From the Editor’s Desk: Five Months In (Premium)

Five months ago, I resolved to take responsibility for my health and work with my doctor to lose weight and address some other related issues. It’s been a resounding success, frankly, and while my most recent check-in today did not include the glucose measurement I care about the most, the results are still obvious. I’ve lost about 50 pounds since June, and in doing so I reduced my waistline by 6 inches and reversed my pre-diabetes. The only downside is that I’ve had to buy a lot of new clothes.

This came to a head in Mexico City in October, as almost none of the clothes I keep there fit anymore, and I didn’t bring much in the way of new clothes on that trip. I spent the three weeks we were there hiking up my pants and retightening my belt every time we walked anywhere, to my wife’s consternation, and she finally demanded that it was time for me to go shopping. I hate shopping. But that, too, was interesting, as the first set of jeans I brought back from the store were two sizes down from where I was but were still a size too big, forcing me to go back and do it all over again. That’s a new problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thin. But I am much thinner than I was. And I see no reason why I can’t keep doing what I’m doing. The weight loss will slow down, it always does. But what I’m doing—intermittent fasting with no breakfast every day, a healthy high-fat, low-carb diet with lots of greens, vegetables, and other fiber, and a reasonable level of daily exercise—is clearly working.

When I visited Seattle last month for Microsoft Ignite, I unexpectedly ran into Scott Hanselman at a dinner event and on seeing him I suddenly seized on that moment to thank him. I told him that I had seen his continuous glucose monitor when he spoke at Build in May—Scott has Type-1 diabetes—and that it inspired me to go on this journey and use continuous glucose monitors over a two-month period in late summer. But his response surprised me.

“What are your numbers?” he asked.

I kind of stumbled on that one. I hadn’t expected to see him and wasn’t really thinking about this stuff until about 30 seconds ago. “My numbers?”

“You know, there’s some controversy in my world about normal people using CGMs,” he went on. I hadn’t even considered that, but in his case, for anyone with Type-1 diabetes, a CGM isn’t a nicety, it’s a requirement. And I’m sure the whole bro culture of health hacking that pervades the tech space these days is a bit off-putting to those in need. This I understood. Our son became deaf because of bacterial meningitis and there is a vocal, militant part of the deaf community that believes that the cochlear implants that allow him to hear are a threat to deaf culture.

I eventually recovered by pulling out my phone, opening my healthcare provider’s app, and looking up my lab results from June and September. There was a meaningful decline between the two, and he was impressed and agreed. He asked about how much weight I had lost, and he was impressed by that as well. And then he surprised me again. “You should have called me!”

And … yep. To that, I had no good answer. As I wrote in From the Editor’s Desk: Running in Reverse (Premium) a few weeks ago, the Microsoft folks I used to see all the time had sort of transitioned in more distant relationships thanks to the pandemic. And I’m just not good at reaching out to people, even people I care about deeply. He understood, but it was a sort of disconcerting moment of self-criticism. One that was interrupted by another old friend from Microsoft who walked up at that moment with another surprising bit of commentary.

“Are you OK?” this person asked—he’ll go unnamed for obvious reasons. “Or did you lose weight on purpose?”

I also stumbled in trying to process and then answer these questions. I think I said something jokingly like, “Yes, or at least I hope so.” But this clouded my mind for the next few minutes. Did I look … sickly? In discussing this with my wife later, she told me that this type of question was actually a polite way to approach someone who’s lost a lot of weight because many times people who have a grave illness will be congratulated on their weight loss. It’s sort of like asking an obese woman when she’s due. Fair enough. But it still makes me feel a little weird.

I’m sure I wrote something to this effect earlier in this effort, but weight loss is a lot like any other difficult, time-consuming task in that it’s easy to start—anyone can do it—but the trick is to keep going. (I’ve said this about writing books or websites and blogs back in the day, and podcasts and YouTube channels more recently.) But that’s one of the rare areas in which I am confident: I know myself well enough to know that I can do this and, more importantly, will keep doing this. And I’ve been very regimental about the diet.

I have cheated only a few times, and each time was basically a reward. I had half of a small sourdough pizza in July and another half in October, at a favorite local place in Mexico City. And I had gravy and stuffing on Thanksgiving, and as leftovers for a few days afterward. (And, boy, did I pay for that last transgression digestively. Totally worth it.) But other than that, I’ve been strictly healthy high-fat, low-carb, two meals a day, virtually no snacking. (And on those rare occasions when I do snack, it’s healthy.) As my doctor said, looking over my blood work and other data over time, you can see it in the numbers. She knows I’m staying on track.

Speaking of which, I visited my doctor this morning for what feels like the 10th time since June. My doctor, a nurse we keep seeing, and my wife have all become close in kind of an odd collegial way, and she’s cheering my progress at each visit. I had expected to get cholesterol and glucose tests ahead of today’s check-in, but the lab would only do the first of those because the glucose test was scheduled for early 2024. She fixed that by ordering new tests—I went to the lab after the appointment for more blood work—but almost everything else looks great. My cholesterol is down from September but still a bit high, so we’ll check that again in six months.

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. It seems to be working, and now I have the numbers to back it up.