I’m not stupid: I know why you come here. It’s the Creative juice stuff. That’s the function of this website and 95% of why I do what I do and why I love my work so much. The site analytics support that conclusion. When I post about a project of mine or a personal experience, this site takes a serious hit in terms of number of daily visits. On the contrary, if I post The Top 10 Ways to Murder Your Agent, the daily visits go through the roof. If I were to post The Top 10 Ways to Murder Your Agent (And Get Away With It), the numbers would jump even more. Humans love sensationalism. After exhaustive research, I’ve determined that you are ALL human. Thank god. A daily conversation with a bunch of robots wouldn’t be much fun for me. That’s why I occasionally score video games.

Even still, certain thoughts of mine just need to come out. After all, what good is a website called [deaneogden.com] that is devoid of any personal sharing from my life away from the composing chair, the lectern or the creative meetings? Some would say that stuff—you know, real life!—is more interesting anyway. I agree, and therefore, this site ends up a fun and challenging alchemy that is part educational, philosophical and personally cathartic for its author. I need to say stuff sometimes, and I’m okay with you weeding out what you don’t want to hear about and marinating for a minute in what you do. Whether we’re writing, composing, speaking or acting, that’s the gamble we all take when we risk putting ourselves out there. People might not like your work. That’s the game, and I like it.

So, fair warning: A small few upcoming entries here will be one of those high-roller gambles, but I’m convinced it’ll be worth the risk. For those of you who can’t be bothered, don’t worry—I’ll pepper it with the stuff you are used to so as to keep that “unsubscribe” button inconveniently out of arm’s reach. Heaven forbid you miss out on 50 Ways ProTools Can Get You Chicks because of a few personal struggle stories. So, while we are here, let me challenge you to read through this series, regardless of your level of interest. You actually might learn something about yourself that you never have given much thought to. In fact, I’m counting on that. That right there is a bet I’m actually willing to double down on.

Adventures in Saving Your Own Life

Recently, I told you about the 265 pounds that I’ve lost since undergoing a Reux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery during the summer of 2005. That revelation was the first time I’d ever spoken about my surgery outside of my immediate circle of trust. Up until then, those who knew the pre-operation version of me have just assumed whatever their imagination allowed in regards to the drastic change in my appearance. Not that anyone lies awake at night thinking about Deane Ogden, but believe me… when you lose 250+ pounds in less than eleven months, people notice. Once the light bulb goes on for them that “something’s up” (in my case, about three months post-op, after I’d shed a very obvious 77 pounds), a huge amount of speculation begins.

Man, have you seen Deane Ogden lately? He doesn’t look so good.

I think he did that thing like Janet Jackson where they give you suction on your back. Cupping, I think it’s called. It’s suppose to work pretty good for people who just can’t lose the weight.

Holy shit, did you hear that Deano caught one of those parasites, like on National Geographic? They just got back from a cruise in Mexico, you know. Scary!

I have a friend who did that Atkins thing. She was back to her fat weight in six months. I’ve seen that guy eat… I’m not holding out hope. I wish him the best, though! Nice guy.

Wow. AIDS?

I heard he’s on a religious fast. Pretty hardcore, from what I understand. Wait, didn’t Karen Carpenter die from doing that?

You know… my sister’s mother-in-law started wasting away like that and four months later they found out she had progressive colon cancer. [gasp] Oh, my God… do you think Deane has colon cancer?

Those lines are not an exaggeration. When I started dropping pounds, I heard every one of these and more. (There is now a running joke in my family about Karen Carpenter dying from fasting.) Aside from the increasing sensationalism of the tales, some of it was to be expected—all my life, people have only ever known me as overweight. When I show someone a former passport photo or an old driver’s license, they laugh and demand to see a “real” photo. People have a tendency to dismiss miraculous phenomenon without tangible evidentiary proof. When such evidence is unavailable, the circumstances, even if standing in front of them and staring them right in the face, is simply not believable. As I’ll explain later, while not impossible, dropping over 250 pounds just shy of twelve months could be considered something of a miracle.

Why Talk About This?

