I have touched on my weight some in past posts but I figured I would talk about it a little more in detail now. I hope that maybe by talking about my weight loss journey I can help people see that anything is possible.
I have been bigger most of my life. I played sports up until high school which helped me from becoming morbidly obese but I was always overweight. When I turned 16 I started at Drug Warehouse and it was about that time that I really blew up for the first time. I was working at a store that sold lots of different candy. Yeah that was not a good situation. By the start of my senior year of high school I weighed about 316 lbs. My best friend Adam asked me to go to new Weight Watchers meeting with him. I went with him and experienced some success pretty quickly. I lost weight but I was doing in the wrong way. I was pretty much starving myself. It was not OK. I ended up losing close to 100 lbs over the course of my senior year but I looked sickly. I remember that someone wrote in my yearbook to eat some candy. They had a point. : )
After graduating I started going to TCC and began dating Amanda not long after that. One of the side effects of a relationship can be becoming comfortable and letting yourself go physically. Because I had not truly followed Weight Watchers and had mainly starved myself I didn’t have good eating habits and over the course of the next few years I gained back the weight I had lost and then some.
It is at this point that I should mention that I have some real body image issues. I have a bad habit of equating my self worth with my size. Not healthy but something I had engrained in me from a young age. I distinctly remember being 13 or 14 and coming out of the bathroom after a shower without a shirt on and my mom making a comment about me having fat rolls. Something like that sticks with you. I mean if your own mom is talking about how bad you look what will the rest of the world think. Because of that memory nobody in my family has seen me without a shirt on since then.
In my relationship with Amanda I continued to struggle with my body image issues. It was a couple of months after we started being intimate that I would even take my shirt off. I guess I thought if I took my shirt off she would run away screaming. I really was stupid but it is amazing how much insecurity will fuck with your head.
Fast forward to January 2009, I am single, living back with mom, weighing in at scale breaking 361.6 lbs and profoundly unhappy with my lot in life. It was then that my friend and now roommate Lisa asked me if I would be interested in going to Weight Watchers with her. Now you will remember that I had went in high school and I had enjoyed in then so I agreed to go with Lisa. Another reason I went was because at that point in my life I felt like there was so much stuff I couldn’t control that I wanted to take charge of the one thing I could control. My body. I went to the meetings every week with Lisa and really followed the program and I began to lose weight. One of my favorite things that is said at Weight Watchers meetings is that Weight Watchers is not a diet. It is a lifestyle change. Being healthy is not a temporary thing that one does. It is a daily journey. It helped me out immensely to have Lisa there to keep me motivated. She was always there with encouragement and she truly understood what I was going through because she was on the same journey as me. It was a few months into attending meetings that Lisa wanted to start walking. I was not greatly interested in exercising but I went and turns out it made me feel good to get out there and move. I did the couch to 5k program and jogged my first 5k in September 2009. I have talked about my love of jogging some already and I will talk more about it later I am sure but for now let me just say that becoming active when trying to lose weight is one of the best things you can do for yourself. It doesn’t have to be jogging. You can walk, bicycle, zumba or any number of other activities. Just find something that you enjoy and if possible find somebody to do that activity with you. You can be each others motivation.
I lost weight quickly in Weight Watchers. Maybe a little more quickly than I should have but I didn’t starve myself. I ate three meals a day and snacked. I ate pretty much the same thing everyday. That isn’t for everyone but it worked for me. I reached my goal weight of 200 lbs in April 2010 and maintained it for 6 weeks to become a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. That is one of my proudest accomplishments. It is now roughly a year later and I have managed to maintain my weight. I fluctuate up and down about five pounds. I have bad days and sometimes bad weeks on the eating front but because I have the tools to live a healthy life I always get back on track and that is what is important.
My body image issues are much improved but I don’t know that I will ever be completely comfortable with my body. I still look in the mirror sometimes and don’t recognize the person staring back at me. It is hard to live as a fat person most of your life and then suddenly be the person that people describe as the tall skinny one. First time that happened was pretty sweet though.
I truly feel like if I can lose the weight that I did then anyone can. It is not easy but it is very possible. I know that it can seem daunting if you have a large amount of weight to lose. I found that it helped for me to break it down into smaller victories. Weight Watchers gives you stars for every 5 lbs lost along with losing 5% and then 10% of your body weight and every 25lbs lost but I took it farther and rewarded myself for every additional 5 and 10% after that as well. That way it felt like I was hitting a goal every few weeks. It helped keep me motivated through the tough times. I believe that I will maintain a healthy weight for the remainder of my life. That is something I would have thought crazy to say 3 years ago. Al most as crazy as saying that I would jog a half-marathon.
confessions of a tall man 