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Feb. 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:01
637 Weight (and fat!)

A brief history of my fight with the 'muffin top'

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Steph, it is a rather slightly more civilized time of 8.20 in the morning on the 8th of February, I think it is, or something like that.
Thursday, for sure. That much, I'm fairly convinced of, because I did the garbage last night.
So I thought we might move a little, little, little bit from the political to the personal this morning.
And I was sort of interested in the conversation that was going on around a weight on the boards.
So I thought I would throw my two cents in with my sort of history of weight.
And I find it quite a fascinating topic.
It is a bit of a consuming topic.
And it's one of the topics for me that merges both health, which is good, and social conformity, which is something that...
Let's just say I have a complicated relationship to.
I don't want to conform to the point where I become a slave to the opinions of others.
Yet, if you don't conform at all, then you are in the tricky position of being a Kaczynski-style outsider, which is also not my preference.
So... My history with weight is...
I don't know. I don't think it's particularly unusual, but I'll talk about it at least as I've experienced it.
I don't remember thinking really about weight as a kid.
And I was, by all sort of photographic evidence, a skinny little tyke.
So I didn't really think about it.
And then in puberty... I did think about it because I gained weight, particularly a little tummy, which I spent an enormous amount of time and energy sucking in until it almost coated my spine.
And my friend back then, he's dead now so I can say Jamie Guthrie, my friend back then, and I, we went to see the film Rocky.
And, yes, I'm that old.
And, like most people, Bill Conti's music, plus the sight of Sylvester Stallone's ripped body, sent us into paroxysms of aping masculinity.
Because neither of us had fathers.
And, for the most part, my friends at that time didn't have fathers.
But... We didn't really know what it was to be a man, but we sure knew that muscularity was something that men could do that women couldn't do, and with the music and the movie, which I think had quite a strong influence on people's perceptions of what it was to be physically attractive.
In the past, I mean, obesity has never been attractive except in this sort of Rubenesque world.
I mean, as I've mentioned before, beauty, I believe...
Physical beauty tends to be defined as sort of that which is hard to achieve to some degree, right?
So, when you have a situation where food is scarce, then women who are overweight are going to be attractive because when food is scarce, being overweight is a hard thing to achieve.
Now that food is plentiful, being thin is considered attractive because it's hard to achieve being thin.
To take sort of the feminine side of things and the masculine side as well to some degree.
On the other side, though, when the norm for human beings was physical labor, then physical muscularity was not considered to be attractive.
In fact, the strongman was the carny sideshow.
So mere physical bulging muscles and so on was not considered to be that attractive.
It was considered to be quite thuggish and definitely indicative of a...
A lower social status.
Now that physical activity is not the norm when it comes to everybody's occupation, now muscularity is considered to be a plus.
And why? Well, for the same reason that a male peacock has very large feathers.
At least there's one theory as to why that's the case on the big fan tail that they have.
And the reason for that is that a peacock must be very, very fit if he can drag those kinds of feathers around.
And similarly, a man must have great dedication and discipline and time and money in order to be able to buff himself up.
There is a sort of a question around smokers.
If you are a senior executive, can you be seen to be smoking?
Because that indicates a lack of willpower, and this and that and the other.
So, there's lots of markers that people like to put out that indicate their status, and...
In the past, being muscular was low status, now being muscular is high status, because it's hard to achieve.
In the past, being more muscular was easier to achieve, because it was just part of your, you know, hoisting and toting and bailing kind of lifestyle.
So, in the South, you know, there's always these fit slaves in these sort of antebellum kinds of dramas.
There's always these fit slaves and these corpulent old white men.
And, of course, the corpulence was part of the status.
You can't be fat if you're a slave, and therefore being the opposite of what a slave looks like has to some degree to do with status.
So, this thing around opposition is quite important.
If you look at someone like Humphrey Bogart, I mean, the man was built like seven sticks of spaghetti, right?
So, um, seven?
One, two, three, four. Anyway, some number of sticks of spaghetti.
And was not muscular at all.
And that, of course, he was quite the sex symbol.
And it is rather...
