My friends and my wife think I have lost my mind. I also think I have lost it but not this time. My kids were kinder. They laughed at what I did. My 24 year daughter grinned when I told my plans to try and lose weight. She said, Todd, she never calls me Dad, “Sounds like a kind of improv to lose weight. Don’t you think that is ridiculus? ” I told her. “You are right it does seem to be a kind if improp used to help people lose weight and I have decided to give it a try.
Give it a try but before I do one last birthday dinner of my choice, my favorite, always. Popeyes fried chicken with an emphasis on plenty of wings, lots of beer, and for dessert, I don’t want a fancy cake but instead doughnuts, not just any kind. I prefer Dunkin Donuts but without filling.
I don’t think, I know, changing how we live our lives, is incredibly difficult. Habits, who we are, are fixed in cement. Most of us consider making ourselves over so I too ask myself, “How do you become the person I always wanted to be?” How do I stop being fatso and slim down?
I saw the ad with its slogan ‘Act your way to a slimmer you’. I figured why not? All my other diet schemes haven’t worked. Read about it asks some questions about the program and then signed up. The idea of acting my way to a new me appealed to me in part because I thought it might be fun.
If an actor can use acting skills to become an effective president of Ukraine then why not have it work as a weight loss scheme.
I read the Actor’s Diet Workshop detailed brochure. Talked to one of the representatives of the program. I was intrigued. The cost?
Cost? Not cheap. The 8-week program costs $7,000 with an additional $1000 for an initial screening and orientation meeting. It was made clear to me that not everyone who wants to participate in the program is accepted. Pricey? A thousand dollars to find out whether you would get an invitation is ballsy. It also was clear that the time commitment demanded of participants was not stingy. Eight weeks, one entire day on a weekend, that is asking a lot of participants.
It is now two years later. Looking back… it has been quite a ride and it worked for me. I’m no not slim but I am no longer fatso.
Who is telling you this story and is worth listening to my experience with Actor’s Diet Workshop? I think so. My name is Todd R. I have been a fat software engineer, married, and with two young adult kids. Happy? Sometimes. Anxious? A good deal of the time. When I get stressed I eat and eat a lot. I have loads of company. For years I knew I was too heavy, that is, fat. My doctor reminds me that I must, must lose weight. I avoided going to see him. My waist size…wouldn’t even mention the number to myself. A familiar feeling of disgust when I tried to squeeze into my clothes.
I have tried more than a dozen diets without much success. Some diets do work for a short time but then, …yes, you guessed it, I gained all my lost weight back sometimes with added fat dividends. Welcome to the club? I hate being fat. My wife used to tell me “Don’t give up.” She gave up and stopped telling me that.” This tale is familiar to so many people.
So, I jumped from the diving board and fell for the ad. I don’t regret participating in the program or the cost.
I paid up for the ride and then participated in a day of detailed interviews and tests followed by several presentations of how the program works. This included a kind of homework assignment. We had to think of someone we would like to be including an emphasis on someone who is active, slim with a healthy relationship with food.
The screening process on day 1 started with real-life exercises, and simulations of our eating habits. This part of the program was part of the intake screening process. We were then interviewed at length by the Actor’s Diet Workshop staff. Questions extracted a detailed history of who we were including our relationships, fantasies, goals in life, lifestyle, and our history of eating and obesity. This took up most of the morning. We then took a break and those of us who were accepted into the program returned and were provided with many more details of how the program worked and what was expected of us. We were rather exhausted at the end of the day.
I learned quite a good deal about myself on Day 1. I certainly got a good look at how I eat which for me should be characterized as fressen (the German term for eating reserved for goutens and animals, as opposed to essen, which is what characterizes normal eating). We were told not to eat breakfast since w would be given things to eat at the Actors Diet Worshop (ADW). We started the morning by eating ice cream prepared by various producers. It turns out that the ice cream quality varied from the amazingly smooth, rich, and flavorful ice cream I had ever eaten and also ice cream that wasn’t very sweet, containing bits of ice, and flavor that dull and nondescript. Turns out I ate almost as much of the garbage ice cream as the highest quality ice cream made by man. A bit later we were served a huge breakfast that featured the biggest omelet I have ever encountered. Turns out it was made from a dozen eggs. I almost finished the huge omelet along with some toast and french fried potatoes.
Later that day one of the ADW staff went over the results from my ice cream experience and how much of the breakfast omelet I had eaten. I was also told about how fast I ate and how much food I delivered on my fork or spoon each time I opened my mouth. Dr. Albert Stunkard had standardized the procedure and published it several decades ago. I passed the Stunkard test and was accepted into the program as a classic fat eater. Bingo. I was not sensitive to the quality of the food I was eating and also had no accurate internal sense of how full I was.
In the midafternoon 8 of us met and we first introduced ourselves and a bit of who we are along with the temporary role we want to use as part of our ADW experience. The role we chose to play was someone we wished we were which include someone that was normal weight and normal eater, i.e. tasted the food they ate rather than someone who ate mindlessly, like us.
