Fun with #OkCupid: A dude in the OKC corral (The Honest Story of How I Lost 150 lbs)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Kenny. We e-met through OKC and although we've never gone out on a date, he was inspired by my documentation of my online search for love, that he wanted to come on board and provide male insight into OKC. So here you go ... and now we're here ... HIT IT KENNY!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @casetines
The story of my dating life as I tell it on TNTML would be somewhat incomplete if I didn’t explain how I got here. How did I find myself as a single, 29-year-old male in Los Angeles?
This isn’t my life story, but it is the story of my life. I’d like to think I’m not defined by any one thing, but my struggles with weight are a major part of who I am. On my blog, I’ll be chronicling how I gained weight (more than once) and how I ultimately lost 150 pounds to become nearly the man I am today. This is part one… Growing Up Fat. Because this is a long story, I’ll detail the other parts on kennethauthor.com and then get back to my dating stories next week. (Lots happening there too!)The most personal of all my personal stories is about being fat. I don’t want to use words like “obese” or “overweight” or “tubber tubber belly rubber” because that’s not what my affliction is called. It’s called being fat, and growing up I was one of the fattest kids in school.
I don’t think anybody can know how something like that starts if it’s all you’ve ever known. From my earliest memories (of which there are few, and mostly spotty at best because apparently I was a stoner from the time I was three?) I have always been a big kid. Not just in width, but also in height.
To put it in perspective, because I have no damn clue how tall I was at any age, I am 6’6″ now and I haven’t grown much since early in high school. This height advantage proved to be somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of any efforts to trim up before I started hitting those critical puberty stages. (Crossing my fingers that I hit puberty any day now.)
People would tell me, “You’ll thin out” or “It’s just baby fat.”
Nope, this is real fucking fat and the taller I get the more I expand. I felt like I was some machine that needed to feed itself more food in order to survive. I have more than once in my life been called a “bear” and not in the much more appealing homosexual way.
At least bears in the gay community are desired. I was just a big ass dude.
So, there I sat (always sitting. Fat, get it?) as a kid in elementary school – middle school – high school, as the big kid. As the “huge” kid. Not just fat. Not just tall. But a whole lot of both.
How does one cope with that? Who the hell would my heroes be to look up to? Baloo the Bear from TaleSpin? Chunk from Goonies? (A special “Fuck you” to anyone that told me to do the “Truffle Shuffle.”) More importantly, how does a kid that’s 10 or 12 or 14 independently lose weight on his own accord?
It’s not as easy as it seems. Kids need guidance for shit like that. And it was fucking killing me that I was not skinny. Seriously, it’s some depressing shit to grow up and have crushes, or see your friends get girlfriends, or want to be respected in sports and then have none of that.
I would have done anything to be skinny.
I can remember going over several ways to lose weight, one of which was inspired by Theodore in Alvin and the Chipmunks when he decided to steam up the bathroom and sweat it all out.
That didn’t work. Damn you for being a cartoon.
I remember being inspired by the most random shit on television like a story about Hulk Hogan on Nickelodeon, or an episode of Head of the Class when the fat kid Dennis comes back from summer break looking even bigger and then reveals that he was hiding pillows in his clothes and had actually lost weight.
Fuckkkk… I want to pull pillows out of my clothes after summer break too.
But up until the time I was eighteen, I did not lose any weight. I just packed and packed and stored more for the winter. I played some football and some basketball, but those aren’t real workouts if you are supplementing them with McDonald’s.
I had small bits of “Okay, I’m going to go running!” but they never lasted very long. I would starve myself for a day or two because I didn’t know any better. None of it really mattered because I was too naive, too lazy, too hungry to stop the cycle.
I mean, have you had a Double-Quarter Pounder with Cheese? That shit’s bomb and it’s half-a-pound.
When I was a senior in high school, I weighed myself and found that I was finally checking in at 300 lbs. That’s a big number. It’s a “milestone number.” It’s the kind of number that no fat kid wants to see and it was an eye-opener.
I knew I had to do something about it and that I was no longer young enough to make excuses. This is when I lost weight… for the first time.
#thatisall
and don't forget to check out his blog!! <----- good shit!