All images courtesy of author

When it comes to losing weight, there are absolutely both ups and downs. There is a lot of social stigma surrounding not only the idea of losing weight but its correlation to being obese. Everyone tells you one of two things: Either it is OK to be yourself and to enjoy the body you have been given. Or the exact opposite: You are so big, you’re going to die in your forties, you can’t even do one push-up. And I could not.

The outside world is a much scarier place when you are large. You are not comfortable in the body you have, which makes every interaction uncomfortable. While the societal belief is that losing weight is generally only positive, I can say with some authority that the downsides are more prevalent than many people realize. Not only is there the struggle with how much to eat but there is also the constant idea that you need to physically exhaust yourself. The mentality someone must adopt to accomplish these is often pretty toxic and harmful.

Let’s first delve into the world of being big. From a young age, I had always been large, in the sense that I was tall and well-fed. While I never had any issues with my size at that age, I was never skinny. As the years passed, I went through a mental rough patch in my life in which I adopted a sort of victim complex. I blamed my teachers for my bad grades, and more importantly, I blamed society for not accepting me as someone large. To say that I was sensitive about my weight is an understatement, and I refused ever to play a sport or go for a run. My weight created a bubble around me and kept me from talking to people. It was so bad that in sixth grade, my teacher came up to me at lunch and told me to go sit with people because I was not going to make friends eating alone.

While I was indeed big throughout middle school, it got really bad during covid. I was at home and ate every second I could during online school. By the time I started my first year of high school, I was 180 cm and 91 kg with absolutely no muscle. That year, I continued my rebellion against physical activity and started my first job at a donut shop called Tim Hortons. Needless to say, being around free donuts for six hours every other day was not exactly the best idea for someone my size. It was a good day if I only had one donut, a sandwich, and a frappé. The summer before moving to ISB, I gained 10 kg in two months. I consistently told myself that I would lose all the weight in Thailand and coud just forget about my health in the meantime.

By the time I moved to ISB at the start of my sophomore year, I was 182 cm and 103 kg, again all fat. I was ready for a new beginning, and it was finally time for me to be healthy and lose weight, so, I set a goal of losing 10 kg. During my first semester at ISB, I took Alternative Pursuits, a fitness class that was extremely beneficial in terms of getting me to move more. But in my new home in Thailand, I found more food to indulge in and I ate just as much, if not more. By the time I weighed myself again, I had gained 3 kg. The number 106.7 will consistently haunt my memories, as it was the heaviest I had ever been.

Reading the scale that day changed the way I viewed myself. From that moment on, I was a different person. I was done with all of the excuses and all of the lies I told myself, and it was time to put in some work. Starting November 2022 I stopped eating as much as I used to. Keep in mind, I said stop eating, not stop eating unhealthy. I would go the entire day without a single bite and eat whatever I wanted at dinner. I would move through the entire day with nothing to fuel me until my big meal at the end. Intermittent fasting became my best friend, a way of losing weight and still eating whatever I wanted. Nearing the end of the semester, I had lost 3 kg and was ecstatic about what I would be able to achieve in the new year.

With 2023 arriving, my new goal was to start going to the gym. During our school DELVE trip in December, I had a friend offer to take me and teach me the ins and outs of our school gym. Despite my previous protest against the mere concept of athleticism, I had decided it was the logical next step to further my weight loss. The gym created an environment of pure energy funneled into the age-old practice of moving big weights. It became a challenging yet welcoming environment, but there remained the obstacle of learning to lift the weights. The term “we all start somewhere” could be used to describe my journey at the gym. In my first three months, I could only ever bench the bar. (For those of you who are unfamiliar, bench is a compound movement including the contraction of your chest in order to press a barbell up.) My first few months in the gym were that of discovery and learning, only meant to lead me to a better future.

But once ISB started construction of the new fitness center, meaning no access for a period of time, my progress stalled. I was still stuck in my stubborn old ways and was unable to dedicate myself to pursuing alternative methods of physical hypertrophy. Despite my lack of physical exercise, I continued with the mentality of needing to lose weight. A deep and dark beast arose from me when I clung to a number on the scale with no true care for my well-being. For two months, all I did was weigh myself before and after every meal and every snack. I stepped on that scale at least four times a day. During that grueling period, I lost another 10kg. Three of those 10 were all in one week in an attempt to drop as much weight as possible before returning to friends and family in the USA.

Being back in the USA for the summer came with its new implications. Because it was summer, there were no distractions to keep me from the gym for two hours every day aside from programmed rest days. It was my time to hone in on the craft of lifting; however, I did quite the opposite. Instead of being around people who have been lifting for a long time, I was with my brother. Instead of having someone to criticize my form, I was instead the one who had to lift the big weight and because of this, I developed a horrible habit of ego lifting. I would rack up large weights with no concern for my health, and I would do anything my body could just to push it up. That was my only purpose. It led to some uncomfortable days with a sore back and indirect muscles being used beyond what the body’s repair cycle could manage.

At the start of my junior year, I had achieved my goal and was now seen as the kid who lost weight. At the start of the school year, I had friends come up to me and congratulate me for my progress, all leading to a correlation of positive feedback about the harm I was dragging myself through. I was now an expert at dropping weight by tracking all of my calories. It was to a point where I would eat exactly 700 calories a day. When confronted about how much weight I had lost by my advisor, counselor, and friends, I began to lie and say I was eating more than I did. Do you know why I ate exactly 700 calories? Because that is two protein shakes and a serving of chicken and rice. No more than that.

I had a lot of lows. From gaining weight my summer at work, gaining 3 kg when I thought I had lost weight, restricting my eating, dropping 3 kg in one week, weighing myself four times a day, ego lifting and consistently putting myself in harm’s way, and only eating 700 calories a day. I will experience more lows in life, and I will go through more lows when considering my personal fitness. When people come up to me and ask me how I lost weight, my answer has always been putting in the work, but the real answer is I didn’t work, I didn’t care what happened to me as long I felt like I was moving forward off of some random number a scale told me. The only reason I lost weight was because I hated myself. I was going to torture myself and test myself until I snapped or proved I was worth something. Let’s be glad that didn’t happen.

Losing weight became one of my biggest achievements in life, showing my perseverance and developing a stronger mentality. But I did the right thing in the wrong way. Despite my achievement, I harmed my relationship with food as well as my ability to be vulnerable. I no longer feel like I should be able to open up. It is now my job to take care of everything in my life, and if I can not handle it myself or need help, that is my failure. Working on these factors is proving to be a new separate challenge in my life aside from my physical weight. Some would say between the weight loss and my character development, 2023 was the best year of my life. My simple response: 2023 was only to prepare me for 2024.