries. But after the surgery, I had brand new
heart plumbing and I solemnly promised everyone that I would change my ways.
But I didn't. After a few weeks of half-hearted attempts I gradually went
back to the old bad habits. But this time, my body didn't react the same
way. One day, after a few months, I looked in the mirror and was shocked at
what I saw. My weight had gone over 190 lbs, far more than I had ever
weighed in my life, and my face looked puffy and unhealthy. Pictures of my
father's beer belly flashed through my head. I was not going to go down that
path. This was NOT OK.
I had spent the previous five years developing a set of
methods to help people change conditions in their community and work life.
The methods called Results-Based Accountability™ or RBA showed communities
how to work together to improve the lives of children and families. And a
variation showed program managers how to improve the quality of their
government or nonprofit services. If I could help people tackle huge
challenges like reducing teen pregnancy or improving school performance,
surely I could figure out how to reduce and control my own weight.
So I began to use the RBA methods to bring my weight down. I
weighed myself twice a day, morning and evening and kept the weight data on
a computer spreadsheet in both table and graph form. I bought a book that
enabled me to count calories. (Corrinne Netzer's The Complete Book of
Food Counts). I wasn't sure exactly what calorie total would bring my
weight down, but I made a guess and adjusted it over time. It turned out to
be about 2,000 calories per day. I had to decide what combinations of foods
would get me below 2,000 calories. I started reading food labels and
Netzer's book. I kept track of everything I ate or drank and tallied it up
at the end of the day. Gradually I learned what worked and what didn't. In
just a few months I was able to bring my weight below my target of 178.
Maintaining this discipline over months and years is not
easy to do. As Winston Churchill said, "I can resist everything except
temptation." So I would overindulge at holiday meals and my weight would go
up. But now I knew what to do and could quickly bring my weight back down again. I
realized that weight loss would never be a straight line affair. My weight
would zigzag. What I wanted was for it to zigzag down when losing weight and
to zigzag horizontally in the weight maintenance stage. In July, 2006, I
started my most recent round of using results-based methods. On April 18,
2009, I will have been on the diet for 1,000 consecutive days. With some zigs and zags I have maintained my weight below 178 lbs.
In fact 88% of the days have been below this weight. (See the graph below.) I am now
resetting the target to 176 lbs.
I realized that if these methods worked for me, then maybe
they could help other people. I didn't want to write a lengthy tome. I
didn't want to write a cook book. Everything I had to tell people could fit
into a very small space. And maybe people who have struggled with all the
lengthy books and complicated fads could find these simple straightforward
methods easier to use and maintain. Hence, a 45 page book.
There are some people who have suggested that it is vaguely
undignified for me to have strayed from the high purpose of social change
into what is clearly a matter of popular culture. But I don't think so. In
addition to helping people lose weight, I hope the book will introduce
people to the RBA thinking process, and perhaps inspire them to take what
they've learned from losing weight and help their neighbors work together to
make a difference in their community.
Most Recent Weight Graph