I mean, you can imagine these sort of 1940s and 1950s male celebrities sort of topless.
It probably wouldn't be that.
It wouldn't exactly be Chippendales, let's say.
So the seeing of the movie Rocky with my friend got us both into exercising.
And I guess it's not a bad thing, but we got involved in exercising.
For the sake of weight control rather than the joy of exercising.
And I distinctly remember us weighing ourselves every day on a little scale in my bathroom, or my parents, my mother's bathroom, And I distinctly remember going past 125 pounds.
I'm now 215 or 16 pounds.
So this was quite a while back.
I said 12 or 13. And I just remember that concern or that fear.
When I was a teenager...
I was not at all comfortable in my body, and that's not that unusual for teenagers, but I had oily hair, and I had acne, and I had, believe it or not, I had hemorrhoids.
I actually used this in a novel, and I didn't know this at the time, even though I went to a doctor.
He called it something like a dermal cyst, the worst doctor in the world.
It's one of the doctors my mom ended up suing.
And it's because my diet was so bad.
My mother was a ridiculously bad cook.
I remember getting onion dip on toast or things like spaghetti with applesauce, which is a little bit funny looking back at it now, but at the time was not so good.
And my diet was just wretched.
And that gave me digestive problems and skin problems and so on.
And then, of course, just as I began to conquer those, my hair began to fall out.
It was all quite exciting when I was a teenager, let's say.
But as far as weight went, I have always had, since those days, since the day after Rocky, and diminishing now to some degree, but throughout definitely my 20s and 30s, always had an uneasy relationship with weight.
I have this almost morbid fear of gaining weight.
Almost a morbid fear of gaining weight.
Now, this is shared by my family, for sure.
Oh, my Lord. My mother is very slender.
Can't be more than 1.15, and always has been.
She doesn't really... Well, I shouldn't say she exercised when we were younger.
She used to drag us up out of bed at 5 o'clock in the morning during her manic phases to go and climb over the fence to go and play tennis because we didn't like the price they charged after 7 a.m.
when... When the courts became sort of chargeable, when the guy showed up to collect the money.
So she did exercise.
She was never one for jogging or anything like that, but we played tennis and we'd walk and so on.
But I've always had a morbid fear of gaining weight.
I associate, and I'm not saying any of this is right, I'm just talking about my own sort of morbid fears about it, I associate weight with depression.
Gaining weight with being depressed.
And although I... I mean, although I've suffered some challenges in my life, I have a soul like a cork the size of a whale, right?
I mean, it goes down and poofah, it comes back up again.
Scattering islands in its wake, it feels like, sometimes.
So it's not that I'm afraid of being depressed.
It's not the cause and effect.
But I associate that with...
With depression, and I associate being overweight with kind of like the elephant in the room when you're talking with someone.
So, oh, and I wanted to apologize last Sunday.
I didn't want to disorient anyone, because last Sunday on the Colin show, I had already done 628, which was me crying about my future.
And there was some bewilderment when I started off with some stuff about students cheating and parents and this kind of stuff.
And so I'm Buddhist.
So I do apologize.
I didn't mean to disorient anyone, and I certainly was not averse to talking about what I had podcasted on, which I know moved some people, and I appreciate that.
but for the people who had joined us for the first time, it would seem like you're going over to a dinner party and they're all just talking about people they used to know in college, not the most.
So I just wanted to sort of hook some people in before we went on to that topic with some more general topics, but I didn't want to give the impression that I was avoiding the topic of 628.
I certainly didn't want to do that.
I just wanted to throw out something and a few niblets for the newbies.
So when somebody is overweight, there is, for me at least, a question.
Thank you.
And there is a question or a series of questions, rightly or wrongly, bigoted or not, this is a series of questions that sort of floats into my mind.
One is, how did this happen?
And that's sort of a fundamental question for me.
How did this happen?
There have been two times in my life where I've gained weight outside of just the hormonal stuff that happened in puberty.
The one time was when I was traveling all the time for business.
And if you've done business travel, you know it's just an exhausting calorie rich, too tired to exercise mess.
