How I Done It:

Preamble

First off, I'm not even sure yet that I done it, the contest not being over, yet. But I think y'all should know some of my methods because even if I ain't done it, I done something purt near it.

I don't know if I done it because I don't know where I'm at in the stats right now. And that's because five weeks into this thing there was a big legal shakeup; the guy running it, I'll call him "Stan," got canned, no one knows why, they didn't update the sheets for a week, and then the bulletin board where they'd been posting our standings faithfully, week after week, was suddenly wallpapered all over with giant, 20-pt-type, "Your Rights As a Weight-Loss Contest Entrant" legal blab. Amusing, since this is week six or seven and up to now we have heard exactly zero about the (obvious) health liability represented by a contest based on how much weight you can lose and how much muscle you can gain in a two-month period after living life like a hibernating grub for the previous six years. Gym people are like this, though. All, "Damn the torpedoes, fatass!" regardless of the danger of lawsuits or getting either fired by administration or kicked in the nads by an outraged "client" driven past civility by the constant heckling to "engage your core."

Here's an example of typical gym-people thinking:

I have a paralyzed serratous anterior muscle in my left upper arm/shoulder/back. It's the muscle that keeps the shoulder blade in tight while you lift your arm so that you can lift your arm over your shoulder. Mine's been out of commission since I was 12 years old, as a result of a demonic summer P.E. session in which the various psych-experiments running middle school gym made everybody, regardless of ability, hang from the chin-up bar and try to do ten chin-ups. Not every 12-year-old can do even one chin-up straight off; some of your weaker 12-year-olds will need to build up upper body strength before they can haul off and do a chin-up. But they didn't take that into account, and now I will NEVER be able to do a chin-up--or at least, I won't until I build up my right arm to Pop-Eye proportions and can do a one-arm chin-up. At 12, I hung from the chin-up bar struggling for two or three minutes or whatever was the coach-mandated torture interval until "blip!" My arm went out. Everybody heard the "blip!" They shielded themselves with their Starsky and Hutch lunchboxes. Now one of the muscles necessary to raise my arm over my head has ossified: it is no longer a muscle. It has become... fibrous tissue. I wonder... if you pay for private school for your kid is that one of the perks? The meatheads running P.E. won't partially paralyze your child out of pure, rocklike stupidity? Might be worth a look-see.

So but anyway, what I've noticed, the meatheads running the grown-up gyms are the same old meatheads, lightly varnished with an all-over layer of Susan Powter blab. There are a bunch of classes that feature the push-up; until such time as I get my right arm to PopEye, I can't do a push-up any more than I can do a pull-up. The gym is plastered with CYA signs encouraging you not to do anything you don't want to do and to modify any exercise until it's no more strenuous than needlepoint. So they can't yell at me to just do the push-ups, wimp, like in the good old days. But every time we get to push up time and I make some candy-ass modification, depending on who it is running the class they either look at me as if I've got the Munchausen's real bad, or they come up all dripping with sympathy and announce that we'll get that shoulder back shipshape in a matter of months. They all think one of exactly two and only two things is the case: either I'm awash in sloth or I have a rotator cuff injury from too much tennis. Very limited imaginations, I'm saying.

Despite them, I have managed to prevail.

What I Done:

I lost 18 pounds; I'm now three pounds under where I was before I began the DeNiro Coke 'n' spuds weight-gain diet. And there are a few weeks to go.

A Very Little Bit about How I Done It:

Besides fattening up beforehand, which was an EXCELLENT idea, by the way, despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the WORLD told me it was stupid, here are a few things I did:
I ignored party line about eating breakfast.
I ignored party line about whole grains.
I ignored party line in general.
I made sure to get a lot of sleep.
Most of all, I did things gradually--I added exercise in increments and I took away calories in increments.

You could do this, too! Anybody can win a weightloss contest simply by ignoring pretty much everything they tell you to do to lose weight and doing what works, instead.