
I’m fat.
So much for burying the lede, eh… But seriously, I am overweight. I won’t be appearing on Maury anytime soon for being morbidly obese, but it is true I am actually quite a bit overweight. I’ve gone from about 185 to 217 pounds in about a year. I first noticed it when my pants didn’t fit and when I struggled to tie my shoes. When I really knew that I was truly overweight was when people stopped asking me if I was still hiking (obsessively) because they could obviously see that I wasn’t.
The irony of this is that since I was about 1 year old (I was apparently a very fat baby with just rolls and rolls of fat. I’m told they were cute. They aren’t now) I have been a rail. I had a legendary metabolism and I could eat professional-eater level amounts of food without gaining a pound. When I was in my 20s, I could literally eat 2 XL pizzas without stopping and gain NO weight.
But the purpose of writing this is because I’ve have had this written for weeks going on months but have never published it.
This is the reason.
I was too busy trying to hide who I am, what I looked like, from everyone. And it really wasn’t totally because of social media and the electronic lives that we lead which are perfect and happy, and we all are content with our lives until we aren’t. It was mostly because I was just embarrassed. But also because up until now, I didn’t WANT to fix it. And a large part of that is because I got tired of hearing people tell me that I needed to.
The truth is that I don’t have to do anything. Sure for health reasons it makes sense to lose weight/not be fat.
But worse than any of this, I finally know what the mental strain is when you’re overweight. I’m ashamed but I, as many kids of a ‘different time’ fat shamed people. I remember bullying other kids for being fat and calling them fatso or ‘you fat slob’ etc. I’ve wondered if maybe not trying to lose any weight was some sort of self punishment and atonement for all the bad that I did to overweight people as a 10 year old.
I remember laughing when hearing women ask if this made me look fat only now to secretly look in the mirror as a MAN and see if these pants really do make ME look fat. And it doesn’t feel good. I know now why women ask this.
The good news is that as my friends have told me, this can be fixed. I have a plan, I have financial means to both workout and to eat healthy-ish . I have to transfer my legendary willpower in some things now to food, which will be hard but I know that I can do it.
Some people will say that this is for attention. It’s not. It’s a motivating tool and frankly I wanted to prove to myself that I could shatter some foolish notion that I was truly leading the perfectly crafted electronic life. I’m not.
So I ask all of you to hold me accountable. Give me tough love if you see me eating In-N-Out. Tell me to swap my doughnut for some kale. Tell me that 1 spoon of sugar in my coffee is better than two.
But don’t try and take away my Pop-Tarts, that’s a bridge too far.