There are easier ways to lose fifty pounds. You can join a gym, hire a trainer, count calories, or try intermittent fasting. Or you can spend almost two months in the Jefferson County Jail. I don’t recommend that last option. The results were impressive. The customer service was terrible.
I lost about fifty pounds during my time in jail. My blood pressure came under control, and I lost weight I hadn’t wanted to carry. Those were real benefits. But I didn’t get there through discipline and a carefully balanced menu. I got there because I was hungry.
My cellmate Ray Ray told me he’d worked in the kitchen. He said the meat products were marked “not made for human consumption.” I never saw those labels myself, so I can’t verify what he told me. What I can say is that the bologna looked awful, the other meat looked awful, and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.
That left vegetables, when there were vegetables. They were scarce. Maybe potatoes, though I can’t even remember for certain. And cake. If you could call it cake. Sometimes it resembled a gnarly piece of foam. Sometimes it looked like a block of cardboard that had been told it was dessert.
Breakfast was grits and a hard-boiled egg. I was so hungry that I sometimes ate the egg with the shell still on it. Someone had told me the shell held most of the nutrients. I believed it then. Looking back, it tells you more about my desperation than it does about nutrition.
I had no money for what everybody called “store”—the commissary, where you could buy things like Cheetos and honey buns. I later learned that “honey bun” could have another, less innocent meaning in jail. I was already having enough trouble understanding the menu. I didn’t need a second vocabulary lesson.
Every time the food arrived, a little marketplace sprang to life. “I’ll trade you my biscuit for your eggs.” “Anybody want carrots for corn?” Men negotiated over the contents of their trays like brokers on Wall Street. The exchange opened at mealtime and closed when there was nothing left to bargain with.
But one question rose above all the others: “You gonna eat your cake? You gonna eat your cake? You gonna eat your cake?” Most of the time, the answer was yes. The cake might have had the texture of packing material, but it was mine, and I was hungry.
The highlight of the week was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We got those only once or twice a week, as I remember it, and everybody looked forward to them. In a place where so much of the food turned my stomach, a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich felt like a gift.
I even tried fasting for spiritual reasons. I wanted to find the right frame of mind, to pray and focus. I managed about a day and a half. Normally I could fast longer, but in jail I was already too weak. There’s a difference between choosing to go without food and feeling as though you have no good choice.
It’s funny to describe the trading floor now. It wasn’t funny to be that hungry. I can appreciate that my blood pressure improved without pretending the way I lost the weight was healthy or humane.
So yes, I lost fifty pounds. But please don’t ask me for the diet plan. And if you ever hear me say, “I’m going to eat my cake,” you can believe I mean it.
JC
