Allen's successful journey from fat to thin: His weight loss story

April 01 2008

Allen Zadoff

Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Age: 40 years old
Top Weight: around 360 pounds (I say "around" because I wasn't rushing to step on the scale back then.)
Current Weight: 160 pounds less than that
Target Weight: My goal is to eat like a normal-sized man every day of my life, and I trust that in doing so, my body will be restored to its proper size.

Emotional and spiritual healing and development - those were the major factors that helped Allen lose weight and are still helping him keep it off. Here the author of the book "Hungry: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin" describes his road to self-empowerment and his passion for helping other people deal with the desire to overeat, a problem that he still experiences but which he conquers every day.

-What finally made you decide to start with a weight loss program?
After years of out-of-control eating, trying diets of every kind, even going on a protein fast and losing 100 pounds (then regaining 125), I finally couldn't do it anymore. I realized that every way I'd tried to control my body for the first 28 years of my life had failed utterly. I had been fighting food since I was a little kid, and food won. I had no choice but to surrender.

-Why did you choose this weight loss program?
I didn't choose it. It chose me.The truth is that I didn't know what to do, only what not to do. Jumping on another diet was not the answer for me. In my experience, diets were painful and I wanted to stay on them as little time as possible. They always started out great, but I couldn't follow through with what I'd started. Life without extra food was just too painful.  All the other things I did-- counting calories, exercising, hopping onto the scale every ten minutes--none of them worked. I guess you could say I knew what wouldn't work better than what would.

-What type of weight loss method did you follow?
Knowing that all the standard methods hadn't worked for me, I became open minded in a way I'd never been before. I became willing to ask for help. I talk about this process in great detail in my book Hungry. Eventually I was led to people who looked at overeating as a disease rather than something they could control with willpower and good food choices. The approach rang true for me. My best efforts were obviously not enough, and I learned that I could surrender my constant battle with food. I began to work a program I refer to as "10-90". Only 10% of my energy revolved around food and eating. The other 90% was focused on emotional and spiritual healing and development.

-How long were you on your weight loss method?
I've been at a more or less normal weight for over 12 years now, and I've been on this program the entire time. I continue to work my program every day of my life. I'm not cured of the desire to overeat. It's more like I've been given a release from needing to do it, but that release is dependent on my taking action on a continual basis.

-How do you keep yourself motivated?
I don't need to keep motivated. I need to help other overeaters who are struggling. There's nothing quite as special as sharing my story with someone, and watching the light go on in their eyes when they realize there is a solution to this thing they've been fighting all their lives. That keeps me going, and it reminds me of where I come from.

-Do you have any weight loss tips for our readers?
In Hungry I share the traffic light exercise. It's a way of taking inventory of my food and the eating behaviors I'm struggling with. Basically you make three lists. Green foods are foods you can eat without a problem. Yellow foods are foods that give you trouble, perhaps there are times you eat them moderately and other times you can't. Red foods are foods you simply cannot eat sanely. They're the foods where the standard portion size is a joke. Chips, for instance. Have you ever eaten ten tortilla chips and felt satisfied? For me the red foods include most forms of sugar, a lot of baked goods, and "finger foods". They also  include certain behaviors like eating in the car, eating more than one plate at a party or buffet, etc.

I've found that when I give up eating the red foods and participating in the red behaviors, I'm given immense freedom. But the traffic light is not a diet. It's an inventory, like looking through the clothes in your closet and tossing out the ones that don't work for you. I always suggest that people take the information to a nutritionist or medical professional. When it comes to food, I can't really trust my own perception. I must check it with another person who's a little saner than me in this area.

-Do you think it will be easy to fall back into your old lifestyle pattern? How do you prevent this from happening?
In my experience, the default switch that sends me to food is still there, but I've been given the power not to act on it. The problem was never food. It was the way I reacted to the the world. I needed food to be comfortable enough to deal with my life. Unfortunately the thing that gave me comfort ended up imprisoning me and almost destroying my life. In my experience, long term recovery comes from dealing with the reasons I needed food in the first place. If I'm willing to do the emotional and spiritual work and help others, and I continue to surrender to the fact that food is far more powerful than I am, I get to eat sanely and live at a normal weight.

-Do you have a favorite Web site or blog that helped or inspired you to lose weight?