I'm fat.

I’m fat. There, I said it.

It’s not an easy thing to say, really. If you look at me, it’s clearly not something I’ve been hiding. I haven’t been wearing a thin disguise. We really have neutered our culture in a way that makes it difficult for someone to say anyone is fat. It’s an offensive word, apart from the anonymity of the internet.  No one is fat anymore, to hear people say it. People are “big” now.  He’s a “big guy”. He shops at the “big and tall” store.  I know I’m stealing from Larry Miller here, but what’s wrong with calling someone fat?  Not in a cruel or obnoxious way, of course, but to say someone is fat is anathema to our sensibilities. 

In any case, whether I’m fat, big, husky, or anything else, if I lost my footing and came barreling in your direction, you’d be petrified.  I’d be petrified.  So it’s important to make that distinction now.  I’m not as fat as I used to be, and I damn sure intend to be less fat going forward, but fat is what I am. I find myself looking through pictures of myself before I post them on Facebook, picking the ones that don’t show the gut, or that little bit of fat that rolls over the elbow, as though people won’t know that I’m fat if it’s not in Facebook pictures.  Well fuck that, it’s time to make myself actually not fat.

So how did I get here?  Well, let’s make a list of the people that are to blame for the predicament in which I find myself.

1. Me

There’s the list.  Of course, there have been circumstances that have made it easier for me to become fat, but everything comes back to me and the choices that I’ve made, and often still make today. It can most easily be traced back to high school.  I actually started getting fat around fourth or fifth grade, but high school really ingrained those habits.  Specifically, high school wrestling, the time when I was in the best shape of my life. 

So how did this teach me to be a big fat fatty?  Simple: I was a 230-pounder in the 275-pound weight class.  While my teammates were eating plain chicken breast and salad (and often less), my lunch often consisted of a pound of chicken strips with ranch and a 20-ounce Pepsi.  If it was the right time of year, it was a quart of egg nog.  Then I went to wrestling practice every day and worked it off.  It didn’t matter what I ate (and I ate a lot), I would stick somewhere between 227 and 234 pounds, which still left me dwarfed by most of my opponents. 

The problem is that wrestling season ended my senior year, so I wasn’t burning thousands and thousands of calories a week.  I was still eating what I can only assume was upwards of 5000 calories a day, though.  When you eat like a 400-pound man and burn the calories of a 230-pounder, the math isn’t hard to do.

It’s not that I didn’t know I was gaining weight.  I just was more than willing to live on in blissful ignorance.  I stepped on a scale at the state wrestling tournament (231 pounds) and probably didn’t step on a scale again until I got shingles at 25 or 26, which is where the real impact of what I’d been doing to my body hit me.  The scale was metric, but it doesn’t take a math whiz to convert 200.0 kilograms into pounds (and I’m a bit of a math whiz). For those who don’t know the conversion, it’s 440 pounds. 

Four hundred forty pounds.

I felt the air come out of me (so maybe 439). How does this happen?  I knew I was a fat person, but holy shit. Time to do something about that, right?  Well, kind of.  I lost sixty pounds pretty quickly, and at 380 I told myself there’s no way I’ll ever weigh 400 pounds again.  I fluctuated between 360 and 390, even getting down to exactly 340 at the beginning of 2011.  I was excited.  I actually weighed what my driver’s license said.  Then I promptly gained it all back.

On May 20^th, 2012, I stepped on the scale.  The numbers did their funny spinning thing, came up E a couple of times (it is only meant to measure accurately to 400 pounds) and finally came up 403.0.  The second stage of complete ignorance in my life ended the second I read that number. I don’t want there to be a third.  I’ll never be 400 pounds again became a lie in that moment.

The next part of the story is about ESPN, and how much it desperately, desperately sucks.  For reasons that are far to extensive to explain here, ESPN has gone from the greatest thing in sports to one of the most awful.  The point is that I’ve shifted my allegiance to Deadspin.  Really you should too.  There’s a writer on Deadspin named Drew Magary who described the way that he reduced his own fatness from 260 pounds to 200 using the Public Humiliation Diet. Here’s the article if you’d like to read it. 

I’ve tried Weight Watchers. I lost 42 pounds in three months and got tired of measuring food and eating heaps of healthy food.  Here’s something I learned on Weight Watchers: If you get used to eating piles of healthy food, then switch back to unhealthy food, you still have the capacity to eat a ton, and then you eat until you weigh a fifth of a ton. I tried Atkins.  I lost weight initially. I also would literally have killed a man to steal his loaf of bread.  The Public Humiliation diet works for me.  You know why?  Because bacon kicks fucking ass.  So does bread.  So does ice cream. So does steak. So does everything else that people tell you you shouldn’t have. Fuck plain chicken breast, I want to eat what I want.  I just need to eat less of it, and have some broccoli with dinner. Broccoli is awesome.

So now I start what I hope is a successful third phase.  Follow me if you like. I’ll be posting my weight here every day (in fact, it’ll be at the top of the page [379.4 pounds as of today]).  I won’t be posting a bunch of sob stories. I didn’t get fat because I was sad, or because I had a terrible upbringing, or because I have to push down the sad feelings. I’m generally a really happy person. I got fat because I like good food and I lived like a lazy fatass for years.

Another thing: Feel free to be supportive or feel free to tell me how fat and lame I am, and most importantly, feel free to offer me something that you’ve made that tastes great. Don’t tiptoe around it.  I’m still a normal person, I still like to eat food that’s bad for you and I still like to be lazy.  Anyone who doesn’t is a god damn liar. Do you want to go out and walk a few miles?  Do you want to play disc golf or hit the gym or play some basketball?  Great, invite me along! Do you want to sit and play video games and order a pizza and drink beer? Shit, I am in! Basically, just treat me the same way that you’ve always treated me. Just expect me to put a little less stress on your couch springs each time.