1 7 5

It feels like a lot and a little at the same time. Still, I am 11 kg lighter than when I started this race against the clock. Less, yes, but still enough to sink the Titanic. It probably would have been an even bigger disaster if there had been a few fat guys like me on board. Can you imagine how much space we would have taken up in the lifeboats? Would we have been discriminated against and traded? Five normal-weight people for two fat guys? Who would you save in that situation?

My weight seems to have stabilized lately, with the drops becoming slower and more consistent. The regular exercise I've been doing recently — at least one hour every day — is slowly forcing my eating habits to adapt as well. My portions are getting smaller and smaller, while the amount of time I spend moving and exercising is getting longer. The direction is right. At the same time, I'm beginning to recognize the periods when I still eat too much and wake up the next day feeling stuffed, as well as those moments when I've literally just eaten and still feel the need to eat something else. Although this second craving for additional food feels different this time. Imagine a Spidey sense that, even though you have meat sitting right in front of you, tells you that you need to eat fruit. After a successful career as a fatso, it's unlikely that my Spidey sense isn't broken. I've spent too many years eating too much of pretty much everything, so it probably hasn't received a software update in ages. I'm still running version 1.02 while everyone around me is already downloading 18. Maybe these new nutritional needs I'm experiencing, which I'd like to blame on all the exercise I'm currently doing, are actually a lie. Maybe I'm just pregnant.

The entire process, however, still feels forced. It feels as if my body is fighting me and the decisions I make. When I eat less in the morning and have a relatively light lunch, I feel slightly restless, as if something inside me is telling me that I should eat. In the past, the first things that came to mind were chips or sweets or, why not, a sandwich to eat while waiting for lunch. Today, I'm discovering that even though I might feel like eating something, if I manage to resist, I don't die. I don't get sick. Nothing particularly dramatic happens. Slowly, I'm realizing that my body is moving in the right direction. And yet it seems to fight every change for the better. It feels as though I have to force it. As though I'm fighting myself. As though a normal blood sugar level is somehow too low. As though one slice of bread with butter is too little and I should really be eating three or four. What has changed this week compared with all the other times is that I'm beginning to understand that I truly have to change my lifestyle. Because as long as I don't, nothing is going to happen.

1 7 5, minus 11 kg since August 19. I'm curious about what happens — and how it happens — if I manage to get below 100. As I move closer to that number, I inevitably start thinking. I find myself reflecting on the idea of being healthy. What does being healthy actually mean? Somehow, over the last 20 years, I think I've lost touch with that concept... I try to remember a period of my life that I could genuinely describe as healthy. I remember being 15 or 16, even 20, when I was still exercising, doing martial arts, moving a lot, and that is effectively the last period of my life when I can honestly say that I truly felt healthy.

There is something embarrassing, funny, even ironic about a doctor giving a patient advice about what constitutes a healthy lifestyle when he doesn't live a healthy life himself. And then I wonder: why should anyone listen to him? You can give all the advice you want, but as a non-expert, why should anyone listen to you? Just because the principle works on Wall Street, where genuinely wealthy people take financial advice from bankers who ride the subway to work and are themselves buried in debt, doesn't mean it should work everywhere else. If you walked into a gym and a fat guy like me came over and told you he was your fitness trainer, would you believe him? Would you follow his advice? Even if, at some point in his life, he had been the world's greatest gymnast. Why would you listen to him? And so I can't help reflecting on the irony of a situation in which I — and I'm sure I'm not alone, but joined by plenty of other doctors and healthcare professionals — give people advice about health and tell patients what they need to do while we ourselves are anything but healthy.

The only pattern that seems to hold up reasonably well in medicine is that cardiologists tend to be slimmer. But otherwise, when I look at my colleagues, most of them have a belly, and most aren't particularly conscious of or interested in what they eat. Ask a senior resident in almost any hospital what they eat during a 24-hour shift. So how did we end up entrusting our health to the promise of tomorrow? The reason so many of us neglect our health is that we keep telling ourselves that whatever we're doing is only temporary. We promise ourselves that tomorrow will be different. We lie to ourselves that even if we eat badly today, tomorrow, when the shift is finally over, we'll eat healthily. We'll finally have time to make a salad. We'll have time to go to an organic grocery store and, of course, because we worked today's shift, we'll even have the money to afford the organic vegetables and food they sell there. The whole thing is either an illusion we willingly choose to hallucinate or simply a lie we're perfectly aware of. That tomorrow never comes. After a brutal shift, all you want is to reclaim a little of the time and sacrifice you've just given away, and most of the time, when you finally get home, if you don't immediately fall asleep and instead decide to eat something, you can be pretty sure you'll make yourself some bacon and eggs. After all, you have to replace all that energy you've burned.

At the same time, you're usually alone and therefore deprived of any kind of quality control. Your partner is at work and the kids are at school; there are no other voices around to object to your bacon. And that's how one simple hospital shift turns into an endless stroll through life, where you jump from one bad decision to an even worse one without realizing that the only thing that actually matters is what you're doing right now, in the present. Now matters because every decision you can make is made now. Yesterday is already gone and cannot be changed, while tomorrow hasn't arrived yet, and every decision you plan to make tomorrow has absolutely no effect on you today.

So what are you doing while you're reading these lines? What decisions can you make right now, at this very moment, to become healthier?