And during the time that I was a caribou for the first couple of years, I was just working too much to exercise.
It would have been fruitless to dry.
And also, because what was happening, I was working during the day.
Then I'd go home to a difficult relationship.
There was just no me time. And for a couple of years, I think it was two or three years, I didn't go to the gym.
And I didn't really exercise.
So I gained, I don't know, probably I would say about 10 or 15 pounds.
And... I can feel that difference.
I mean, I notice that difference.
I turn into what they call a muffin top, where your dilbert sort of belly and dorsal flaps of fat are hanging over your belt.
The muffin top, I think that's quite a descriptive phrase.
So I just stopped.
I stopped eating sweets and so on.
And then during the first year of my marriage to Christina, we just ate and ate and ate.
And it started on our honeymoon when we had an all-you-can-eat.
Now, that was different, though, because we were playing volleyball and swimming and snorkeling and so on.
So that was a little different. But after we got back, we just kind of kept up the eating.
And again... Probably ten or so pounds, which then we just had to cut out.
For me, the four C's are the evils, right?
The chocolate, the cookies, the chips, and chocolate, cookies, chips, and some other C that I can't remember.
It's not exactly candy, but it's some other thing I can't recall just now.
So you just stop eating those, right?
I mean, that's sort of the deal.
Now, in my family, my mother, always paranoid about gaining weight, and I inherited, I could say, or adapted from her, the rather vainglorious habit of checking myself out in a mirror.
So, when I am, at least once a day, this is how ridiculous this sort of stuff can be from the family, at least once a day, as I'm walking past a mirror, I will lift up my Top, and I will check out my gut.
And I will pinch my side and back fat.
Because I think that's what's happened biologically, is that after 20 years of sucking my gut in, I've actually moved all the fat to the back.
That's where it's migrated, because there's no room for it.
Although I think that actually sucking my gut in should have given me a six-pack by now.
It's not easy. So, there's that.
My brother, the jerk, would call me, throughout puberty, would call me fatty.
And, I mean, looking back at the pictures, I wasn't fat.
What happened was, not only did I start exercising, but I joined the swim team, I joined the cross-country team.
I mean, I got to be fairly fit, but my brother still called me fatty.
Just one of the annoying, stupid, asshole things that brothers tend to do.
And my father was a geologist who basically walked...
For a living, right? He was an in-the-field geologist for his career.
He didn't really have the social skills to being struck with periodic fits of catastrophic depression for fairly obvious reasons that he will still not to this day acknowledge, i.e.
leaving his children in the care of a criminal.
Or, as he put it once, somebody who might have criminal tendencies, or seems to have criminal tendencies.
But he walked for a living, and of course he lived far away from snacky temptations, right?
He would just be out in the bush. And I lived like that for about a year and a half after high school, when I worked as a gold panner and claims taker up north.
You're just working all the time.
You burn off like, I don't know, 1,500, 2,000 calories a day just doing the work that you're doing.
Especially, he did it in Africa, where I guess he sweated it off.
off.
I did it in Canada where I shuddered and froze it off.
So he has always been concerned with weight himself.
Thanks.
As he said once, I think the last time I saw him, he said, well, you know, the key thing is that you have to make sure that you don't do that one pound a year gain that is so common after you hit 40.
It doesn't seem like much, but then you're carrying around 30 extra pounds when you're 70, and that's tough, it's almost impossible to lose, and he was, I think, 65 at this point.
He had a gut, not a big one, and we played squash.
So, there is a kind of obsession about weight in my family, and I inherited that to some degree.
And I used to weigh myself, and I would go through the highs and the lows of, oh, I'm down two pounds, oh, I'm up two pounds, oh my god, I'm up four pounds or six pounds, that's terrible!
And I gave up on that.
I gave up on that a couple of years ago.
Because it just didn't mean anything, fundamentally.
Like looking on the backtrack scenario of all of this obsessive weighing of myself and checking myself out and seeing if I gained weight or not.
Partly what I did was I said, Christina, would you mind telling me if I've gained any weight?
Because she can see more clearly than I. So it's just one of these trust things.
