Category: COVID-19

I’m Not Committing to Tomorrow. I Just Know He Won’t Drive Today.

I was a skinny kid. That’s my earliest memory. My parents regularly emphasized it. It makes sense, if I project back. They both struggled chronically with being overweight, so my skinniness would be more than incidental. It also makes sense that I was skinny, because I was heavily asthmatic and that made me what the classical authors would call “sickly.” I was in and out of the hospital due to severe asthma attacks. Bottom line, as current lexicon would convey it, I identified as skinny.

My parents were also from a generation of Eastern European Jews who remembered the Holocaust, and more broadly, World War II. My mother was born in Canada in 1940, and my father was born in Romania in 1938. Both had been lucky enough not to have faced the war directly, but nobody of that generation escaped the impact of it. That, and just the Eastern European mentality in general, translated into ideas surrounding food. You do not waste food. If your children are eating, it’s a blessing. If they are eating a lot, it’s wonderful.

When you’re the child in question, you learn that your parents love when you eat. It makes them happy to feed you, and it lights them up when you ask for more. Eating a lot becomes a way to make love surround the home. My asthma and maybe a speedy metabolism afforded me a lot of leeway in this endeavour. Skinny I stayed. For a while.

I remember the first time I noticed I was not skinny. It was my butt. Maybe I was 10? I have a clear mental image of looking at my profile in the mirror and noticing that my butt looked “like a girl’s.” I raised my concern with my dad. He looked me over and pronounced me fine. I trusted him. Sort of. Doubt had started to enter my mind. A kind of disconnect between external input and an observed reality. But that was likely quickly erased when my mother bought a bag of Halloween-sized Peanut Butter Cups after Halloween (reduced for clearance!), and I ate the whole bag reading Richie Rich comics. I still remember how pleased she was.

I was not a skinny teenager. We can fast-forward through that part. Through learning to wear loose shirts, to hold in my gut so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously relax my core sometimes. Through plummeting down the social pole. Through learning that being invisible was much easier than having the Popular-Crowd-Eye-of-Sauron turn my way. Through becoming invisible so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously decloak sometimes.

As an adult, I had some success with weight loss. I think the first time I thought I had Fat-Rich beat was in my early 30s. I had a rock-bottom moment when I carried my son upstairs to his change-table and could not immediately change his diaper because I was too out of breath to do anything but rest my head in my forearms on the pad and wait until my heart rate slowed. I just stood there with my hands resting on him so he wouldn’t accidentally launch himself off the table for about 10 minutes. A few days later I discovered The Zone. It worked. For a while. I went from 225 lbs and a size 40 waist to about 190 lbs and a size 32, as I recall. I felt really good. I felt like I had found the lane I would stay in for the rest of my life.

Turns out I had not.

We can fast-forward through this part. Through discovering the gym, learning that to gain muscle you need to be in a calorie surplus. Through being immersed in a culture that is simultaneously fitness-oriented and body-dysmorphic. Through dieting down for a bodybuilding competition so that I weighed in at 168 lbs and was wearing a size 28. Through “bulking” until I could no longer claim I had left 225 in my rear-view mirror.

Yeah, I was gaining muscle. That part’s a legitimate win. But the muscle-gaining food attitude layered on top of the child psyche that learned that eating is love was not really a recipe for overall health. I got up to 230 lbs.

Then I had a heart attack.

I was 45 years old. As myocardial infarctions go, I was lucky. It didn’t infarct me up as much as it might have. I was actually well enough to start the school year a week later, to the day, from when it happened, albeit sporting three shiny new stents (fun fact: stents aren’t actually shiny). My cardiologist (because I have a cardiologist now) said that I didn’t have any modifiable risk factors. As much as one might think to blame my weight, I wasn’t obese. I don’t drink or smoke. I am not diabetic. Just a genetic win that created an environment of turbulence where plaque could build up in my arteries. But now that we knew, with some light medication and the stents, there was no reason to think I was just waiting for the next one. And as of today, 12 years later, every visit to the cardiologist reassures us that this is the case. There is no permanent damage and no new blockages forming that we would want to address.

We can fast-forward through the next part. Through getting it through my dumb head that I may not have modifiable risk factors, but that doesn’t mean I should keep eating like an idiot. Through realizing that my heart doesn’t go on vacation, so there are no days off from eating properly. Through getting down to 190 lbs, feeling and looking great, and knowing, with absolute certainty, that I would never be fat again. That I could sit down to any meal and make the right choices, and sit in front of a plate of cookies or a bowl of chips and know I wasn’t going to have any, because even though they were right there, for me, they were not on the menu. Through travelling to Singapore for work in 2016 and finding myself alone at a restaurant and ordering a meal I should not have ordered, telling myself that if I was setting a precedent that every time I’m in Singapore alone at a restaurant it’s OK if I have an indulgent meal, I should be good.

