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Project exorcised his heavy demons

The threat of public humiliation has helped John Cotey drop enough weight so that he now feels comfortable.

By JOHN C. COTEY
Published December 20, 2005

	[Times photo: Patty Yablonski]
	John Cotey discusses his effort to lose weight over the last six months.

Weighing In, John C. Cotey's column about his effort to lose weight, appears Tuesdays in Floridian. His starting weight on July 1 was 250 pounds. To read previous columns and his Web log, The Skinny, please go to www.sptimes.com/skinny

WEIGHING IN: 217.5

Six months ago, Times staff writer John C. Cotey weighed 250 pounds, had recently been to the emergency room with chest pains, and was on the verge of becoming diabetic. And yet he still wasn't motivated to get in shape.

So on July 1, he embarked on what he called "Project Public Humiliation." He would write a column and a blog about his effort to change his life. He would overcome his weaknesses by exposing them to the world and laughing at them. He hoped.

Cotey's last print column will appear next week, though the blog will continue as long as he and his loyal (and surprisingly intense) followers want to keep the conversation going.

Recently we invited the slimmed-down Cotey to our office for an exit interview.

COTEY: My face has definitely slimmed down. My cheeks are not as bloated, or whatever it was. I felt like I had a pretty big head.

EDITORS: You still have a big head.

COTEY: I have a big head naturally, but it's not as puffy now.

EDITORS: Did you see the story recently about research showing that dieters who check their weight actually do better than those who don't? It validated what you had been saying in the column.

COTEY: I saw that. I tried not to look at the scale for like a week once, but I felt like I was lost. I still weigh myself every day, but I don't weigh myself every time I walk by the scale.

EDITORS: What do you make of that?

COTEY: I haven't been obsessed about my weight since I started liking how I felt. The last month and a half, I've been like, "Eh, 217, it could be worse."

EDITORS: That might be the biggest change in you.

COTEY: That's right.

EDITORS: Your original idea was to lose weight through "Project Public Humiliation." But based on your blog, it seems you lost weight through public support. People were pulling for you. How important was the blog?

COTEY: The blog was great. For the longest time I got tons of support and people posted recipes or gave me tips. But I also worried about disappointing people. I didn't want it to become the place where I went to whine, but sometimes I know I did.

EDITORS: In your first column you talked about "my nephews puffing out their cheeks when they saw me, my son Jonathon patting my stomach, the kid down the street calling me "tons-of-fun.' " What are they saying now?

COTEY: At Thanksgiving I was exercising with one of the nephews. There were no cracks made. I felt like they were treating me like their uncle for the first time, instead of the big fat guy whose belly they could poke.

EDITORS: You tried a lot of things over the six months. You had successes and failures with exercise, and we all know you binged a couple of times. So what did the weight loss plan turn out to be?

COTEY: It turned out to be what everybody said it should be, which is, just stop eating the junk, and you don't have to eat until your stomach hurts. People say it's as simple as exercise more, eat less. But it turns out that I can almost eat what I want to eat if I just eat less of it.

EDITORS: Have you gotten to a comfortable place when it comes to food and exercise? Or is it still a struggle?

COTEY: I've gotten into a very comfortable place with food. I wake up now and I have oatmeal or bran cereal or a couple of hard-boiled eggs. I take the yolks out. In the beginning it was hard. Now I absolutely don't mind that. For lunch every day it has been a 6-inch sub with no cheese and no mayo, or else I'll have a salad somewhere. The only thing that's still a struggle is when work gets in the way of my eating at regular intervals.

As for exercise, I exercise when I can. I know it's not at the rate that everyone thinks it should be, especially on the blog. If me and my blog have issues, it's about that. But I've exercised more in the last six months than I did in the previous five years. I'll be talking about that in my last column.

[Last modified December 19, 2005, 17:42:29]