Just hand that body check over to your partner.
That can be a very good and helpful thing.
And... I used to eat, you know, like half a chocolate bar a day, yet with weight obsessions, isn't that funny, eh?
But I've always had a real sweet tooth, and I've always sort of felt like I want it, right?
As I work out. I mean, basically, except for a couple-year gap in my late 20s when I was starting my company, I've pretty much been working out solid since I was about 17 or so.
16, and jogging since earlier than that, and so on.
Although I don't jog anymore. I'm too old.
So... I think that I kind of need the calories.
I really do have a sweet tooth, which I've had to really control, and I don't do that anymore.
Now what I'll do is have like a Hershey's kiss or two every night after dinner, and I don't really eat dessert and so on.
So it's not that my diet is not too, too bad or anything like that.
Breakfast is a bit of a killer because everything that's easy to eat at breakfast is like lots of sugar in it and so on.
But I've never really been on a diet.
All I've done is stop overeating, which is a little bit different.
And The sort of result of all of that, what is considered to be attractive and so on, has been For me, a fairly stable body weight for the most part over the past 20 years.
I sort of weigh now what I weighed when I was about 20 or 22.
There's been a slight shift.
I used to wear a size 36, now I wear a size 38, so the muffin cup has expanded slightly.
But I think that's because of all my back muscles.
Yeah, that's it. When I'm around somebody who's overweight, though, a part of me sort of wonders, how did this happen?
And, of course, part of me sees, rightly or wrongly, and this is just my impressions, there's nothing syllogistic, so flame away if you like, but I'm not trying to put any stake out there in the land of truth.
What I see is a very sad and lonely childhood.
What I see is a very sad and lonely childhood where self-checking and parental concern and parental involvement in the child's body is not present.
And that seems sad to me.
That seems like a very sad and lonely place to be.
As I've mentioned before, I would go over after school to a friend of mine's place and we'd, you know, whatever, play board games or we'd play video games or whatever, chat.
And his father was a doctor and...
His father was the one who, after I went through puberty, had to say at one point, look, your body's going through some changes, and basically you're smelly.
And he gave me some deodorant, which I started to use, and it never occurred to me.
As I mentioned before, you don't smell yourself.
Now that, of course, is an indication of a very sad and lonely childhood, which I certainly wouldn't argue against.
And for me, weight is very much along those kinds of lines that you haven't Noticed that you're overweight and your parents didn't notice that you're overweight.
Assuming that this is something that occurred when you were, something that sort of started when you were a child.
The other thing that's always interesting for me, and again, you know what, enough caveats.
Then another thing that's interesting for me is watching people who are obese eat.
Because, you know, glandular questions aside, it's a fairly simple calculation.
Calories in, calories out.
Some genetic differences in terms of one's body's desire to retain weight, but basically it is calories in versus calories out that causes weight gain, right?
Too many calories in, too few calories out, weight equals up.
And That aspect is always interesting because I've almost never seen an obese person overeat.
I've almost never seen an obese person overeat.
And I'm only saying almost because I can't specifically say no, but I certainly can't recall one off the top of my head.
And... That's obviously the sign of a rather tortured relationship with food for me.
Because you know they're overeating.
I mean, you just know. You just know they're overeating or under-exercising or whatever it is, right?
And again, this is outside of the glandular issues and so on.
And so, if you see an obese person wolf down half a pizza, half a large pizza, I can do half a small.
And if I'm really hungry, half a medium.
Half a large pizza, let's say, at lunch.
Actually, I can't do it at lunch. I just fall asleep.
Then it's fairly clear, I think, that you say, well, that's why that person is overweight.
But that never happens, right? The people who are overweight, they end up not eating that much when they're eating normal portions, let's say, normal or less.
And all that means to me is that they're binging at night when they're alone, which again seems very sort of sad and lonely.
And there is a debate that's floating around the boards around self-esteem and weight.
And for me, I don't have a particular answer.
It is... Low self-esteem to be obsessed with being thin as well.
So there's a bell curve, right, of self-satisfaction that occurs, and it's a different degree to everyone.