Turns out that wasn’t precisely the precedent I was setting.

My brain may have thought so. Food-is-love-is-comfort-is-entertainment-is-experiencing-the-world-Rich learned the precedent was you can eat like an idiot and not die. That’s the Fat-Rich “free-pass” gambit. I have learned it’s an opening that Fat-Rich uses to start his sales pitch as he works his way in. Fat-Rich isn’t evil. Fat-Rich loves me. His issue is that he’s operating on a faulty signal that got embedded early. His warning signals light up when we’re not using food for love, or as a reward, or for comfort. And he is a hell of an ad man. When he tells me I deserve the fries, or that finishing the pizza will make tomorrow easier, or that I may as well eat the ice cream because I’m already fat, he isn’t trying to hurt me. When he says “You know what? Just let me drive”, he thinks he’s taking care of me. Apparently he is even more persuasive than a heart attack.

And he is me.

Bring on the slow crawl back up. Bring on a worldwide pandemic. Bring on learning to make potato chips and doughnuts at home. Bring on creating a recipe for deep-fried Wunderbar.

In November of 2025, I weighed 240 lbs. It wasn’t a number I got to without a fight. I saw it coming. I tried things that had worked in the past. I hired two different fitness/diet coaches. Spent thousands on them. The second one had me on a carnivore diet. “If it ran, swam, or flew, you can eat it. If not, you can’t.” Maybe that works for some people. It doesn’t work for me. Any kind of free pass will not work for me. I don’t get full. I’m like a pug whose gene for detecting satiation has been edited out. I can and will eat three bacon cheeseburgers with no bun and still have a bowl of cottage cheese because I see it in the fridge. Nothing would take. The scale kept climbing. I was buying size 40 again. XXL shirts. XXXL shirts. I was depressed. I was sure my metabolism had shifted to old-man mode. I resigned myself to being fat for the rest of my life. After all, my parents were. It was my destiny. I no longer believed anything would work.

But there was this little pilot light in my brain that would not extinguish. A small, tentative voice from the chasm that was crying. We have to do something! What, though? I’ve tried everything. And pizza and fries taste so good.

OK, yeah. But this can’t be it. I can’t be this guy. I can’t.

I searched “weight loss for middle-aged men.” I found a program that I already knew about in Toronto. My dad had tried it and had some success. I literally did not find a single other option that claimed to be specifically for middle-aged men. I filled out the intake form on their website. Answering the questions was an exercise in self-loathing. To make it worse, I knew that the owner of the program was a childhood friend of my son’s and that it was very likely he would read my submission. Fuck it. Who cares. Can’t get any worse than this. They contacted me, and I don’t remember how much it was to join, just that it was in the thousands and I couldn’t bear to throw yet more money at my hopeless cause. I didn’t join. My depression spiralled. I was watching myself from outside myself. I wasn’t the same guy in ways that transcended weight. I wasn’t the same teacher. Not the same friend. Not the same husband. Not the same father. I didn’t recognize me, even as I acknowledged, in open-mouthed horror, that in fact, I did. This was me. This was the me I was seeing. This was the me the world was seeing. And depression is a fun spiral—you’re depressed because you treat yourself like shit, so you treat yourself like shit because you’re depressed, and the whole thing is reinforced by the way you see the world seeing you.

I called the program back. Said take my money. I had no expectation that it would work. I just knew that doing nothing was not working.

We can fast-forward through this part. Through being so overwhelmed by the details of the meal plan that I created a one-day plan that fit the rules and just repeated it every day for the first week. Through attending Sunday morning meetings and feeling some kind of way about being in a room full of guys who had a relationship with food a lot like mine. Through slowly starting to resent the guy who led them because he would confidently make up demonstrably false facts to establish himself as an authority. Through realizing I could not sit through one more meeting listening to him explain that “jacked” came from Jack LaLanne, or enthusiastically nod while guys accepted that getting weaker in the gym was simply the price of eating healthy. Through briefly wondering whether OA might fill the same role and realizing that wasn’t my jam. Through finally stopping the meetings because they were making me angrier than they were helping me.

We can fast-forward through all that because here’s where I am today. I am still eating the exact same meals every day. Sure, I adjusted the macros almost right away. More than double the protein the plan allowed for. About twice the fat. The same level of carbs. I was literally starving. Every day felt like Yom Kippur. But that’s not important.

I EAT THE SAME THREE MEALS EVERY DAY.

And I love it. It’s liberating. Not one of the meals I eat is a chore. I look forward to them. I’m just slightly above 190 lbs and wearing size 32. That’s about 50 lbs of fat lost. My lean mass has stayed pretty constant. My strength is up in some areas and constant in others. I gave away about $5,000 in clothes. There are no “in case I get fat again” options in my closet.