We were 4 men and 4 women between the ages of 29 and 61 years of age and it didn’t take long for us to get to know one another the real us and the our the role we would play the next 8 weeks.
Most of the group took on the role representing real people. One of the women chose to be a younger version of Michelle Obama. One of the men chose to act like a young world renown musician YoYo Ma. One of the other older men decided that he would take on the role of a standup comic. I made up a character that didn’t exist in the real world. I became younger, mid-30s fit, a bit taller, and was the head of a financial group. I was attractive charming and worldly and not filled with myself.
We were encouraged to act our chosen roles not just when we were together, and when playing our role on a stage used by Actors Diet Workshop but throughout our everyday lives “off-stage.
I got to know the members of our group, not just from the characters we played on stage at the Workshop studio but also when we would get together over coffee after a ‘class’. Most of the participants did not hold back telling others details about their lives including some things that they had told few others. What surprised some of us is that our immersion into our roles grew to point that it started to dominate and take over our lives.
Our training sessions, and our ‘performances in character’ were intense, emotional, and powerful. Sometimes acting our chosen parts spun out of control to the point that workshop staff had to step in and take control.
We had lots of opportunities to perform in front of each other and with each other. The ADW staff pushed us, cajoling us, to immerse ourselves to make our chosen character become like a second slimmed-down new version of what we used to be.
There were some amazing people in my group. No one was boring. In time we got to be quite skilled in playing out our chosen roles. I will never forget Annie who took on the role of her own making, a sexy, seductive torch singer with an amazing voice. She was fantastic ‘on stage’. When I first met her at the Workshop she was wearing a huge garish moo-moo. I bet she weighed close to 300 lbs. She always looked away when I talked to her. She spoke in a whisper. I don’t know how often we told her that we couldn’t hear what she said, to please speak up. After some time, we could hear her clearly. Then by week 3, she took to her role with energy that astounded all of us.
She would get up and start to sing. She had an incredible voice. It was, deep, huge range, sultry, passionate, amazing. I didn’t see her as a fat young lady. I found her downright sexy.
By week 4 she was unlike her real old self. She came dancing into our meetings, smiling. She started to shed pounds, lots of them. Huge Annie had left her shy self somewhere back in her life, parked on a shelf.
That was about a year ago. I found out that after ‘graduating from the Actors Diet Workshop she was the lead singer a local band, and was even asked to audition for some off-Broadway musicals.
All of us lost weight. I and the young man who was my role me, dropped 14 pounds during the 8-week program and then continued to lose weight afterwards. This time the weight didn’t creep back into my life. In addition, I felt changed having adopted Jim Sorenson the name I gave my other me.
Fast-forward two years later. Three nights ago, at the Flamingo Club, there was Annie, behind the bar, mixing and serving drinks. Her sour look had returned. She also developed a gruff don’t bother my style of talking to folks. She was fatter than ever. There she was mixing and serving drinks stuffed into a cocktail dress that was two sizes too small.
I walked up to her and smiled. “Annie, remember me, remember the Actors Diet Workshop?”
“Sure do. Your Todd and I even remember your wife’s name. It was Jan wasn’t it?”
“Annie it is great to see you and you sure have a great memory. Jan and I are no longer together.”
Annie dropped some ice in a big cocktail shaker, shucked it, and poured the whiskey sour into a glass. She asked,
“Are you still playing the role of your cousin, was it Jim something? The guy with the retro grin and that nasty snarl, that tough-guy demeanor. Are you still pushing folks against the wall, yelling at them, groping the sweeties?”
I shook my head. “No, Annie. Jim is nothing like that. You must
be thinking of someone else in our group.”
Annie looked at me. “I see you have kept your weight down. Congrats.”
“Annie, what about the singing?”
It took her a minute to answer.
“Hard to talk about it. I was doing just great and was even a headliner in a couple of fancy clubs. Then my voice got raspy, tight, hollow and I thought what the hell was going on. Went to a doctor and he examined me. He discovered the polyps on my vocal cords the kind that could not be removed that easily and with no guarantee that my voice would come back. It didn’t. Well, I was devastated but there is much more to the story besides the fact that I started to put on weight.
Annie wanted to go on but a customer walked to the bar and asked for a bloody mary.
“Sorry, Todd. Can we talk later maybe after I am done here and if not tonight or if not how about in a few days? Would love to catch up. Here is my phone number. ”
She scribbled it on a cocktail napkin and handed it to me.
“Yes, it will be great to catch up to find out what life has been like these last 2 years. ”
I felt sorry for Annie and yet she was able to live another kind of life until the unexpected derailed her.
I am still on a roll. I don’t really understand how change works. Can make-believe be part of it? Maybe.
Comments
The neurobiological foundations, mechanisms, for emotions such as fear, love, despair, shame involve brain networks that are older (from an evolutionary perspective), more automatic than the parts of our brain that regulate planning, reflective evaluation, and inhibition. Emotional responses are far less controlled than the kinds of thinking and behavior that govern our rational life.