ONE MY STRUGGLE WITH SUGAR
IF YOU ASKED THE 25-YEAR-OLD ME TO PREDICT WHAT my 40s would look like, I would have used just one word to describe them: fat.
Fat was my inevitable destiny. I’d grown up as a lonely latchkey kid with a serious sugar addiction; my best friends were the Three Musketeers, and all I knew of the world outside my suburban Pennsylvania neighbourhood was French vanilla, English toffee, and Dutch chocolate. When my 90 kilograms went into the US Navy Reserves after college, I could see the disgust on the faces of the basic-training instructors: Who sent us this leaky old tugboat? And how the heck are we supposed to turn it into a battleship?
The Navy did whip me into shape — morning revelry of burpees and sprints for months on end will do that to you — but when I entered the workforce soon after, the weight began to pile back on. So, I started exercising like a fiend, completing the New York City Marathon twice and turning the company gym into an extension of my office. But in a lot of ways, I was just trying to outrun the devil. My father had struggled with severe obesity for most of his own adulthood — he’d be dead from a weight-related stroke by the time he was 52 — and there was no reason to believe that destiny wasn’t awaiting me too. No matter how hard I exercised, nothing could overcome my own desires for sweet, instantly gratifying confections.
As I gained success in my career, first as an editor and author and then as founder of Eat This, Not That! — and later as the Editorial Director of Men’s Fitness and founder and CEO of Galvanized Media — I learned a ton about eating right.
