My first memory of stepping onto a scale came in September of 1973. I was eleven years old, living in Nairobi, Kenya, recovering from the flu. I had barely eaten in several days and wondered whether I still weighed one hundred pounds. Curious, I wandered into my parents’ bathroom, climbed onto the scale, and watched the needle settle at ninety-seven.
It seemed like a trivial moment.
It wasn’t.
Six months later my family returned to California, and I joined the Junior Olympic Weightlifting team at Earl Warren Junior High. From then on, weigh-ins became as routine as brushing my teeth. The scale was no longer a bathroom fixture. It became a judge.
Within a year I was competing in the 148-pound class and, for a brief, glorious moment, ranked number one in the nation. Then I watched Pumping Iron.
Like countless teenage boys before and after me, I fell under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spell. His charisma was so overwhelming that Olympic weightlifting suddenly seemed like yesterday’s religion. I converted to bodybuilding.
From that point forward, every weigh-in became an attempt to measure myself against Arnold. He stood six-foot-two and weighed about 230 pounds. I was five-foot-eleven, so simple arithmetic convinced me that 220 pounds would make me his earthly cousin.
By sixteen I weighed 195 pounds, naturally lean and deeply tanned. A classmate named Kay McQuade told me I looked perfect.
Poor Kay.
She didn’t realize she was competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Compliments bounced harmlessly off my ego because perfection had already been assigned another number.
By eighteen I weighed 210 pounds and could bench press four hundred pounds. I assumed 220 was inevitable.
It wasn’t.
At nineteen I competed in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest and finished runner-up. Contest dieting stripped away fat—and a good deal of muscle—until I weighed a shredded 180 pounds. I had never taken steroids. I wasn’t enormous, but I looked the way I had imagined a bodybuilder should look.
Soon afterward I retired from competition.
I continued lifting because it steadied my mind as much as it strengthened my body, and I settled comfortably around 205 pounds.
That became my dating weight.
Then, at thirty-two, something quietly went wrong.
My weight climbed to 235 pounds with astonishing speed. The muscles remained underneath, but they now seemed trapped beneath an expanding layer of softness. I no longer looked powerful. I looked inflated.
I became obsessed.
Calories.
Body fat.
Scales.
Mirrors.
Thinking about my weight occupied so much mental real estate that you would have assumed all that rumination would produce results.
It didn’t.
When I began dating the woman who would become my wife, romance arrived carrying a dessert menu. We celebrated by eating at restaurants, lingering over dinners, and ordering sweets with cheerful abandon. Love and indulgence turned out to be enthusiastic dinner companions.
By 2003, one year into our marriage, I weighed 257 pounds.
There is photographic evidence.
Somewhere on my wife’s Mac sits an image of me sprawled across our living-room couch with a bowl of popcorn studded with chocolate kisses. Melted chocolate decorates my face like war paint from a battle I had decisively lost.
My daughters love that photograph.
They laugh every time they find it.
I don’t.
When I look at that man, I don’t merely see obesity. I see someone whose appetites have staged a successful coup. He looks less like a husband than a failed republic.
The next two decades became an exhausting cycle of resurrection and relapse.
In 2004 I embraced a reduced-carbohydrate diet and returned to a respectable 205 pounds.
Mission accomplished.
Then came complacency.
Back to 235.
Years later I repeated the feat.
Back to 205.
Back to 235.
In 2017 I met a remarkably fit celebrity chef whose daughters attended school with mine. His example inspired me to cut calories again. By August of 2018 I weighed a lean 200 pounds.
Victory.
Temporary victory.
The weight quietly returned, as faithful to me as an old friend who never forgets my address.
The last photograph of myself that I genuinely admire was taken in Yosemite in 2019.
My daughters and I are standing beneath El Capitan. I’m wearing a black T-shirt and a Seiko Monster with its coral-blue dial mounted on a hulking Super Engineer bracelet. My arms are muscular. My face is lean. My expression carries a quiet confidence that only hindsight fully appreciates.
Now I look at that photograph the way one studies an old passport.
Proof that I once lived there.
Then came COVID.
For eighteen months I shuffled around the house in pajamas, taught college classes online, and discovered that home workouts were no match for comfort eating. My weight drifted back toward 240.
As I write this in August 2026, I weigh 230 pounds.
It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen the 220s since 2019.
Seven years.
Seven years hovering above 230, occasionally visiting 240 whenever vacation invited me to overstay my welcome at the buffet.
Last week my family returned from Carlsbad.
I came home weighing 236.
Three disciplined days later I was back to 230.
I now eat roughly 2,400 calories and about 140 grams of protein each day. Three times a week I spend sixty-five minutes in my garage swinging kettlebells. Twice a week I climb aboard my Schwinn Airdyne and pedal as if someone were chasing me with bad bloodwork.
I have little doubt that I will soon break below 230.
The problem is that I have already celebrated this victory several times before.
I suffer from what I call Resurrection Fatigue: the exhaustion that arises from repeatedly rebuilding oneself after failure while knowing that every previous resurrection eventually gave way to another collapse. Each new beginning carries not only hope but memory.
Memory can be a cruel training partner.
It whispers:
“You’ve been here before.”
On difficult days I hear another voice.
“What’s the point? You’ll gain it back anyway. You’re almost sixty-five. Eat the pizza. Order the carrot cake. You’ve had a good run.”
Ironically, many of my eighteen-year-old students agree with that sentiment.
Recently I asked them whether they would rather live to sixty-five eating whatever they pleased or live to one hundred on an austere diet.
Every single one chose sixty-five.
I understood their answer.
At eighteen, death is an abstraction.
At sixty-five, it has a calendar.
You no longer think in terms of someday.
You think in terms of seasons remaining.
You become strangely willing to fight for another episode.
No one wants his television series cancelled.
So I’m still fighting.
I know every trap.
I know every rationalization.
I know exactly how easily discipline dissolves into complacency.
But I also know what waits on the other side of twenty lost pounds.
Less sleep apnea.
Healthier cholesterol.
Less pain in my ankles.
More years with my wife.
More years watching my daughters become the women they are meant to be.
Getting down to 210 is no longer about vanity.
It is about longevity.
It is about mental health.
It is about refusing to surrender while the fight is still mine to wage.
The older I become, the less interested I am in looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I would settle for looking like a man who refused to quit.
Cinemorphosis 
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