Human beings are the only species on the planet, probably in the universe, that can make a deliberate decision to be different, and then … be different. They’re also the only species that, for emotional reasons, can inadvertently set themselves on a course of self-destruction that can be unspeakably hard to change.
As I write this, Koda, my beloved Husky, is sleeping under my desk. He is what he is and he does what he does, and all of this is in keeping with his instincts. He will not, for example, drink alcohol, or eat until he imperils his health, or pick fights with larger dogs, or attack a member of the household or play chicken with cars. Even if he could understand what they were, he has no interest in, say, drugs. He instinctively knows what’s good for him and what isn’t, and nothing will get him to vary from that. Admittedly, trauma or abuse may alter a dog’s behavior, but rarely to the point that it will harm itself.
Humans are different. People have a way of absorbing trauma, and then having it kind of take over. Think of a young woman who’s teased and rejected because of her looks, and spends her entire life nurturing a deep-seated hatred of men, until she marries an abuser. Or a boy who’s bullied and becomes a bully himself. Once pain gets deep enough into people, it can define them.
That’s what happened to my friend Eddie Soto. Ten years ago, he was severely, morbidly obese, a colossal alcoholic, and his life had become a blind alley. Remarkably, he turned everything around. Eddie is now sober and has lost over 300 pounds. Alone. Working out in a tiny storefront gym. He’s a living, breathing, walking, talking example of the kind of person I want to be.
How did he do that? How does anyone? How do you decide to literally reshape your body, which you’ve spent your entire life damaging, and then find the drive, the perseverance, the will to devote years to the process? Most people can’t summon up the willpower to clean out their glove compartment. Eddie changed his entire body. In doing this, he changed his life, the life of his wife, Vanessa and his children, and now, mine. Maybe he’ll change yours, too.
Usually, when I write an essay, the structure either becomes very clear very quickly, or is in place from the start. Not this time. What Eddie has done is so extraordinary I am not sure what to say about it. I’m not sure what it means. I’m not sure how he did it. I’m not sure how it relates to me, or you. But I am sure that it’s amazing, and inspiring, and worth relating even if it can’t be delivered in a package with a bow on it.
Eddie’s story begins with childhood trauma, the same sad, repetitive story human beings experience over and over again. His father and mother divorced when he was seven, thanks to his father’s womanizing. Then, when he was nine years old, a trusted female babysitter began molesting him. This went on for months, and he can describe, in some detail, exactly what she did, what it was like – the lifting of the blanket, the whispered admonitions not to tell, all of it. Hearing him calmly walk out this narrative decades later makes you feel a little sick.
Of course, being a little boy, he didn’t tell. When he finally did, the babysitter went to prison. But Eddie absorbed it, all of it, and what developed emotionally was what Eckhart Tolle has described as the “pain body”. Here’s a definition:
The pain body is a collection of negative emotional experiences, such as hurt, hate, depression, anxiety, fear, and blame, that can be active or dormant. It can be triggered by internal factors like negative thoughts or external factors like a minor event that causes a disproportionate emotional reaction. When triggered, the pain body can cause someone to react in the same way as they did in a similar situation in the past, which can strengthen the ego.
In other words, again, if you are hurt badly enough, early enough, and/or in a way you’re not able to handle, the emotional wound takes over your life. It defines your identity. It influences your behavior. It gets stronger and stronger, and whatever primitive, destructive coping mechanism you use to deal with the pain turns into who you are. Eddie was an extreme example of something I’ve seen countless times in all kinds of ways.
As an example, I had a colleague once who grew up in a household where his father was largely absent and his mother was a remarkably skillful, cruel, judgmental, guilt-wielding hyperChristian martyr. This created a toxic stew of suppressed rage, guilt and amorality in my friend. He became colossally obese, completely Machiavellian, and utterly dishonest when it served his purposes. Thanks, mom. Thanks, pain body.
Eddie managed his intense emotional pain by eating for comfort. And, beginning around the age of eighteen, drinking. Both worsened over the years, helped along by a Mexican-American family that viewed eating as a sign of prosperity, of love, and of belonging. And, unfortunately for Eddie, that loved him deeply and thus tolerated decades of self-destruction.
Think of a grandmother feeding him a dozen tortillas, slathered in butter. Eddie can talk about the respite he found in being stuffed with food and blind drunk, his own personal place of comfort in a world that seemed like an unending attack. Think of eating 15-16 tacos at a sitting, or two entire chickens and a loaf of bread. Think of downing liquor by the bottle, beer by the case, ending up weighing over 600 pounds, with a severe drinking problem, and children openly talking to you about your impending death. Think of being unable to sleep lying down. Think of the monsters inside your head being so loud, so insistent, so relentless that you make your own body your enemy, to the point of destroying it, and yourself.
My personal Rule #1 of Being a Parent, which my daughters all know by heart, is: “Don’t die.” Eddie was about to break it.
