Interview with Chuck Vermette

The fitness field has taken a giant leap: it is clear that fitness has moved from a simple one-dimensional view to an emerging paradigm of holism. New terms used to describe fitness are “comprehensive fitness,” “wellness,” “mind-body fitness,” “holistic fitness,” “prescriptive fitness,” the old concepts of physical body-centered fitness now includes mind, body, and spiritual factors. For example, the June 2006 issue of IDEA Fitness Journal holds the title “Mind-Body CEC Issue” on it’s front cover, containing articles about therapeutic yoga, emotional and mental benefits of exercise, motivation, etc. IDEA is one of the world’s leading fitness professional associations.[i] Fitness today merges both modern and ancient systems such as yoga, tai-chi, pilates, and martial arts forms. Even traditional Western styled exercise systems that build cardio-respiratory fitness, strength, and flexibility are included in the concepts of holistic health and well-being, they are becoming recognized as preventive and prescriptive aspects in a total health lifestyle. Through modern science, we know that mind and body are inseparable and that positive thought, cognitive psychology, stress-management, and spiritual factors influence our physical health in monumental ways, and vice versa.

Few would argue that losing weight requires intense motivation; however, how does one find that often-elusive reservoir of inner strength? I wanted to interview someone who has conquered obesity and to examine their “hows” and “whys” for doing it. In this month’s issue of Mind-Body-Soul, I interview Charles Vermette a man with quite an inspiring story: in less than six months, Charles has lost over 70 pounds (of primarily fat) by paying serious attention to diet, exercise, and excellent health practices. In Mind-Body-Soul, our primary purpose is to look at the physical, mental, and spiritual factors of health. Charles Vermette is a spiritual person, and I wanted to find out how his spirituality influenced his life-changes, and as well, to find out more about his approaches to diet and wellness. Our interview follows:

Paul: When you began on your weight-loss journey, did you have a medical reason to lose weight?

Charles Vermette (CV): No, someone I love gave me a speech one night encouraging me to do it. And, for a number of reasons it made sense. I knew I needed to do it, and I heard it that night and all of the sudden, for whatever reasons, it made sense.

CV: No, it was my mother. And, she had a very good reason. She brought it to my attention that soon my kids were going to be off at college, and I would have the rest of my future together with my wife. She said she thought we would want to enjoy those years without some of the health problems that other people close to me have had.

Paul: Chuck, what I would like to talk about are the connections between weight-management, spirituality, and health. When people have co-dependent behaviors such as compulsive eating, it is believed they may be missing a sense of completeness or wholeness in their life, and are perhaps using replacements like material things, addictions, negative and destructive behavior patterns to attempt to fill that void. I know you are quite spiritual; you are a Catholic. I am hoping, consequently, from our discussion, that people of all faiths, traditions, and walks may be able to imbibe greater wisdom concerning struggles with food and obesity, and in their lives in general. Perhaps you can touch a little bit on how your spirituality relates to your recent health changes.

CV: I think of a specific scripture from the Apostle Paul, though I cannot think of the exact passage, it says: “you are a temple of the Holy Spirit and the spirit of God dwells within you.” Put it this way, most of us would not go into a friend’s house, leave a mess, and spill everything on the floor; yet we are perfectly willing to do that to our own selves, to our own bodies’. I reflect back to when I had my children growing up, and many people would not dream of giving children the poison in a cigarette or the poison in some of the junk foods that are out there; but somehow they will not hesitate to put it into themselves.

The other thing I think is important is that food is something we want to control. But as a Christian, it is very clear I do not always have control over things in my life. It is a cross Christians pick up every day realizing that either we are not in control, or that we give God the control. There are a lot of things in our lives we may not control, but it seems we can always get that other portion of food. And I think food is something that can give us a feeling of gratification right away. And, we cannot always get that feeling of instant gratification from other things, so we turn to food -- like that extra piece of pie, or a Big Mac.