I eat the same three meals every day.

I do not recommend this plan. I do not think it’s a terrible plan. It’s a great plan. For me. I’m a compulsive eater. Food for me is like booze for an alcoholic. Knowing what I am going to eat each day, and knowing that there is no room for choice or judgment, is why it works.

But I’ve been here before. In this place where I thought I had Fat-Rich beat. He has shown me he doesn’t get beaten. He doesn’t go away. He is content to wait. He doesn’t have the wheel anymore, and maybe he’s not even in the front seat. But he’s there in the third-row bench seats. He’s content to wait. And I can’t promise he won’t make it to the driver’s seat again. He has before, and it would be naïve of me to assume it can’t happen again.

But he won’t make it there today.

I’m me again. My jokes are back. My smile is back.

We Didn’t Sign Up for This

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been a reality long enough now that the emails and texts that start off “in these extraordinary circumstances” or “considering the difficult times”, or “unfortunately, due to the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in” now feel like the opening sentiment is redundant. It has strangely become awkward to know what to say when sending out an email with yet another update on how someone or some institution has been impacted. We get it. And yet … we don’t get it. Because we didn’t sign up for this.

I have always admired and respected people in law enforcement, the armed forces, and perhaps especially firefighters and EMT’s. I remember 9/11, which drove home the point that hardly needed making that when everyone’s instincts are screaming at them to run away, these are people who run toward. And my respect for them stems from the fact that they signed up to do it. Something inside compelled them when they were younger to sign up for a career of running toward the danger. Of being in place when the shit is going down. Of being the person who was standing between the monster and the town, or being the first person the rest of us might see after getting mauled by the monster – doing their best to get us out of the danger and back into the loving arms of uneventfulness. My respect for them is unchanged.

But now we are finding out that some monsters don’t make a frontal assault. Some of them don’t take the path through the Hot Gates, so that Leonidas and his Spartans can know where to stand to get between the armies of Xerxes and the Greek civilians. Sometimes there is no bridge for Gandalf to block, because sometimes the Balrog descends like a toxic snowfall, on everyone at once.

And we didn’t sign up for that.

Grocery store clerks and cashiers, essential workers in office buildings, gas station attendants … they didn’t sign up to have to go out each day and do the exact opposite of what the rest of us have been told to do. Nurses and doctors signed up to treat sick and injured people – but they didn’t sign up to fight for 15+ hours a day, 7 days a week, against an unseen and not fully understood enemy, under-equipped and underfunded. They didn’t sign up to put themselves at risk caring for ICU patients with a highly contagious virus. They didn’t sign up to hold the phone as patients who might never go home FaceTime their families who just cry as they watch their loved one in an induced coma, breathing only thanks to a ventilator.

It is sadly ironic that some of the lowest-paid occupations in our society are now clearly the backbone of it. I find myself more and more troubled by this glaring imbalance. They didn’t sign up to be brave. The didn’t sign up to run toward the trouble. They didn’t sign up to be at the front. And yet.

What we are slowly discovering is that there are no rules for this. There are no precedents. Values and priorities we thought we understood only a month ago have undergone a seismic shift. And still, many people are operating on assumptions out of a lifetime of habit. As a high school teacher I am seeing this acutely through the lens of my colleagues and my students. Some colleagues are very concerned we will not be able to cover all the curriculum. Some students are very concerned about how this will impact their grades. But it seems to me that what this concern is missing is that the entire world is in the same boat. Every grade 12 student in the province of Ontario is not in school. Every graduating student that will attend university next year is going to have major gaps in their knowledge base as compared to previous years. Every single one of them. As for grades, the only time grades ever matter is when they are being compared to the grades of others. Entrance to university or college. Acceptance to a Masters program. Awards and scholarships. I can promise you that when committees are sitting looking at grade transcripts from this time, they will 100% not be wondering what the hell happened in 2020. Nobody knows yet how they will compensate for the complete inscrutability of the transcripts that we generate, but it is certain that there won’t be individual students who managed to live an alternate reality stream where they did not experience the pandemic and the effects it had on curriculum delivery and grading.

I also find it ironic as an educator that for years now we have been saying that we need to prepare our students for a future that we don’t understand, and yet now we find ourselves living a present that we have no frame of reference for. All the rules have changed. Societal norms are in flux. Responsible governments are scrambling to make the best decisions for the present and for the future. We’ve seen politicians completely shed their veneer, humbled into humanity by the pandemic. We’ve seen others double-down on the default political position of obfuscation, redirection, and selling the fantasy. They don’t have a rule book for this, so some are writing a new one, while others are desperately trying to make the old one work. Time will show either way that governments around the world are making many mistakes. But time will also show the wisdom of many of their decisions. It is too soon to be able to tell in each instance which is which. But as I wrote a few years ago, mistakes are just as valuable in the long term as getting things right, because time doesn’t stand still and we are only ever as good as the lessons we learn. Mistakes make excellent teachers for those willing to learn instead of criticize.

