Kevin **Note: This post is a reflection of the ideas, feelings, and attitudes I held over the years I struggled with my weight, based on my own memory, and journals I kept at the time.**
We all have to start somewhere when it comes to weight loss, and this is where I started. This is my baseline zero, where I was at before I lost the weight this time around. I’m no stranger to unsuccessful weight loss attempts. There. I said it.
Anyone who knows me at this point probably wouldn’t believe it, and if they don’t, then I don’t blame ’em. This is the only way they’ve known me.
But the truth is, I’ve been down that road before. I’d try to lose weight in the past, with the results being such small potatoes, only to fall off the saddle and end up back where I started. My weight loss motivation waxed and waned over time during these yo-yo dieting patterns, which left me feeling even less motivated than before.
There was one time where I was at least somewhat successful. I’d lost roughly 40 pounds that time from my highest confirmed weight that put me in the obesity class 3 BMI range. This is just my best guess based on what I wore before this, and what I was able to fit at that point.
No photos of me exist from around this time, other than a few poor-quality ones a relative took of me that have since been lost to the ages, and some Polaroids I had from high school the year before I started.
I’m grateful for that, since it was a difficult time in my life, and they’d be nothing but reminders of that for me. I ended up gaining back whatever I managed to lose and then some on account of a medication I never needed (and should never have been given in the first place). Throw in a lack of understanding about the specifics of nutrition, and bang, we’ve got the perfect storm.
I felt so helpless, and so angry that all that work I put in just a year ago to get to where I was before this whole mess started was officially all for naught. I was already back in what I wore in late high school, when I reached my confirmed highest weight. I was on my way to reaching my estimated highest weight from late middle school.
The time that followed was a whirlwind of quick-fix supplements, wild crash diets, and dopey exercises that all promised me the moon but delivered jack shyt.
I felt like I shouldn’t have ever expected any different in the first place. I mean, I figured at the time that I was so overweight at this point that I’d never lose it. Maybe that one time I made any progress worth writing home about was as good as it got for me.
Maybe this was something for everyone else but me.
Everyone else was worth a healthy lifestyle, but not me.
Everyone else deserved a healthy lifestyle, but not me.
Every time I’d try to talk to someone about my dreams of losing this weight, they’d laugh at me and never take me seriously.
There it was. Maybe that was another sign telling me that this truly wasn’t for me to want or even dream of. I felt like that if this was gonna be my lot in life, I might as well make the best of it.
But on some level, deep down, I didn’t completely buy into those bullshit messages.
For the previous installment, read here.
And a Pinterest graphic if you’re interested:
