| Current mood: |  quixotic |
| Current music: | The Triffids- "A Trick of the Light" |
Plunky Fatypus.
Alright, this post has been a long time coming.
I've been chubby since I can remember. My childhood was marked by my eternal quest to raid my father's mini-fridge and stealthily consume the treats I could find there. Whenever my dad bought us treats for school-- potato chips, chocolate bars, anything-- he'd have to stash them away in the darkest corners of our kitchen cabinets. I'd eventually find them and do away with them. No scolding, harsh as it may have been, would deflect me from these infantile acts of gluttony. It came to the point where my dad would have to stash the food away in his own personal closet and keep it under lock. It was bad.
That pattern continued on to adolescence where I'd do away with an entire week's allowance in a two-day eating binge. The rest of the week I'd ask to borrow money from friends, which I never paid back. To some extent, that self-destructive behavior has continued-- in relative moderation and hidden under the guise of responsibility and adulthood-- to today. I don't blow an entire month's salary on food anymore, but that same compulsion creeps up on me every now and then. Sometimes, I just can't stop.
The word "fat" has always been a thorn on my side. To file me away and mark me as "the fat kid" was excruciatingly painful and frustrating for somebody who, even at an early age, struggled to break free of the mold. To be tagged the chubster, the kid who'll do anything for a treat. The disdain with which one regards the overweight-- weak, self indulgent, a tub of lard weighing society down. The perceived callowness with which one writes a fat kid off. I didn't want to be associated with that. Factor in the extremely superficial, image-driven Caribbean town of Barranquilla and the social pressures of a relatively well-off kid in a high-end high school, obesity wasn't just a health and image problem. It was a social stigma. Fat, I was a pariah.
There was a turning point for me. When I hit 15, I was graced with a sudden growth spurt combined with about 6 tough months of hard dieting. I was in the midst of puberty and had just started getting interested in girls-- I was growing up. In the course of that year, I lost a huge amount of weight.
Over the course of the next few years, I pigged out again. I have no idea what happened-- the growth spurt came to a screeching halt and I started growing sideways. By the time I came to Argentina, a bit over two and a half years ago, I looked like this:
Ignore the effeminate hairstyle. At that point, looking back, I think I looked pretty good. But at that time, I was certain I had pigged up to extreme levels. Self-image has always been a bit of an issue for me, and every single effort I made to lose some weight fell on its ass. I knew I was gaining weight, and I knew at some point I had to stop it, but school, work, girlfriends and other such distractions kept me from really paying attention to an ever-increasingly-alarming problem.
I think it reached its peak in July of 2007, when I went back to visit Barranquilla for a month. Every single person I met commented on how much I'd grown-- sideways. It was dreadful, but completely overthrown by the immense joy I felt to see my family again after close to two years. When I got back to Buenos Aires, there were a few attempts to start dieting that were botched by the Holidays and the lethal combination of my own laziness and the convenience of fast food. Going to school in the mornings and working in the afternoons and nights for nine hours didn't exactly leave me much choice.
One of the things that has been the toughest for me to overcome or to even make jokes about is my weight. Call me weird, an asshole, a film snob, a big-nosed prick, it's all fair play. But talk about my weight and ooh boy, we're gonna have trouble. Only recently had I started making myself the butt of fat jokes and, when I realized it meant I accepted my condition, I stopped, alarmed. Vowing to lose weight.
I actually did lose some weight in the course of the last few months, and started feeling complacent about the way I looked until...
Nothing could prepare me for this picture. It was taken this Sunday by a friend of mine right outside of the Buenos Aires zoo. It's me and Barney the dinosaur, and I can't tell who's who. Seriously, I am fatter than Barney. Look at those cheeks. I'm a fucking blimp.
So this time, it's for serious. And I say it with a passion and conviction I hadn't had since I took that very same oath when I was about fourteen years old. I've been dieting and jogging for the past week and already I feel results. I am confident than in the course of a few months I'll lose a ton of this excess weight, and hopefully by the time I get to Colombia (December of this year-- mark your calendar), I'll go back to looking not like something you'd see floating over the Thanksgiving Day Parade.
And once the weight is gone, I will keep it off. This self-destructive cycle has gone on for long enough. For once, I feel like it's time to better myself. I have kicked certain bad habits in the past. I've got the strength and character for it. Fuck it, I'm not that guy. I've carried this crutch for enough time already. And yes, I know this all reads like the determined self-defeating lies of a thoroughly deluded fatty, but goddamnit, I mean them more than I've meant anything else in the 20 years I've walked this earth.
Mark my words. This time, I am not picking up that extra pizza slice. Fuck you.
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funkyplatypus) wrote,
