How I slimmed down after a long weight struggle
As a Delano native, Gene Garaygordobil has asked me to write this column documenting what has become a surprising and unexpected viral internet phenomenon: After more than 40 years of struggle with being fat, I got skinny.
For those of you who remember me graduating with the Delano High School Class of 1987, you would not recognize me today. I am about 40 pounds below my high school graduation weight. More surprising is that a whole host of people are following right along behind me, getting skinny too. My weight loss community called “Eat Like a Bear!” — just 2 1/2 years old — has 60 people so far who have lost more than 100 pounds. Mine is the only platform I have found that measures its success in “century cases” (100-plus pounds lost). My own success and the success in my community is far beyond any of my expectations.
As I recount my own story here in The Record, the best first story starts right here in Delano. One of my earliest adopters was my cousin, Steven Phillips.
Steven was learning from me before I even realized I was teaching. Back in early
2018, we would meet about once a month at a buffet restaurant in Delano. Each month, I was looking quite a bit trimmer than the month before, and Steven couldn’t help but take note of what I was eating.
Steven did not know a lot about types of food. He didn’t know what a carbohydrate was — the component in food that spikes insulin most and stands in the way of fat burning. I pointed to various foods on our plates, commenting on shrimp with and without breading or a carbohydrate-loaded noodle dish versus green beans. It was in the process
of sitting and looking at all of the various foods that Steven learned what I ate and why.
I was doing something a bit unusual: I was eating all of my nutrients for the day in one sitting. My meals were calorie-minded but not as low in calories as many failed diets I had attempted. My meals were low in carbohydrates, but not as low in carbs as other diets I had tried.
A striking difference between this diet and the diets of the past is something Steven could not fail to notice: I was eating an awful lot of food in that one sitting and then I would walk away from food for the rest of the day. I took care of business right there in that restaurant, and then I moved on.
Steven and I met monthly for a while, and then I did not see him for some months. The family rumor mill reported that he and my aunt Joyce were getting trim, but I did not realize why, and I made no assumptions about it.
When I started the Eat Like a Bear! community on Facebook on July 9, 2018, they arrived and
reported on their success. Steven trimmed up so much that he actually regained a few pounds on purpose. Really, his may be the first case in history that a person with Rose blood ended up too skinny.
Steven and my Aunt Joyce then became little viral stories on their own and still send people to the community today. However, most notable about those lunches with Steven was that I happened into a simple teaching method that continues to drive success in our community: I simply sat down with him and talked about what I was eating. None of it was compli
cated. There were no “secrets” or weight-loss accelerator products I was pitching. The food could be purchased on a food-stamps budget. Steven took the knowledge and crafted a solution to his specific problem. It really was as simple as that.
A year ago, I formalized the method in a video series on the Eat Like a Bear! website called the “Three-Day Challenge.” In the challenge, I send people to the grocery store with a simple shopping list for three days. In videos each day, I make the dish and then describe why it has driven weight loss in our community. More
than 100,000 people have taken the Three-Day Challenge to date, and it is the single-biggest reason our community will likely have 100-century cases by the summer 2021.
At just 11 months old, the Three-Day Challenge made the cover of Woman’s World magazine. My own “trimmer-than-highschool” photo made the cover of Woman’s World in August and is on news stands again as I write this .
Many fascinating stories are emerging from this unexpected circumstance. I will do my best to report them here.