Since I revealed how I lost the weight on this website a few weeks ago, you cannot imagine the amount of emails and messages I’ve received from people struggling with similar issues. As of this writing, the count exceeds 350. Almost all of the stories I’ve heard have included similar details—heartbreaking accounts of valuable life lost being too uncomfortable to participate in the everyday routine activities that most healthy people never think twice about. I understand that struggle all too well, as do many of my friends who have overcome their weight issues, yet still struggle with them daily. It is because of my intimate experience and understanding with these issues that I feel compelled to tell my own story. This series will hopefully help someone, and even if it’s just one person, it will be worth the effort.

I’m only writing about this experience for two reasons. #1) To help someone else dealing with the same weight issues that I do; and #2) To educate people on the benefits and risks of undergoing a Reux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery, based on my own experience with it. I’m NOT writing this series to illicit any pats on the back from anyone. Those are very sweet and appreciated, but unnecessary. It’s been a long journey to here, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, it’s a journey most people won’t understand unless they’ve walked it themselves or have faced some of the same life-threatening circumstances I have which ultimately lead me to take action. If you’ve always been a thin person, it may be difficult for you to identify much of what I’m talking about in these posts. That being said, you might be a person who has dealt with another form of addiction other than a food-related one. In that case, you may find some of this valuable, and at the very least familiar.

With that in mind, here is the rest of my story.

Back Then…

It started with just eating normal little kid stuff. I’ve always been a candy and sugar freak (still am!) and so I was really into the sweets when I was little. My parents weren’t absentee, by any means; they closely watched what I ate and cut me off when they felt I was getting a little too happy with the sugar. When they could, that is. They didn’t know that I was buying Nerds and Fererra Pan Jawbusters with my paper route money. I had them both pretty much bufallo’d into thinking I was just eating what was served at the dinner table every night. But the truth was that I had stashes of candy everywhere—in my tree forts, under my bed, in my desk. At one point, I remember having a rubber-banded bundle of Charleston Chews stashed in my drumstick bag so that when I played drums out live, I could mow through a few of them on breaks. I was addicted to sugar and sweets (and eventually, food in general) long before I knew what the word addiction even meant.

The origins of my addiction are wholly my own, but the theme of addiction runs in my family. There is scarcely a person in my immediate family who has not dealt with addiction in some form, be it alcohol, drugs, or food. You name it… We’ve embraced it. I saw enough death and destruction due to alcohol and drugs when I was growing up to vow to never touch the stuff. I’ve never done drugs—not once—and I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I’ve tasted alcohol three times in my 37 years and have never been drunk or even close. That life just has zero appeal for me. Nope… for me, it was always food. In fact, to this day, I still love to eat, as evidenced by the foodie pics I often plaster on my Facebook page. But now, the motivation is quite different: I love to cook and I really get into trying new tastes, particularly when I’m spending time in an unfamiliar geographical region. I no longer eat to make myself feel better, to “mask emotions”, or for any other self-abusive reason.

But it took a long time to get there… and like most addicts, I’ll probably never be completely out of the woods.

Like many people who have been food-addicted, I used the refrigerator as my great counselor. If I had a tough day, I’d go to the fridge. Having an issue with someone? To the fridge. Having a problem I couldn’t solve? Fridge. Get in an argument with my dad/friend/teacher? Fridge. Fridge. Fridge. Go shopping and can’t find anything that fits? Yep… ironically, to the fridge I would go. The fridge, the kitchen, the pantry. All of those places made me feel better. They took the pain away of real life. It’s exactly the same phenomenon as a drug-addict masking his/her pain with substances. It’s a masking mechanism for reality—what’s happening in reality is not making you happy, so losing yourself in the land of milk and honey—or, the land of Bit ‘O’ Honeys, in my case—for a few hours just feels better. It’s only temporary, of course, because real life demands to be let in eventually, but for the time being, the distraction takes your mind off of all that’s wrong in your world.

The Long Middle

I can’t possibly paint an accurate picture of what it is like to be overweight. You have either been there or you haven’t. People have asked me, and I just don’t know what to say. If I were to recount what I would consider the five most horrifying moments of my overweight years, most people, not knowing exactly how to respond, would clumsily offer up something like:

“Oh… uh…. well, people are stupid, dude. Who cares what they think? Fuck ‘em!”

That pretty much reflects how I feel about it all now, but back when I was overweight, that rationale made zero sense to me. It’s a great attitude to have, but easier to profess than to actually walk in. The fact is that we do care what people think. We do. It’s the way humans are built. We care what gets said about us and we care what is believed about us. We care about how people perceive us, and we just can’t help it. If you say you don’t care, you’re either a liar or a crazy person.

That being said, there are a few moments that I can point to in my life when I was painfully aware of how incredibly obese I really was. At my fattest times, when I would go to a restaurant with people, I would silently pray that there were no booths available so that we’d be forced to sit at a table instead. I simply was too big to fit into a booth. One time, at a wedding reception for a friend, I sat down in one of those white resin chairs and started in on the plate of food I’d carefully assembled from the buffet line. Within fifteen seconds or so, I was on the ground, my food flung everywhere, the resin chair splintered in tiny pieces… in front of the entire wedding party and their 400 or so guests. Shortly after that incident, I started making a self-deprecating joke that I was not “resin or wicker friendly.” It got a good laugh every time, but like much of my humor at that point in my life, it was designed to circumvent the jokes that I’d decided people were “probably already making about my weight.”

In high school, I fluctuated between being 35 to 100 pounds overweight at any given time. If it was football season, I was down to about 210, which was great for a 6′ 3″ high school sophomore. Unfortunately, in most people’s eyes, that’s still fat. And probably clinically, or at least according to the BMI (Body Mass Index—the most widely used method for determining one’s appropriate weight based on age and height), I was about 20 pounds over even when I was exercising, lifting and running three hours day, five days a week. I’m currently 201 lbs., 6′ 4″, and people think I’m shockingly underweight. Go fuckin’ figure.

Anyway… There was a girl in my class. I’ll call her Amber, because that was her name. She was attractive, sweet, kind to me, and always had a beautiful smile on her face. I liked her a lot because she didn’t have the plastic facade that most girls at my school seemed to have—a certain “fakeness” about them that left me rolling my eyes and gagging as I walked away from a conversation with the majority of them. Amber was different. She seemed genuine. She smiled at everyone, and it didn’t seem to matter if they were on the outer fringe of the general populous or if they were the captain of the basketball team, she treated everyone exactly the same. She seemed to have a kind heart and she struck me as a very honest person.

It was the beginning of my junior year, and I was playing in a band at the time with my best friend. Amber wanted our band to play at her 17th birthday party. Of course we said yes, and my buddy got all excited. “This is your chance, man! Ask her out!” Like we do at that age, I planned the perfect way to ask Amber to dinner, even though I was completely unsure of myself. I hated how I looked. She was thin, gorgeous and really took amazing care of herself. To me, she was stunning. I was an insecure, overweight, long-haired rocker. But, I had one thing going for me—my ace in the hole since I was five-years-old: People loved it when I played drums. So, this was perfect. We’d play a few tunes, maybe I’d rip a kick-ass drum solo or something, and then I’d ride that wave of excitement and use the electricity of the crowd to lock down a dinner date with Amber. It was the perfect plan. There would be no way she could resist.

And that just what we did. The band blew the roof off that party. Everyone was giving us high fives and doing the whole “You guys better not forget about us when you’re famous” thing. In hindsight, it was all pretty silly…. but  it was working, nonetheless, so I rode the wave and moved on to Phase Two of my genius plan. Sensing the right timing and opportunity, I watched out of the corner of my eye until Amber was standing by the refreshment table, alone for the first time all night without a throng of people surrounding her. I sauntered over, took a deep breath, and carefully laid out my heart to her. Suddenly, a huge smile came across her face and she reached out and put her arms around me. I couldn’t believe it. It worked! As she was embracing me, she said, her voice muffled against my chest, “Wow, you are the sweetest person. You know what? If you lost some weight, I’d absolutely go out with you!”

