My Big Fat Miracle – Physician Steps On The Scales And Takes A Swing At Weight Loss

After a long day of seeing patients at the community health clinic, Dr. Nick Yphantides liked to reward himself by driving through his favorite fast-food joint, In-N-Out Burger, and ordering a “4 by 4,” large fries, and a Coke.

The “4 by 4”—four hamburgers and four slices of American cheese stacked in a hamburger bun with all the sauce and trimmings, plus the deep-fried fries and 16-ounce Coke—contained 1,400 calories and 100 grams of fat, but that didn’t bother Dr. Nick a twit. In his mind, the drive-thru forays were just a snack, something to eat before dinner.

He was hungry—and fat. Dr. Nick had been gaining mounds of weight ever since medical school, when he fortified his late-night study sessions with Ding-Dongs and heaping bowls of Rocky Road ice cream. During interminable forty-hour shifts as an intern, he kept up his energy by raiding the hospital canteen, where someone had set out a plate of sweets to be shared by the attending staff.

When he entered the public health arena as a family physician, he could be best described as “corpulent.” He couldn’t tell you how much he weighed, though, because he had stopped weighing himself. His expanding girth actually turned into an occupational blessing: his patients viewed Nick as a larger-than-life advocate for the poor, the big man with a big heart who cared for his community in a big way.

Overweight patients loved Dr. Nick because they knew they would receive tea and sympathy from someone who also shopped at Mr. Big and Tall. From a doctor’s perspective, he was always gracious with people who struggled with their weight. More than a few times, he looked a heavyset woman or fat fellow in the eye and said with a smile, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Shortly after he turned 30 years of age, however, Dr. Nick began experiencing declining health and a host of unusual symptoms that led him to a doctor’s examination room. A week later, he learned the bad news: he had testicular cancer.

The surgical excision of the right testes and aggressive radiation over 12 weeks saved his life—and caused some soul-searching. The way Nick saw it, he had dodged the cancer bullet, but there was another round in the chamber: his gargantuan weight had to be causing incredible amounts of stress on his organs—heart, lung and liver, as well as his skeletal frame. He wondered how much stress he was putting on his knees, which were bearing such a severe load.

One day, Nick stood on two scales—one for each foot. Each needle came to rest on “233 1/2.” A fourth-grader could do the math: Dr. Nick Yphantides, the jolly doc with the Santa Claus-like image, weighed in at a hefty 467 pounds. Nick was scared. His cancer had forced him to face his mortality, and now he was sure that each bite of an In-N-Out 4×4 brought him one swallow closer to the grave.

Something needed to be done. Nick was tired of dressing in XXXXL T-shirts and tent-sized gym pants, tired of booking uncrowded red-eye flights so that he wouldn’t have to buy a second seat, tired of gawkers staring at his monstrous midsection in restaurants. Ahead of him was a future filled with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and debilitating diabetes—unless he made a radical lifestyle change and lost a ton of weight. Well, maybe not a ton, but 200 pounds would be a good start, he figured.

In April 2000, Nick gave a one-year notice that he would be stepping down and leaving the Escondido Community Health Center. Then he began formulating a game plan. Since he wasn’t going to work, he needed something to do—a diversion to keep his mind off being so hungry. That’s it! Nick loved baseball (or was it those ballpark franks?), so he decided to drive around the country and visit all 30 major league ballparks and watch baseball games. He calculated that he had been consuming 5,600 calories a day to maintain his weight. To lose weight slowly but surely, he would embark on a liquid fast—drinking a protein supplement offering just 800 calories a day.

On April 1, 2001, Nick sailed off in a used RV—a vehicle he christened the USS Spirit of Reduction—with the intention of becoming half the man he used to be. His father rode shotgun. Going cold turkey from food gave Nick the shakes, just like any junkie coming down off a high. “I was so hungry that I would have eaten a cigarette butt dipped in mustard,” he said.

Two cities known for their gastronomical delights were particularly painful to visit: Kansas City, for its butter-fried steaks; and New Orleans, for its Cajun-style fish and shrimp. At times the only thing that kept him going, he said, was knowing that hundreds of people back home had pledged varying amounts of money for every pound he lost—money that would go to the Escondido Community Healthy Center and the California Center for the Arts. That unique accountability contributed toward helping Nick accomplish the goal he set out for.

At first, the pounds melted off Dr. Nick like a snowman standing in the Sahara desert—seventeen pounds in the first week. After that initial surge of encouragement, his weight loss went from a gusher to a steady drip-drip as he continued to drink protein shakes flavored with diet root beers and diet Orange Crush soft drinks. In Seattle on July 2, he had his weekly weigh-in under a doctor’s supervision. That day, he learned that he had lost 103 pounds in three months, or an average of 1.1 pounds per day.

While that was a lot of weight, it didn’t feel like much to him. When he looked in a mirror, he couldn’t even detect a difference in his appearance. He was still wearing the same “Dr. Nick” T-shirts that he wore Opening Day at Dodger Stadium. He had to admit they were a bit looser, but all he saw in the mirror was the same old mound of human flesh. Nick fell into a funk.