And there are people who are very fit who look overweight.
So that's not to me a particularly simple example, but what I would say is that people who are overweight as a result of poor health choices Do not have strong self-monitoring.
And of course, if you ask any overweight person, would you rather be overweight or not, almost all of them would say, I'd rather not be overweight.
Not all of us may want to go to the skin-on-muscle Brad Pitt body image, but people who are overweight, just like you ask almost any smoker, would you rather not be smoking, they would say, yes, I would rather not be smoking.
To me, it's not a matter of willpower, at least not consciously.
Willpower is what we use in the absence of self-growth.
To me, you outgrow food addictions.
You outgrow Smoking.
You don't battle smoking.
You don't battle weight gain.
You don't battle addictions. You outgrow them.
And you outgrow them through therapy.
You outgrow them through self-revelation.
You outgrow them through changing some moral choices in your life to make yourself feel better about yourself.
And those things will then just naturally fall away.
I didn't battle and conquer my addiction to weighing myself and checking myself out and making sure I wasn't gaining weight or anything like that.
I didn't battle that and finally vanquish it and it's like pinned like a tiger beneath a couch.
I've got to keep my eye on it.
No, I just continued to work on myself until the point where I trapped Christina in the marriage and no longer have to worry about my appearance.
Oh wait, sorry, that's not the correct answer.
Let's say it. Until I became a good enough person and an integrated enough person that I just no longer felt the same desire to eat and eat and then exercise and exercise and then weigh and weigh and try and keep all these juggling balls in the air,
so to speak. There was an article I remember reading years ago about a guy who was having an argument with his friends, and they said, oh, you're over 200 pounds.
And he was like 5'6 or 5'7, so that would be quite a lot.
And they said, oh, you're over 200 pounds.
He said, no, no, no, no, I'm 175.
I'm 175. I've been 175 my whole life.
And they say, oh, come on, no way.
So there was a bet. He climbed on the scales, and he was like 220 or something like that.
This guy hadn't noticed 45 pounds.
Added to his frame or whatever.
There hadn't been some sort of self-monitoring.
And that to me is kind of interesting because there are some indicators about weight gain, right?
You can't fit into your clothes anymore.
I would just ask any pregnant woman, right?
There are things that help you notice that you're putting on 20 pounds or so.
So there's some sort of indications, right?
Not necessarily that you're going to always have lying around those Joey pregnancy stretch turkey eating pants that you can slither into and not notice anything.
So there are some real indications and you can sort of blow past those and just say, yeah, you know, I've decided to just eat and not exercise because that's going to make me happy or I've only got a year to live for other reasons so I'm not going to worry about my weight or whatever, right?
I mean, there could be reasons why you would do that.
But if you don't want to gain weight or you have a negative attitude towards being overweight or obese, then blowing past the physical signals, i.e.
my pants don't fit or something like that, would be sort of important, I think.
Now, I don't think it's good to then be obsessive like myself and check yourself out and weigh yourself every day and so on, but I do think that it is rather surprising That people sort of claim to unknowingly blow past this pretty obvious thing.
I can understand you blowing past Alzheimer's, right?
Because it's, you know, we all forget our keys and then, you know, as it begins to increase, you sort of lose your own ability to think.
But weight gain is not one of these things that...
It's like not noticing that you're going bald, right?
There's not many people out there who don't notice that.
So... I do find that I do have that sort of question, which is, what happened?
How did this come about? What was your childhood like if it started in childhood?
And if it started in adulthood, what's going on that you don't notice some basic and fundamental things about your body?
Because weight gain is one of these things that if you can sort of nip it in the bud before your body gets a new set weight, right?
So it gets sort of mildly technical.
Most people's body has like a set weight and it takes a fair amount of effort or I guess you could say catch potato lack of effort plus increases in calories to change your body's set weight.
So for me, when I gain 5, 10 or 15 pounds...
I could... I sort of nipped it in the bud to some degree in that it was only a couple of months.
I cut back on that, increased my exercise a little.
And then I was able to sort of...
Before my body said, okay, 230 is narrow set weight.
That's what we work with is 230.