Because we didn’t sign up for this, we don’t have a playbook. There is nothing that is time-tested and proven effective. There is nothing you are “supposed” to be doing with your time. There is only what makes sense in the moment. And the biggest thing to understand is that everyone is in the exact same boat. Or to use another metaphor – we are all on the same ride, and the ride has stopped. So when things return to whatever normal will look like, we will all emerge into the same sunlit sky, rubbing our eyes and stretching our arms and legs. Standards and expectations that applied before the pandemic in many cases not be relevant.

Everyone will understand what you went through.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Interesting Times

There is a saying that goes “May you live in interesting times” and depending on who you ask it is meant either as a blessing or as a curse. I have always considered it a blessing. After all, who wants to be bored? It is also “interesting” that although the saying has often been attributed to Chinese culture, there appears to be no solid evidence of this.[1]

The application to today’s situation – and the parallels of attribution – are worth noting for a moment, though not dwelling on. That COVID-19 originated in China seems to be effectively certain. That it has anything to do with Chinese culture is not (in a country with almost 1.4 billion people how can we designate any one practice as national culture?) That it has thrust us into interesting times is clear. How we behave is going to be something we learn from and talk about for the rest of our lives. I like breaking down my own experience into two categories: Fear and Opportunity. I’ll talk about both.

The fear. Well this is an obvious one, right? I am afraid the virus will overload our health care system. I am afraid of getting the virus. I am afraid that my loved ones will get the virus. I am afraid that myself or someone I love will need hospital care for some other reason and not be able to get it. This is first and foremost. Like almost everyone reading this, I have loved ones who are vulnerable. I cherish them. I want to protect them. But even for my loved ones who are not vulnerable, I don’t want them to get sick. The threat of COVID-19 is something we can’t see, and it travels on our network – the very network we turn to for much of what we consider a happy existence. Humans are a social species. We rely on our pack to survive and thrive. And the virus uses that exact connection to spread. So, we are in a time where we must go against our culture and our very human instincts and disrupt the network. This naturally creates more fear. We are programmed to find safety and security in our social connections, and these are the very connections we must sever in order to break up the network. There is no human alive who has lived through a time like quite this, though there are certainly those who have lived through arguably worse. In modern memory though, this kind of reaction to pandemic exists only in history books and in movies. So, it’s scary for sure. But the fear also creates the opportunity.

If forced to select a time in my life where this was going to happen, well this is the time I would select. There is no human alive who has lived through a time like this – a time where connectivity is so easily established without physical presence, where we have successfully created a new network on which a biological virus can not travel. A time where respect and understanding has been pushing itself more and more to the forefront of our considerations in how to deal with each other. A time where mental health issues like anxiety and depression have become something we are no longer expected to conceal and endure in isolation, but rather to share and explore so that we can help each other grow and be better. And while much has been discussed about the dangers of this non-physical connectivity, we are now faced with the opportunity to show how we can overcome those dangers and use it for immeasurable good.

We are feeling isolated – we can connect. We are feeling anxious – we can share. We have been feeling exploited and tainted by social media – we can exploit it right back and use it in ways we always wanted to but instead allowed it to deteriorate into a morass of rage and AI marketing.

Most importantly, we can connect with those who we are still face-to-face with. Our families.

As a teacher, my plan is to use what I know and what I am learning about connectivity to continue this year’s delivery of curriculum. It won’t feel exactly like being in class. I have done some experimenting already and I can tell you this – while inferior in ways, it is also superior in other ways, and we will allow ourselves to see it, to embrace it, and to grow. Patience is key, but so is enthusiasm. And I am happy to tell you that swirling around with the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety that I’m having about this pandemic and the measures we are taking, is a maelstrom of enthusiasm that is unyielding. We’ll make it work.

As a human, my plan is to continue to exercise proper caution, in the hopes that months from now there will be a whole slew of people who will be able to criticize what we have been doing as overreaction, using evidence of a less severe outcome to back their claims. I will wait as we all settle into this temporary new normal, and as our politicians perhaps speed up the recognition and acknowledgment of what experts have been saying since the outbreak started. We will have food. We will have our prescriptions. And with care and some healthy paranoia, we will have access to health care when and if we need it. None of us signed up for this, but we can handle it. Humans have weathered worse, under much less optimal conditions!

[1] From Wikipedia, citing Garson O-Toole: “Despite being so common in English as to be known as the “Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced. The most likely connection to Chinese culture may be deduced from analysis of the late-19th-century speeches of Joseph Chamberlain, probably erroneously transmitted and revised through his son Austen Chamberlain.”