Indy is back, jack!

Indy and the lovely Mandy

Remember Indy? He's our great friend who entertained the masses with 

this
and
this
and
this 

after Henry was born. Now Grace and Henry are both a year old and we've all moved to North Carolina. That's cute, huh? Anyway.

About a month ago, Indy sent a well-timed text while I was in the middle of a two day cleanse trying to avoid Spanx at a Christmas party. I may have closed the conversation with, "Asparagus and cucumbers aren't a damned snack!" I was angry. And hungry. 

He has a solution by which I am fascinated. A solution I'm too scared to try, so I was more than happy to bug him to blog about it.

Of course he'd do this scary diet. After you've been shot by a cab driver, what's left to fear?

I'll pipe down, now, and let the man talk. 

Ok Ok OK. Last thing. What he says about his metabolism is completely true.  Once, we went to dinner in DC and he ate three bowls of cheese dip by himself and then ate dinner.

  So I should probably start out with an admission: I get it. Females of the world, I get it. A few short years ago I assumed y’all held the monopoly on body image issues due to your dangerously high levels of mysterious lady hormones (it’s science). Now, I know better. I had always been naturally athletic and could boast a metabolism that allowed me to eat multiple entrees at dinner only to burn them off so quickly that I didn’t have to turn the heat on in my apartment in the winter. I’m not sure when that stopped. I wasn’t consulted. Heck, I wasn’t even alerted that I needed to make some drastic lifestyle changes.

Four and a half years ago, I started a four year anesthesiology residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Looking back at my records, I was 6’3” and weighed 183 lbs. Admittedly, I was a little underweight, but I worked out and ran long distances 4-5 times a week. Why? Did I love it? No. I did it to look good for the fairer sex. I was single, and after work my day was my own. I was probably more than just a little vain-and still am despite no longer being supported by objective evidence. Exactly eight and a half months later, I met the girl of my dreams. Suddenly, I had better things to do with my free time-namely drive the 45 minutes to Annapolis to see her every chance I got. A smart dude like me probably should have realized that, with a finite number of hours in the day, if you are hanging out with your girlfriend, you are most likely not also working out. Long story short, I started gaining weight.

It wasn’t really noticeable at first. To be honest, I didn’t really mind filling out some, but as my important life events began happening at a rapid pace-first an engagement, the inevitable wedding, a pregnancy (her, not me), and the birth and subsequent wrangling of our daughter, I began to realize that I had been working out zero and eating at the same clip I had when I was a college athlete. I stepped on the scale a month ago and it read 216. Double ewe tee eff. I was by all objective standards overweight. I realized that I had recently been buying XL shirts when I had worn a Large size high school. I had come up with some lame excuses about why I couldn’t attend my college baseball team’s reunion. I refused to let my wife post pictures of me on Facebook. All of this while looking by all objective standards like a pretty normal 30 year old American dude. I had full blown body image issues. I needed to do something drastic, but I didn’t know what. I knew that simply working out more and eating less would reverse the progression, but how many hours would that take me away from my family? I needed a magic bullet. I needed a quick fix that would drop my new found weight without pulling me away from playtime with Grace and hanging out with my wife.

That’s when I decided to go on a no joke medical diet. To be continued in installments per Courtney’s request.