I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve felt absolutely on top of the world one second, and immediately following that, wishing someone would shove me in front of a speeding bus. That was one.

In all candor, I allowed Amber’s words to scar me up pretty bad inside for a long time after that. I used to be able to almost audibly hear her say those words to me in various situations, long removed from my high school years. Sometimes, when I would go into an audition for a recording gig or be up for a meeting on a film or get invited to a networking event, I would hear Amber’s voice, and I’d just start crying, imagining what these people I was about to meet were going to think of me when I walked into the room, big, fat and disgusting. Oh Deane, your music is so great. You know what? If you just could lose some weight, you’d be our guy!

It’s Not Just Hollywood

I’ll quickly chronicle the steps to getting the weight off in the next installment of this. It’s actually pretty comical stuff, and will be a welcome reprieve from some of the stories I’ve just shared. It’s always darkest before the dawn, right? Right. But just quickly, I can tell you that the number of things that have changed for me since becoming thin are boundless. I could write a whole book on just that part of the story alone, but I’ll leave you with a few thoughts on how I believe self-image issues correlate to creative output, and therefore, why I focused so intently on my artistic side growing up. Since my surgery, and subsequent life-altering changes in my physical appearance, people treat me differently, they respond to me differently, and they assume different things about me than they would have or did when I was overweight. If you are not careful to really learn to love yourself, no matter what your body is doing, this little game of “image-based acceptance” will wreak serious havoc on your mind and spirit. At times, it has pushed me to the edge in terms of trying to understand how people can be so shallow and one-dimensional.

I live and work in Hollywood. My dad says something that cracks me up every time I hear him say it: “Ahhh… Los Angeles: Land of fake tits and real assholes.” There has never been a statement so hilarious and so true at the same time. In Hollywood, image is everything. I recently saw a blurb at the grocery checkout on some mag questioning whether Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen are less funny now that they are both thin. I thought to myself, “You can’t fuckin’ win.” As fat guys, they were considered two of the funniest dudes in town… yet people shook their heads in disgust at their obese bodies. Now that they are thin… well… they just aren’t funny anymore. Never mind that their chances of living past age 40 went up by 80%. You can’t fuckin’ win.

Al Roker had a gastric bypass (the same one I had) for a reason. Peter Jackson went on a barn-burner of a diet and lost over 50 pounds after becoming successful in his directing career for a reason. I do not personally know either of them, but I absolutely understand all too well the way that our culture—and our adopted hometown of Los Angeles in particular—views being out of shape or overweight. It’s not endearing to be ”a chub” in Hollywood like it is to your mother. Nobody wants to pinch your cute fat cheeks and say shit like, “Ohhh… You’re just so darned cute!” the way your favorite aunt did when you were a little cherubic ankle-biter fat kid. Nope. Weight + age = undesirable in our image-based modern culture. That’s the way it is. I learned through all of this that it will never change. It’s pretty sick, really, when you think about it, but it is what it is. We are a visual people, and that makes it hard to judge whether if how we approve of one another is really our fault or if it’s just the way we are wired as a species. All other animals do it the way we do it too, so who knows. I quit worrying about it a long time ago. People are going to judge you based on your appearance. You cannot let it affect anything. As a child, that’s harder to do than it is when you are an adult, but to be completely honest, I’d still be struggling with it if I were still 265 pounds overweight. It’s just not something that goes away under those conditions. You carry it with you, literally, every day.

I know there are some who’ll want to say, “Deane, you cannot project your situation onto others. It’s not the same for everyone.” Sorry—yeah, it is. In the entertainment world, it is the same. It doesn’t matter if you are Brad Pitt or Chris Farley, it is absolutely the same. I was once counseled by a very close and personal friend who I love and trust very much, and who is a super-huge A-list player in Hollywood: “I love you, and I’m always going to tell you the truth. If [this gig] comes down to the two of you, and you end up standing next to him [in this case, a tall, thin composer known for dressing well and looking sharp] and your music is still better than his… He’s going to get the job anyway. I just want you to be prepared for that. That’s a symptom of how fucked-up and sick this town is. I wish it were different, but that’s just the way it is.”

