A Former Obese Persons Views on Being Fat.

The extremely short answer is to make other people jealous. I know that answer might sound really pretentious and assholeish, but hear me out. 

For most of my life I was known as the ‘fat kid’, hitting 280 pounds in high school, and I tried to make up for this by also being ‘the funny one’. But I was only using jokes and comedy as a way to help myself forget out how much I really hated myself. To some extent, I am still battling with this idea of liking the person I am becoming.

I have been battling with my weight for some time now, but have for the most part gotten my shit together over the past couple of years. I've always been the kind of person who needs to have some sort of motivation to get myself out of my normal routine. When I first started to lose some weight my motivation was to be healthier and look good. After I got ‘healthy’ and started to look okay, I started to slip into my old habits and eventually started to gain some of the weight back. So, now it was time to find some new motivation. I started working out for me. I thought that if I told myself that I liked working out it would somehow get me out of bed and teleport me to the gym or outside for a run. Well, it turns out that working out is hard and I hated hard things. 

Up until last year, I was completely lost in regards to my relationship with working out and fitness in general. So, unsurprisingly, the weight came right back, and this time getting me back up to 190 pounds. I would love to say that this happened to me years ago and I have had time to really think about how I overcame all the struggles of weight gain and eventual loss, but nope, that's not what’s going on here. This 190-pound version of me was operational in 2018.  

I was depressed again. I was staying up late doing absolutely anything I could to get my mind off of how crappy I was being to my body. I would go out my way to make other people happier even though I wasn’t. This is the really crappy part of being fatter that not many people like to open up about. This is the part where you DO look in the mirror, just so you can remind yourself of just how big of a shit you are. But, its a vicious cycle of acknowledging how much you are suffering and not asking for help. I would rather give advice to anyone who would listen about how easy it is to get in shape and how anyone could do it, “as long as they tried.” I think I was giving out advice to others in the hope that someone would stop and ask me about what I was doing. This goes back to me wanting to make sure others were happy, instead of making sure I was happy. But, being that I have anyways been the ‘happy or funny’ person in the group, people rarely, if ever, assumed I was not. 

Around February of this year that I started to really look into why I was so sad, and come to the core of feeling sorry for myself. That's when it hit me - jealously. I remembered when I was the 280 pound junior in high school looking at other fit people. I would always ask myself why that wasn’t me. It was that initial spark of jealousy that led me to want to lose the weight. I wanted to be healthy and look good, but most importantly, I wanted to make others jealous. 

Now at this point, I can image your thinking that same thing as before. I promise I am not some pretentious asshole douchebag. I might be one or two of those things, but never all at once. 

When I was fat, I would look at those people with jealousy and wonder why it wasn’t me with a six-pack. So eventually, I stopped wondering and started to work at it. It was that waiting to fit in and feel good about myself that eventually led me to my weight loss journey. And, as of February 20th of this year, it was again my biggest motivator. 

My hopes with working out and getting fit are that if you are fat or bigger than you’d like to be - I make you jealous. I want you to look at me and know that I have been there and I know what its like to be that fat kid AND come out the other side. I want you to ask yourself, “why not me?” Most importantly, I want you to know that you came become a better version of yourself, without losing yourself. 

Thanks for reading this. 

xoxo,

Luis