The Nine Percent Solution

Circa 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties, I decided, already for the umpteenth time, to get in shape, and to develop a healthy relationship with food. Here’s the strategy I chose:

• I became a hardcore vegan. No meat, eggs, dairy, or fish.
• I made my food from scratch as much as possible. Which, since, I was a part-time student supported by my parents, was a lot.
• I avoided fats of any kind. Most of my cooking used recipes from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. At the back is an index of vegan recipes, and another index of fat-free recipes. I methodically went through them both, creating my own modified index of recipes that were both fat-free and vegan, and those were the recipes that I made.
• I worked out for several hours per day, six days per week. I used the exercise program in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia Of Modern Bodybuilding (now apparently out of print).

After doing this for about five or six months, I signed up for a body fat percentage test at the local university (UW in Seattle). The kind of test where you actually step into a tank of water.

The test showed that my body fat was at 9%. I refused to believe it. At the group Q&A session that followed the testing, I argued with the administrator. It was perfectly obvious that I was not really that thin, I said. Just look at me!

Weirdly, there are no pictures of me that I can find from my 9% body fat period. Which only goes to show how messed up my body image was. I didn’t think I was worth photographing. This image is from about a year later, when I was still exercising compulsively and eating very low-fat. That’s me and my mom, standing in front of the house I was living in. The housemate/landlord, in addition to being a psycho, grew a big garden in the front yard. You can see evidence of it in the background, what with the buckets of soil and such. Many a day, I would eat fresh tomatoes or lettuce basically right out of the front yard. Sometimes I’d pick them as I left the house on my way to work.

There were many aspects of my lifestyle back then that I think back on fondly. Physically, I felt good. But psychologically, my relationship to exercise and food was something that I felt I couldn’t control unless I was completely obsessing over it all the time.