My almost three-year-old son took this picture of me the week before I started my diet. I was 313 pounds.

Between 1996 and 2010 I added three “X”s to my shirt size and my waist grew from forty inches to fifty-two. This didn’t happen without me noticing, but I had known since elementary school that I was fat. I was just resigned to being fat and getting fatter. Occasionally I tried diet and exercise, but I didn’t lose weight and it was impossible to keep up. Eventually I gave up trying altogether.

Instead I tried to make peace with my body, and that worked for a time. I told myself that even though I was fat, I wasn’t “stereotypically” fat because my diet was limited in fat and I ate normal quantities of food. I was not really eating any better or worse than anyone else around me. I just happened to be fatter for some reason.

That changed sometime in the last year or so. I started eating more. A lot more. I could eat a number two combo from Wendy’s and still be hungry. I’d go to downtown to the Rivermill and eat a Philly cheesesteak, fries, and Guinness and still have to grab a dollar bag of Doritos from the office snack room.

An hour later I’d be back in the snack room contemplating my choices. At last I was eating “stereotypically fat,” in danger of adding a fourth “X” to my girth, and worrying about still being around when son got to elementary school.

Sometimes I worried that I wouldn’t be there. Sometimes I worried that I would and the other kids would make fun of him for his dad being genuinely, enormously fat.

I started to wonder:

What the hell is going on?

Here’s the problem: I often felt hungry even though bloated with food. There was no logical reason for me to be hungry, and yet I was. I did not need the food but my body was insisting I did. How could that be? Was I just weak-willed? Were thin people always this hungry? Had I developed a full-blown eating disorder?

Weight is often treated as a matter of personal responsibility. You choose to overeat, you choose to lay about. If you made other choices, then you would be healthier. It seems we prefer to think that obesity is a result of being irresponsible or ignorant. So I spent a lot of time (and money) trying to eat less and exercise more. You know, to take responsibility for myself. I always failed.

Why was I failing? Maybe I had developed an eating disorder, but I didn’t think so. If you had stopped me on my way to that bag of Doritios and asked me if I was hungry I would have told you that I wasn’t because I couldn’t logically be. But I was. That is something that will make you feel a little crazy, but it doesn’t seem to fit the profile of eating disorders.

Being sick

That left being sick, which is also something I didn’t want to admit. That’s right: I preferred to entertain the idea that I had an eating disorder over the idea that I had a physical disorder. Why?

We’ve all been told physical conditions that affect appetite or weight are rare, so people who suggest illness caused their obesity are often accused of just making excuses, lying to themselves, or otherwise trying to duck responsibility for their choices. Sometimes I’d think my obesity was the cause of a physical problem, and then I’d think: don’t be stupid. You just eat too much. Eat less. Exercise more.

This is ludicrous. Appetite changes and weight changes are common symptoms of many diseases. We look for these changes in pets and very small children since they’re often the first sign that something is wrong. But once humans become adults we dismiss the idea, apparently willing to assume intelligence overrules appetite.

We only make exceptions for dramatic disease: diabetes, cancer, maybe the odd congenital metabolic disorder or haywire thyroid. We are assured these cases are very rare, and what most of us should do is bear down. Force ourselves to eat less. Work out ninety minutes a day on the treadmill, or at least take a walk after dinner. Eat less fat, less meat, and more broccoli. And always be hungry.

Getting Well

Either our species have become so far removed from evolutionary pressures that we must log every calorie and force starvation on ourselves to stay thin — traits that would have killed our animal selves in a handful of generations — or that is the wrong strategy. It was certainly the wrong strategy for me.

I read along the fringe of nutritional science, the only place where being sick is considered the most common cause of obesity. And so I decided to try a low-carbohydrate diet for a while.

That means I decided to ignore national dietary guidelines and adopt a diet that people either call a “fad” or a “metabolic hack.” That also meant reducing my carbohydrates intake to nearly nothing while eating foods like sausage, bacon, and fatty meats I had been told for two decades would kill me.

And it worked. Almost instantly.

In three days I was no longer finding myself in the snack room every thirty minutes. My caloric intake was way down because I was no longer constantly eating. Snacks became a few peanuts instead of potato chips or candy. The primary problem — the appetite I could not control — was back under control, and it took far less effort than I expected.

The weight will take longer to lose, but I have lost around twenty pounds in three months. I should be back to relatively normal size somewhere between a year and two years of dieting. That’s a long time to starve, but since I am not starving I don’t think it’s going to be any problem.

And all I had to do was accept an idea that almost everyone views as the nutritional equivalent of Flat Earth theory. You can include me in that “everyone” as well — I avoided low carb diets for years because I, too, was convinced they were a dangerous fad. They’re not, nor are they a hack.

They are a means of accommodating a damaged carbohydrate metabolism. The symptoms of that broken metabolism are frequent hunger, overeating, inefficient fat cells, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity. The onset of these problems tend to be slow, like the failure of shock absorbers. So it’s often missed, the symptoms attributed to misbehavior rather than anything else.

I like to think that people are coming around to this idea that the Flat-Earthers might have something this time. Low carb diets won’t work for everyone — the causes of obesity are numerous and complex. But since I started writing about it, I’ve heard from more friends who tried it and succeeded. And I’ve heard more stories from within my own family that suggest that drastic reductions in carbohydrate intake may help a lot of people.

First they have to accept that they good but sick people, not weak-willed slobs. Forget almost everything they’ve ever been taught about how to eat. And accept that people are going to look at them strangely in public when they eat a hamburger patty but throw away the bun.

That’s hard.

But for most of us, it’s easier than salad-and-stairmastering your way to good health.