It is said that in order to change, you have to hit bottom. Eddie hit bottom. The details are too awful to mention – a situation you would not wish on a mad dog. For him, it all came into focus with a snap when his endlessly, unbelievably patient wife, Vanessa, who had stuck with him through decades of this behavior, told him that there was nothing she could do for him, that what he had to do he could only do for himself. And then she called him “Ed”.
And for some reason, that hit him right between the eyes. That one syllable from someone who until then had called him something else. His wife, who loved him very much, and had been loyal, faithful, supportive and kind through years and years of self-destruction, was addressing him now like he was an acquaintance. After he had chased off everyone who ever loved him, immersed himself in booze and food to the point of being very close to dying, and arrived at some inflection point of humiliation, physical suffering, alienation and despair, he finally, in the emergency room, realized two things with overwhelming clarity:
He was headed towards real oblivion, and had almost gotten there
Nobody could help him but himself
These things had always been true, of course. However, this time, somehow, reality had punched through his cage frenzy. He knew, finally. He really knew. It reminds me of that amazing line from The Matrix, when Agent Smith is interrogating young Neo/Mr. Anderson – “One of these lives has a future. One of them does not.”
Eddie wanted to have a future. And more impressively, incredibly, he had (and has) the willpower to overcome almost unbelievable obstacles to pursue it.
In the movies, what happens next is what a friend of mine describes as the “improvement montage”. This is where we see the hero doing pushups, or working alone late at night, or furiously painting at his easel. The music plays, and ninety seconds later, we have Luke Skywalker, ready to use the Force, or Rocky, or whoever.
This, politely put, is bullshit. What it really takes is unbelievable amounts of uncomfortable, repetitive work. Alone. Eddie had some advantages here. Vanessa was a trainer, and was endlessly encouraging and supportive, providing meals, suggesting workouts, prodding him forward. But still, he began by doing mini-situps in the bed he was too obese to get out of. He quit drinking completely, which meant going through alcohol withdrawal. Nobody can help with that. Mini situps progressed to endless repetitive walks in the backyard, with a cane, then without a cane, then bouncing a soccer ball.
The weight started coming off. When you remove several thousand calories of alcohol a day from your diet, the difference is profound. His energy started returning. And he started getting his life back. He remembers the first time he was able to walk into a store – it was a Wal-Mart – after years of being unable.
And he kept going, and the weight kept leaving. Until now, he’s under 300 pounds, for the first time in a very long time. The man has lost 300 pounds, which, if you do that math, is approximately one million calories. I see him in the gym. We bump fists, chat a little, then return to the grind. Turns out, Eddie can really grind.
It’s hard to fathom the scale of this. So let’s do a little math. A rough number for the daily calorie needs of an imaginary, average man, is 2,500. A million calories divided by that is 400. In short, what Eddie took off is over a year’s worth of calories. Spring, summer, winter, fall, and part of spring again, every single thing you eat or drink for over a calendar year, Eddie lost.
Even more remarkable to me is the level of commitment, endurance and will this took. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, or get into shape, you know firsthand what a battle it is. It’s a war of attrition. Accomplishing anything in this realm requires getting up, going out and doing the thing day after day after day. You have to grind even when you don’t feel like it. It’s dark, it’s raining, it’s cold, and still, always, you get your shit together and get out there and do it.
That, really, is where results are obtained – or not. It’s the thousand tiny decisions made day after day after day. Do I eat that? Do I take the stairs? Do I get out and walk? Can I have a beer – just one? In order to consistently make the right little decisions, a million calories’ worth, you need some kind of North Star. Some kind of goal, or ideal, or persistent source of meaning and purpose that you can rely on, that will always work, that matters enough to counteract decades of programming in the other direction.
In his fantastic book, The Slight Edge, Jeff Olsen wrote at length about the power, over time, of these little choices. As he puts it, they’re deceptive because while they’re easy to do, they’re also easy not to do. That, multiplied by a million calories, is what allowed Eddie Soto to save his own life.
And what was that thing? I asked him. How did he do it? What gave him his drive? He looked puzzled for a minute, then got that expression on his face that appears when you figure something out. “Me,” was his answer. “I did it for me.”
I thought about that a lot, for days. In the end, I think, this is the point of what he realized when Vanessa called him “Ed” instead of “babycakes” or whatever her term of endearment was. In the end, when all the bullshit has run its course, when you cannot kid yourself any more or keep reacting to what other people do, or did, it all comes down to you. Inside that gasping, morbidly obese walking manifestation of the pain body, was the real, essential Eddie. The real person – kind, energetic, significant, and capable of doing very, very hard things.
As I see it, thanks to all the trauma, Eddie had never met that guy. His life was like looking at the road through a dirty windshield. He was a stranger to himself. He believed he was who he had been told he was, and badly hurt, he lived that person out all the way to the end, to the point where he was forced to see that that guy was an illusion. That he was going nowhere except the grave. That he had been force-fed a gigantic lie about who he actually was, and was forced to find out what the truth was. Who he really was. The alternative, literally, was death.
And the answer stands right in front of me every time I see him in the gym. It’s a privilege to know him.