Paul: Yes, food is the “low-hanging fruit” so to speak. And not only that, but food seems benign, yet it is not benign by any standard. Nobody enjoys being obese, and as well many people are dying from lifestyle related health conditions, and these conditions are often very connected to the abuse of food. However, food somehow does not seem as dangerous as drugs or drinking perhaps because the other addictions bring an immediate response. It is one of the things I would like to emphasize and advocate to the readers of this interview – that the dangers of food abuse are very real.

CV: Exactly, the dangers of alcohol and drugs may seem more immediate than food. It is funny, there is a great commercial with Toni Sinclair and Tanqueray; it is an inverse of what we are talking about. It is about moderation and alcohol, somebody’s sitting over the shrimp bowl at a party and eating shrimp and just devouring it, they are eating way too much of it. And, Toni Sinclair comes over and says, “Isn’t the same thing true for alcohol?” The point being people will get excessively drunk but somehow socially it is very acceptable. That was another thing I was compulsive about: I wanted to finish everything in front of me. And, I was getting heartburn. Sometimes I would wake up and things I had eaten were coming up, e.g., acid-reflux.

CV: Yes…. in all honesty, yes. I tend to do all things compulsively. The idea of being moderate, and paradoxically, the idea of following certain guidelines did not excite me. As a Christian, one of both the challenges and the advantages is that you have certain guidelines: There are certain things you can do, and certain things you cannot do. I do not have to wake up every morning and re-invent the wheels of ethics or do whatever I feel at the moment. It’s fairly obvious there are a set of rules I have to follow. And, it’s easy to say OK I will not do such and such under any circumstances. I am not saying it is easy, but it is easy to set up guidelines, and then it requires diligence to try to follow them.

Paul: So would you attribute your greatest strength in this challenge to God and to your spirituality.

CV: Wow,that would be tough, because the root word of the word holy is to be “whole.” So that means it would be hard for me to separate the two. Because as a Christian you know certain things very clearly, e.g., “this is wrong,” this is a sin. For example, [sic] I should not be yelling and waving my fist at someone when they cut me off… I know I should not be doing that. Food is a little different, however.

CV: Well, I guess it is a gray area; but I guess the best way I would put it is I took a Christian ethics class when I was in college, and what I believe is we have a nature as human beings - we cannot fly. We are free within the limits of that nature, but we do have a distinct nature. Christianity tells us if we do what is outside of that nature it is wrong. For instance, you eat to nourish yourself. You do not eat for merely the sake of the taste of eating, that is a misguided act.

Paul: Perhaps you are talking about hedonism to a certain degree, or, excessiveness. Personally, I believe God would like us to enjoy our food. However, if you look around, more and more we are seeing obese people with bulging stomachs and diet-related health conditions, and that may be hedonism or overindulgence (or perhaps compulsive eating), and I guess what you are saying it’s not a spiritual way of life, spirituality really is about balance.

CV: That’s correct, it is not spiritual. And if you go to other parts of the world they don’t have these problems until they adopt a Western lifestyle. There are case studies, for example Pacific Islanders where they had marvelous health rates and healthy lifestyles until 50 or 60 years ago and then all the sudden they get introduced to Western foods and Western lifestyle and diabetes goes up and heart disease goes way up.

Paul: Regarding food and emotions what is interesting Chuck is there is a growing area of psychology called Positive Psychology started by a researcher named Martin Seligman at University of Pennsylvania. It is sort of a new field, but in truth is a new body of research for something very old, ancient, even very simple: optimism, positive thinking, happiness. At University of Pennsylvania and now many other places, the interesting thing is a growing and large body of research studies displaying that hope, positivity, and the way we think can impact our health in dramatic ways. Off the top of my head I can think of one well-known person, Dr. Dean Ornish, who has done much similar work linking social and emotional factors with heart disease and obesity. Your last answer kind of leads into the next question. You also said something earlier that resonated with me and with my interest in wellness: you said “you really want to enjoy the rest of your life”…would you consider yourself an optimist, would you consider yourself a positive thinker, and if so did it help you change your health behaviors and help you overcome this weight problem?

