Life as a Lemur

Last year we visited Busch Gardens in Tampa, specifically to see the animal care center featured in a television show we often watch. The center had pretty much closed down for the day, but two veterinary technicians were carefully weighing and measuring ingredients to formulate some sort of animal concoction. We engaged them in conversation and learned that they were making food for a sick lemur. We watched as they created a precise mixture of ingredients essential for the lemur's health, carefully weighed into the correct proportions. But this lemur was a persnickety little guy and had not been eating well, so the vet techs had the challenge of adding different flavors to the same base to see what they could get the lemur to eat. Lemurs happen to like fruit, so they added honeydew to one mixture, mango to another, and then created one with banana. Anything to get this guy to eat so he could regain his strength. But the base -- the essential nutritional package -- was always the same.

Now, it seems, I am the lemur. Not a sick one, but still. I am spending my life as a lemur. I have entered the world of Medifast, or, as I enjoy referring to it, Planet Lemur. In the vast universe of weight-loss plans, books, ideas, notions, far-flung stupidity, and flat-out whackiness, planet Medifast is not one on which I ever expected my spaceship to land. After living for so many years in the comfort of the largest planet in the weight-loss universe, planet Weight Watchers, I voluntarily launched myself into the unknown and had been floating aimlessly (although sadly, not weightlessly) through space looking for suitable atmospheric conditions upon which to land.

After successfully losing 125 pounds on Weight Watchers and keeping them off for six years, several painful events occurred which I did not have the emotional coping skills to handle. So I stuffed them down using the only tool in my familiar toolbox: food. I stretched my daily points at first, telling myself I was sticking with the program, but eventually it became obvious I had veered quite far off course. By the time I could face the scale and fully assess the damage, it was bad. Very bad. So, as any good little Weight Watcher would, I went back to diligently counting, weighing, measuring, and dutifully recording everything I put into my mouth. I stepped up my walking regimen. I did everything right. But it didn't work. The scale wouldn't budge. My clothes did not become looser. My body, it seemed, wanted no more of this tried and true program. My body, it seemed, was stuck. The points program was suddenly pointless.

Then I spoke to my dear college friend who had recently started the Medifast plan and had already lost more than 30 pounds (she has since lost a whole lot more). She knows the intimate details of my struggles with food, and although she never suggested or advised me to try Medifast, I was intrigued. On the plan, I would eat five Medifast meals a day and one healthy meal of lean meat and vegetables. I thought about it for weeks and vascillated back and forth between thinking it would never, ever work and that it was a terrible idea to wondering just exactly what I had to lose. Well, the simple answer is weight. Weight is what I had to lose. I had a closet full of clothes that no longer fit, my blood pressure and cholesterol were climbing, and I felt, yet again, like a failure. I began to research the program more thoroughly. The meals are completely interchangeable, having basically the same nutritional stats, the same nutritional base; hence my crowning these meals lemur food. But instead of fruit flavors to entice a sick lemur, Medifast entices me with a variety of flavors of bars, shakes, soups, etc. As I looked toward my friend, pounds lighter and happily living and losing on planet Medifast, I made the decision to try the program.

So far, it has been an incredibly successful journey. Since I began in April 2014, I have lost more than 50 pounds. I'm almost to where I want to be, at which point I will begin a period of transition and then maintenance. I know this is not the route to weight loss for everyone. I never thought it would be for me. But for right now, I feel good. I am less self-conscious, I have a closet full of clothes that fit again, and I can see my collarbones. It's the little things that make me happy.  

So here I am, a lemur in my new world. I have carried this theme to every corner of Planet Lemur. Wherever there is lemur food, there is a photo of a lemur. My desk drawer at school is labeled "Lemur Headquarters." At home, both my kitchen cabinet and my box filled with extra food feature photos of lemurs. The lemur is my official mascot of this journey. On a recent road trip to the Midwest, we went to a zoo and I made a beeline to the lemur exhibit. Once there, I pulled out one of my lemur bars and one curious little ring-tailed lemur was so intrigued that he grabbed the cage and looked at that bar so longingly and with such intensity, I swear he wanted it. If he could have jumped that fence and landed on my shoulder, I would have shared it with him. Those lemurs and me, we're on this journey together.