On July 4, he found himself in Sitka, Alaska, where he had planned a daylong fishing trip with his brother John and two friends. He woke up at 4:30 a.m. feeling sorry for himself. He resented skinny people. Why were they thin and he was fat? What had he done to deserve his fate? Why did he feel such despair?

With a dark cloud following him, Nick and his brothers boarded a fishing boat at dawn to fish for salmon and halibut. After catching their limits of salmon inside the bay, the boat motored into deeper waters to catch the really big fish—Alaskan halibut. Leaving the safety of the bay, Nick thought that day, was a metaphor for what he was going through with his weight-loss odyssey. His weight had become such a monumental dilemma in his life that he had to leave the comfort of the bay and drive toward deep, choppy waters to seek the big catch of a healthy existence.

No one caught a big one until late in the afternoon, when . . . Nick had a strike! His rod bounced off the railing, but he held on tight. He yanked with all his strength and cranked the reel as fast as he could. For the next forty-five minutes, he kept dipping the rod and reeling, dipping and reeling.

Finally, the captain gaffed the monster halibut and helped Nick pull it onto the boat. Nick, his last reserves of energy spent, leaned against the rail, wowed by the excitement of catching a fish that size.

The captain weighed the fish, which was nearly as tall as Nick—59 inches. “It’s 103 pounds,” he announced. Nick was stunned. “What did you say?” “One hundred and three pounds.”

The weight of that Alaskan halibut—103 pounds—exactly matched the weight Dr. Nick had lost since April 1. Everything came together for him at that moment because something unspeakable had occurred. To Nick, it was a confirmation that he was on the right track, that he was right where he needed to be in his weight-loss journey.

As pictures were snapped, he felt the same sense of awe that he felt when he stood in front of Michelangelo’s David and the Sistine Chapel on a trip to Italy. He couldn’t even articulate what was going through his mind, but it was a jumble of bewilderment, love, confirmation and validation. He knew he had been lifted from the depths of despair. This experience became the deciding moment of his trip, but more than that, the defining moment of his life.

When Nick returned home in time for Thanksgiving, his mother was shocked by his appearance. Some of his nieces and nephews didn’t even recognize him. Nick, now weighing 269 pounds, had shed nearly 200 pounds. He ate his first solid food in nearly eight months on Thanksgiving Day: some vegetables and a baked potato.

He continued to lose weight as he returned to solid food and his medical practice. Nick reached his low-water mark the following summer, when he weighed a svelte 197. The end of his long weight-loss trip was just a beginning, Nick learned. Now he would have to work at keeping the pounds off.

Today, Nick weighs 220 pounds, and he has remained steady at that weight for three years. Everywhere he goes to tell his story, people clamor for advice how they can lose weight as well. In response, Dr. Nick wrote a book and tells his story in detail and has developed seven bedrock principles to help others enjoy the same success.

A Weight Loss Plan – Learning How the 4 Stages of Dieting Can Help You Tremendously

Each successful diet starts with a weight loss plan. This is just one of the steps that make up a diet that really has results.

A weight loss plan is the best way to approach any attempt at dieting. Obviously, you must recognize the symptoms and be able to translate the sensation of clothing that binds or won’t fasten at all into an understanding that your garments didn’t shrink, but you have added extra and unwanted pounds and inches. A resolve to do something about the extra pounds you are carrying is a part of the plan. You need to review your goals and make sure they are realistic. As the body matures, weight is distributed differently and that must be taken into consideration in your diet plan in order for it to be successful.

Plan your diet

Planning your diet usually follows immediately upon the heels of recognition of the weight problem. Your weight loss plan should take into consideration such things as how much weight you need to lose, where the extra pounds are located, your lifestyle factors, and how healthy you are. Take the time to think about why you are carrying unwanted weight. If weight gain is related to such things as stress based habits, how can you relieve the stressors and give your diet plan the best chance of succeeding? Plan the starting date of your diet carefully to take advantage of such things as time to pamper yourself. You won’t want to schedule a weight control plan to start on the eve of preparing for a family reunion, for example.

Get medical approval

As you prepare your weight loss plan, it is important to pay a visit to your medical professional about your weight control program. While not every weight gain has a cause based in illness such as diabetes or thyroid malfunction, a thorough checkup by your family physician will help to rule out any such conditions. Certain types of fad diets may result in health stressors which your doctor can give you advice on. It is to be hoped that you will listen to and heed warnings given to you by a medical professional and will avoid the popular yet dangerous diets that come on the scene regularly.

Implement the diet

The next stage of your weight loss plan, and presumably the one in which you will spend a great deal of time is that of actually implementing the plan you have developed. If you have been conscientious about the previous stages, you will find this step to be exciting and rewarding since you will soon begin to see results. You will already know what type of temptations and pitfalls you may encounter and will have developed a fall back position so that a slip up won’t sabotage the entire effort.

Follow a maintenance plan after the goal is reached

Once you near the desired goal, your weight loss plan should make provisions for gradually easing into a life long eating habit that will maintain the desirable weight you have striven to reach. By this stage in the plan, your new eating habits and lifestyle changes should feel normal and natural.