And then it becomes very hard to bring it down.
It becomes a sort of permanent thing.
Or at least a semi-permanent thing becomes very hard to get below that, right?
So my body's set weight is like 215.
And... That is not bad.
I think it's a relatively healthy weight.
I'm a big-boned fella.
Or was it Dennis Leary says?
People say, I'm big-boned.
It's like, no, no, no. Brontosaurus is big-boned.
You're just big. So I've sort of at least been fortunate enough or paranoid enough, probably is the better way to put it, to sort of nip it in the bud insofar as I can...
Or I've been able to lower my sort of weight gain to the point where I can still stay with a relatively set weight.
Diets, I've never really been on a diet.
That is to me a nightmare.
And of course diets are all developed by women.
98% of nutritionists are women.
And women simply cannot lose weight by cutting back on food.
I mean it's just biologically impossible or next to impossible for a woman to lose weight.
By cutting back on food.
Women can only lose weight by cutting back on food and increasing exercise.
Men can do it by cutting back on food or just by increasing exercise.
You can do sort of one or the other.
It's just part of our genetics.
So I've never really been on a diet and don't really have any trust in diets.
And of course, I have a great paranoia about going on a diet, losing 10 pounds, and then finding that my body goes into starvation mode And I can't keep the 10 pounds off and end up going up 20 pounds, right?
Sometimes you aim to push this thing down and it bounces up higher than it was before in terms of weight.
So for me, as long as things are relatively stable, then I'm relatively content.
So for me, I think it is sort of important to examine weight as a function of health and to some degree as a function of attractiveness.
Because you don't go through any magazine where there are attractive people and see somebody who's obese in the advertisements, right?
Unless it's a before picture in a weight loss program.
So we do have, rightly or wrongly, hardwired into us a cultural, and it could be biological, preference towards slender people.
Or as Drama says in Entourage, not thin, lean, lean.
We do have a preference for that.
So to make ourself as attractive as we can to our partner, I think it's fairly okay to sort of stay fit or at least to not be too overweight and so on.
And to ourselves as well, I think it can be helpful or positive.
But I certainly would not recommend the obsession side of things, which carves a lot of pleasure out of your life and is distracting, right?
I mean, for me at least, it was that way.
And one of the ways that I stop worrying about weight, or worry less about weight now than I used to, is just remembering that I'm going to die and I've got bigger things to do with my life than worry about whether my back fat has expanded, you know, half an inch or not.
And to recognize that, I mean, you can go with extraordinarily low calorie intakes and extend your life by a couple of years, at least according to the theory, but...
That's not really the answer for me.
The answer for me is sort of to focus on virtue and being happy and being good and so on.
And then assuming that out of that, I like to program the base code.
I like to program the operating system, not each individual application.
So for me...
The focus on health and weight and all these kinds of things has shifted from fitting through some silhouette and measuring each pound as it goes up and down.
Of course, when you do weights, you never have any idea, fundamentally, unless you go in for your body fat check and all that, and even that I have some skepticism towards, but you never really have any idea whether the weight that you're gaining is muscle or fat, right?
So that doesn't really help.
Weighing myself as somebody who lifts weights doesn't really help.
So for me, working on being a better person, a more virtuous person, a more rational person, a more consistent person, a kinder person, and a tougher person where necessary, doing all of that has given me some sort of very fundamentally interesting aspects doing all of that has given me some sort of very fundamentally interesting aspects to my life, some of which are sort of obvious in the podcast, others of which are sort of interesting in that I don't really worry about
I don't really feel the same impulse to eat endless reams of sugar and so on.
That's not my scene anymore.
Because I'm sort of happier with myself, and that's what I mean when I say I would recommend don't fight the effects, right?
Fight the cause. And being happier with yourself, I think just generally leads you to happier choices or to better or more productive choices.
That's sort of my theory. I'm not going to say that's proven or anything, but that's the theory at least.
Thank you so much for listening.
I got a cleared e-check yesterday, which I really appreciate.
Looking forward to another couple of donations.
Those of you who are moved by 628 could certainly do your part, and I would appreciate that.
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