The Real-Life Diet of Comedian and Writer Ian Karmel, Who Shed 200 Pounds ‘the Right Way’ and Helped Keep It Off With Zepbound
If you can stop it and call it out, that doesn’t make it go away. It’s like when you’re standing in front of a fridge eating your sixth piece of pizza without having tasted it. But if you have the tools to be like, Oh, you’re binge-eating, stop, go for a walk…You know what I mean?
Go for a walk with the pizza at least. Take it with you.
Yeah, put it in motion, but stop before it’s a full-blown feeding frenzy.
In the book, you mention a time when you thought you were having a heart attack, so you went down to the street to call 911, because you didn’t want anyone to have to carry you out.
That was my last straw. It was the entire event. What struck me after looking back on it, was that I was so fucked up in the head and so desperate to be not one of those fat people, quote unquote. I could never accept myself as who I was. I was like, Oh, I don’t smell like other fat people. I have a job. I dress well. I’m not like other fat people. I want the paramedics to be like, “No, I didn’t even notice he was fat.”
It was another act of apologizing for myself. It turned out to be a panic attack, but panic attacks and heart attacks apparently feel very similar at first—which is fucked up and not a thing that makes you have less panic attacks, by the way. In that moment when I realized I wasn’t having a heart attack, I went back upstairs and I scheduled a telehealth appointment.
I was describing to them what happened and they were like, “Okay, so we do have a walk-in clinic that we’d like you to come into right now.” I went into that and they told me I had a blood pressure—I don’t remember the second number—but I remember the first number started with a two. It was like 200 something over blank. That’s really high. Healthy range, as I have since learned, is somewhere in the 100 up to 130 range. I called my mom, who’s a nurse, and she couldn’t even really hide the panic in her voice. They gave me an IV to get my blood pressure down. What’s crazy is, I had already started losing weight! I had already begun the thing I ended up losing 200 pounds doing. But I didn’t really realize that sugar and salt raise your blood pressure. What seems like such common knowledge, I think, really gets taken for granted by the people who know it. I didn’t know any of that shit, really.
That’s also in the book—you talk about health food and not knowing that some of it is actually not good for you at all. That it might just have a cute little label.
It’s green! In the ‘90s, the entire approach to health food was make the box green. You’re like, “Oh, I’m going to live forever.”
I remember thinking that way about Hidden Valley Ranch because it was green and they had vegetables on the label. Ranch is not good for you.
You might as well be pouring fucking foie gras onto your salad at that point. It’s that bad for you. But I didn’t know any of that stuff, man. I got food delivery, [which is] still a thing I do to this day. I have prepared meals delivered to my house. It sounds bougie. It’s not that expensive. Frankly, it’s not more expensive than groceries right now. I was just eating that. I was supplementing it with a lot of almond butter, which you should look at the calories on. Then a lot of beef jerky, which is protein, but it’s like a salt lick.
Protein for the boys.
Protein for the boys, but also sodium for the boys. I had already started losing weight and trying to be more health conscious, but the night I clocked that 200 blood pressure, I was completely unmedicated and I had drank for the first time in six months. I drank and I ate a bunch of chicken wings. After that I started regularly going to a doctor. I got on blood pressure medication. I had a doctor tell me they were going to do bariatric surgery. That’s the fait accompli. You have to lose weight before we do that, but that’s what’s going to happen with you. I sort of took that as—not a challenge—like, I think I can do this without bariatric surgery.