Guess what? She was right. Eventually, the short list was whittled down to the composer in question and a pre-surgery, 465-pound version of me. He got the job, and I got a “We love your stuff! LOVE your stuff. [insert enthusiastic handshake here] We’ll partner together soon, you’d better believe it.” Not being one to believe anything until I see dollar signs, I eventually did believe it, but only after five years and 265-pounds were gone. It was then that that company apparently felt that it was time to “partner together”. Understand, my friend wasn’t being a bitch, she was being a realist. This woman is someone I love and trust and she was just telling me, as an industry veteran, what to expect. Actually, even at the time, I took the outcome of that particular situation as a serious compliment to my music. Additionally, I used it to push myself toward a goal to, in three years, not be in the same situation I was in then. In my mind, the thought of dieting away the extra pounds was still something that was attainable. Little did I know that my actual method of loosing all that weight would be something far more drastic and invasive. It had to be. Dieting wouldn’t have worked for Deane Ogden. Hell—it didn’t work for me fo 29+ years, why would it work now?

Forcing the Issue

Which, brings us to what seeded my decision to investigate bariatric surgery as a solution to solving my problem of being overweight (You see that—I still thought it was going to be “light-switch” easy!). In the course of my deep research into every weight loss method available to me at the time, I quickly discovered an industry at work in the world that literally is designed to keep people fat. Ironically, it’s called the diet industry. It sells false hope to desperately seeking people. The messages are so confusing and often so ambiguous that, by the end, people are more flustered over their weight situation than they were when they started whatever program they are hundreds of dollars into. Studies (solid ones, not bullshit ones) have proven that people who participate in diets will regain a third of their lost weight back within the following year of losing, and are likely to end up back at baseline within 3 to 5 years. It doesn’t take a wizard to realize that those odds suck hard. The diet industry, as it exists nowadays in our modern-convenience society, is a ridiculous cash-cow system designed to imprison people into a lifestyle that is self-perpetuating. It feeds itself, no pun intended.

But the biggest thing that keeps dieting from working, I believe, is that dieting never forces you to face your demons. It never insists that you confront why you overeat and why you cannot seem to stop. Those underlying issues are what make you do what you do, not the good taste of the Colonel’s extra crispy Secret Recipe chicken. That’s the catalyst, but your hidden demons are the cause.

I remember when I quit playing football in high school to concentrate more on my music career. People were worried I would balloon up to 400 pounds without the daily peer-pressure from my teammates to show up and run wind sprints. That was a good rationale. In all the years I played ball, I never missed a day of practice because I knew I’d catch shit from everyone the next day at school for being a chump and skipping out. When I started researching how to lose my weight, I remember correlating the experience of being “forced” (by peer pressure) to attend football practice and being “forced” (by the limitations of my new 30cc stomach size) to only be able to eat a limited amount at each meal without getting super sick, and in the most extreme case… dying. Death, as it turns out, is the ultimate deterrent.

The Road to the Operating Table

Ask anyone who has known me longer than 6 days… I’m an eternal optimist. I don’t do drama and I don’t do negativity. However, there are very real dark sides to body image issues for many people, and I do not want to shortchange the effects they can have on anyone who’s struggling. From little 7-year old kids to grandmas in their 90′s, weight issues and body-image self-loathing affects most people at least at one point in their lifetime.

So why did I choose bariatric surgery? Simple. I was tired of running from those demons. I wanted total and complete freedom from them. Like I said, after researching every option available, it was clear: Bariatric surgery was the only method that would literally force me to face my food demons. I would have no choice but to learn how to deal with life like people do who do not have food as a numbing mechanism, who instead choose to face things head on and take life as it comes to them. Since I had zero interest in alcohol or drugs, I knew this was my only shot at not only a life completely untethered from the addiction of food, but also from dying at age 30.

It’ll take me a bit to put together… but in my second half of this story, I’ll tell you about the time I almost died. At age 30.