CV: Absolutely. I would have to say there are three books that have influenced my life dramatically. And, in some ways they are polar opposites: they are The Bible, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and the last one is Napolean Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, which I read when I was twenty one. And, I would have to say growing up I was a very negative thinker, and Napolean Hill and some others like Norman Vincent Peale influenced me tremendously. But what I was going to say, tying-in with what you mentioned, Carl Jung [the famous Swiss psychologist] said something I thought was tremendous: that if you are trying to avoid something you should attempt to replace it with something to aspire for. It’s one thing to say, “I want to lose weight.” Yet it’s another thing to attempt to understand “why.”

For instance, someone that is close to me, an attractive woman who is overweight, once confided to me that one of the reasons she did not want to lose weight was because she was afraid of having to deal with relationships and men. However, if she had something positive to go toward, it probably would have helped her. In my case, what I find is that I have a lot more energy and a lot more aspiration – I am getting more done. And that motivates me – and therefore, when I look at something I shouldn’t eat now it’s like “no, I don’t want that.”

Paul: Absolutely. I’ve found that when you are taking care of your health it really shows by how you look, and by the way people treat you; and, I guess even more to your point is that we feel better about ourselves, we develop a positive self-concept and self-image. A lot of people have psychological blocks: they are afraid to lose weight because they may have to live life more fully, and that is a very scary thought for them.

CV: I do believe that most of the bad habits people develop are a kind of escape from something. I think we get into a negative feedback loop where we start a bad habit to escape something then we start to have problems because of the escape and it becomes a vicious circle. And, the problem is once you stop that bad habit you still have to escape from whatever it is you’re trying to escape from. Therefore, in a sense you are fighting a two-front war.

Paul: Let’s talk about culture and upbringing; for example, about the eating patterns and lifestyle that contributed to your overweight. Do you see any things e.g., the way your parents ate, or anything else in your family and upbringing that contributed to your weight problems?

CV: Well, you know it’s tough, I wouldn’t necessarily want to point the finger at my family for that. I can give my father credit for being hard on me. Like I said, I lost my father at a young age. I didn’t understand it at the time, but before he died he would be really hard on me when I would go back for that second helping. He saw this tendency for compulsion in me very young. I thought he was just being a hard-guy-- I did not understand it until much later.

Paul: Chuck, as you know I study psychology, but simply from personal empirical observation it seems to me that when people come from strict parents, when they get free from those parents, they tend to almost go the opposite way. I do not know if it is a rebellion, or it is the phenomenon of when you hold something down it has a tendency to want to expand or explode.

CV: I think it is a rebellion, but the ironic part is that he was right. You know I am a parent Paul, and as a parent one is constantly making judgments about how to react to things, and you don’t always get it right. Many times you are trying to do the right thing, but you do it the wrong way. I can understand it now, because my father had reasons to be concerned because of things he had seen regarding my potential for excess.

CV: Again, Christianity calls us to run the good race. I am never going to assume this is over. Here is a specific point. I have determined what my diet should be and I think this is very important. I did not say I am going to starve myself with the intent of “Oh, I am going to get to a certain weight and then go back to what I was doing.” I made up my mind, I did this actually very calculated. I determined what my optimum weight would be and how many calories a day it would take to get to that weight and to maintain the weight. So, I decided early on this would be a lifestyle change, it was not something I was doing temporarily. We all have the danger of getting lazy, whether it is “I think I’ll sleep in a little more before going to the gym” or whatever; and conversely one can also become too diligent. I have asked people to notice signs of me working out too much, or if I am skimping too much with my diet. Because people with a tendency toward compulsion and being driven can go the other way, too. I do not want to become 150 pounds and not able to eat anything, either. So I would never say I beat this, I would never rest on my laurels for any reason.

CV: You said you are a compulsive person, how much do you think stress was involved in your eating?

CV: An extreme deal. Maybe all of it. I would have to say I was that person who used food as something they could control. And, I always consider my spiritual life a walk, a process, it is not something where one wakes up one morning and has gotten there. I often compare it to baseball. I really love baseball, and one of the amazing things about baseball is that as a hitter you are considered a success if you hit .300; which means that you are succeeding thirty percent of the time. There are not too many more things in life like that -- if you only please thirty percent of your clients you are not going too far. You know if Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady completes only thirty percent of his passes, he is not going to remain the Patriot’s quarterback much longer. The point being: When you get in the batter’s box, you are not going to succeed every time. But that does not mean you go up to the plate with the attitude “Oh I am not going to succeed every time,” or “Oh, I got a home run the last time out, I don’t have to try this time.”

Paul: So I suppose what you are saying is we are going to make mistakes, you have to roll with the punches. And, a lot of that goes back to control. A large part of stress is learning how much of life we have control over and how much of life we do not have control over. And, people who are spiritual, of all faiths, give control to a Higher Power; whereas, it has been shown that Type A people or high-stress people (whether or not they are spiritual is another factor) often try to exert control over everything. It becomes sort of like forcing a square peg into a round hole all day long.

CV: I come to terms with this all the time. Many of us do. Like the Saint Francis prayer “Lord give me the strength to change what I can, accept what I can’t and to know the difference”

Paul: Yes, that is an awesome prayer, and to me is the essence of real wisdom.

CV: And knowing that difference, because we are not going to control everything, is not an easy thing for people to accept; and I am no exception to that maxim.

Paul: To me Chuck, you seem quite serious about your total health. So, regarding stress, what changes have you made?

CV: I am still making them because I do not think I deal with stress that well. I am constantly dealing with the issue of stress, and, that may be my next step.

Paul: Well, it is good you realize it. Because I think it is really the first step. Perhaps part of it is self-awareness, and part of it is similar to alcoholism where you first have to admit, “I have a problem.” Well, I know I am the same way with stress.

CV: One good book I have been reading is titled, The Ape in the Corner Office and in it one of the things they notice about apes is, when they are in groups is that if apes are generally embarrassed they tend to rally around each other. And, most people will do the same thing if you really look. We tend to know when someone is truly sorry for a misgiving or really trying to do the right thing, or when someone is merely blowing smoke. It is not that hard to tell the difference when you come to terms with these things. There is a scripture that says “children of dark hate the light.” Sometimes just shining a light on something -- and this is not easy, it is very hard to do -- exposes it. And, and that is why something like AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) or OA(Overeaters Anonymous) works so well. Because people are speaking the same language, they are dealing with the same things. And, I think men need to talk about these things more than woman because women do bond with each other. Women tend to talk about these things and men do not.

Paul: Yes, there is still a sort of machismo. I totally agree with that. I think women communicate healthier than men in general.

Chuck: Well, until recently, my wife used to do most of the food shopping and I did not. But, one of the first changes I made when I began reducing my weight is that I started going to the supermarket and looking through the shelves and I noticed that about 85% of what is there is useless. The vast majority of it is nutritionally useless.

Paul: Yes, that is correct, and because of the food-marketers there are many nutritionally empty foods in the supermarkets.

CV: One of the first pieces of advice I would give someone to start with is to take a look objectively at the foods they are currently eating, and ask themselves, are some of them complete junk? Because one of the things I have found is that some of the foods that are supposed to be junk may be healthy; and, that some of the foods that are supposed to be healthy are junk. For instance, most of what passes as juice is artificial. It is not anywhere near the same thing as putting fruit into a Jack LaLanne juicer. On the other hand, for example, pizza can be reasonably nutritious food if it’s cooked correctly. I happen to love pizza; however, I no longer sit down and eat half a pizza or a whole pizza. Nevertheless, if it is prepared correctly I believe it can be enjoyed in moderation.

Paul: Yes, I would say that if we eat foods as close to their whole form as possible and without the processed flour, and the processed sugar, they can often (though not always) be healthier alternatives. And, then of course, another important thing is to eat in moderation.

CV: Yes, that is the biggest thing that I have had to change, and, I have to be honest with myself, it could still be a problem in the future. I have to remain aware of that possibility. I used to eat reasonably well during the day, but would come home at night and pack it in. I would just keep eating as long as the plate was full, I would really pack it in.

Paul: Yes, it seems that when people come home at night, it can be sort of an outlet. You know, our minds remain in gear during the day with our daily activities e.g., work, school, other responsibilities; however, when we come home at the end of the day, we have a tendency to sort of “let it go,” so to speak.

Chuck, can we get a little more specific about what you did to actually lose the weight?

CV: I wish I could make it complicated but to make it simple, I ate less and exercised more. Specifically what I did is I found a government website, I think it was an National Institute of Health (NIH) site, and plugged in some numbers, what my weight I was, how many calories and it told me how many calories I needed to maintain that weight. Then I plugged in the weight I wanted to get to and found out how many calories I needed. The bottom line is I started off dropping 500 calories a day, and I had already been exercising three times a week -- I have since I was young. However, I upped it to five times per week.

I would like to add that if one of your readers is not currently exercising they should get a doctor’s permission and perhaps start a simple program, maybe dropping 500 calories a day. One would be surprised at how easy it is to drop 500 calories if you track what you eat; for example, eat one doughnut instead of two, you would be surprised at the result.

Secondly, I looked at what I ate, what I really wanted to eat, and what I liked to eat that was low-cal and healthy, and I made up my mind there were certain things I could eat and could not eat. For me what worked were certain fruits and vegetables and meat, by meat I mean beef or fish, and chicken occasionally. I love cottage cheese, and my basic diet is I have cottage cheese in the morning with a piece of fruit, and I have a salad usually with some chicken or some cheese, I love cheese I do not spare myself that. But you will be surprised for instance you can eat a half a pound of shrimp with some cheese and cocktail sauce and you have no more calories than you do with a Big Mac, and it is much more filling. Additionally, I find I actually prefer those things. I actually prefer a veggie burger over a Big Mac, and I love my vegetable meddlies, I am very content with them. And then the portion control came in. I went to a restaurant the other day and I ordered a veal parmesian with spaghetti and I looked at it, and six months ago I would have packed it in. I made three meals out of it. I simply couldn’t eat, simply didn’t want to eat it.

It is difficult to get to that point, some people may not be able to, and I empathize with them. There are certain things you may have to avoid. Again, there is a metaphorical scripture, “if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” I literally could not stop eating potato chips once I opened the bag. So, I probably will not be able to touch something like that because I do not know if I can eat only a few. I can eat a couple of slices of pizza, and I can eat one piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken. But potato chips are something I just do not go near anymore. But having said that, I would recommend as a first step exercise more, and again see your doctor before doing that, but start some kind of exercise regimen and try to drop 500 calories from your diet.

Paul: Well, that sounds like good advice for anyone. We already discussed this a bit, nevertheless, what are the main foods you have eliminated from your diet?

CV: I used to have a sandwich every day, and I pretty much eliminated it. I have ham and turkey occasionally but I will have it with salad now, not with bread. You would be surprised you can get wrap a veggie burger in lettuce. Or, occasionally I wrap a piece of chicken in romaine lettuce. I have very little mayonnaise, I have almost none. I eat vegetables, fruits, I do not eat baked goods anymore.

Paul: You have to be crafty, a large part of the game is self-awareness. Of course, one needs to know proper nutrition; however, a large part is knowing oneself, developing self-awareness, and how knowing one responds to different foods and environmental cues and stimuli, which cannot really be learned from a book. It sounds like you are doing a pretty good job with that -- I am quite impressed!

II. References

[i] Gavin, J.; McBrearty, M. “Exploring Mind-Body Modalities” IDEA Fitness Journal, June 2006, P.58.