Just a heads up: some of what I’m saying here may be in some way(s) triggering. It’s not my intention to hurt anyone with my words. My primary goal here is to just be heard.
I need someone to hear me.
In my endeavors to become a stronger man, I feel as though I’ve subjected my brain to a plethora of ideas that may be considered neurotic. For a while now, I’ve held the perception that my brand of motivation is something that’s unorthodox. Every time I explain my motivation, I feel as though I’m interpreted as someone who is absolutely insane. Before recently, I only knew one way to describe how I felt about bettering myself, and it was that I spent/spend most of the process feeling angry about something. Like there's a fire burning in my brain that won’t put itself out. Why is this? I’ll tell you.
Because my motivation, at its core, is a feeling of frustration. Feeling pissed off. Fed up. Fucking sick of it. I worry that in some ways, it can be a dangerous line of thinking. If I were to describe it in the edgiest, most 13-year-old-me way possible, it almost feels like my efforts to be stronger have been a means to exact some sort of vengeance on a life that made me feel weak.
Unfortunately, it’s felt good in some horrible, terrifying ways.
Age: 26 years old
Height: 5'11
Weight 430 days ago: 400 lbs
Weight now: 270 lbs
I post a lot about my process, but I’ve never made a post about exactly what I think it’s done to my brain. However, before I delve into what weight loss has done to my mind, it’s important that I delve into what being fat has done in the first place. It turned me into someone who felt afraid and weak. That’s something that growing up obese from the very beginning can do to you, especially when you’re surrounded by the wrong sort of company. The sort of company that has no reservation against attacking the weaker individuals in society. I can’t tell you how many times in my childhood I’ve been a victim to being targeted because of my weight. I’ve always been an inherently sensitive kid - it was simply my nature. Stack on top of that nature multiple events of harsh words and/or chaos sourcing from people who were supposed to love you, bullying and the fear that bundles feeling that you’d be stabbed and/or killed for trying to defy it, and you have a recipe for a person who lives their life feeling like a target. It only takes feeling like a target for so long before you become toxic to yourself. Which leads me into what I was before I started trying to better myself.
A self-defeatist.
For a good chunk of my life, I believed myself to be someone who was fundamentally incapable of doing difficult things. I felt that I was a hideous, unlovable child/teen/adult. I believed myself to be absolutely worthless in any position I could find myself in, whether that was in my friendships, my relationships, my jobs, my career endeavors. In any group I could find myself in for any reason whatsoever, I considered myself to be someone who didn’t belong. Something akin to imposter syndrome; it spanned seemingly my entire existence for many years. It was a recipe for failure that often ended in failure. I was always one of the first people in a social group to make fun of himself, joke about hating himself, and then to often chase that down with some sick sort of joke about killing himself.
The worst part is that they were never entirely jokes.
Here’s the thing about being a fat, sensitive kid. I really do think that the years I spent being an obese child have taken their toll. It fucked me up, via aspects both external and internal. For some reason, typing that makes me want to apologize. It makes me want to apologize for possibly seeming like someone who is trying to garner sympathy. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not; I can't always make heads or tails of what my intentions are. Although it was never entirely single-handedly responsible for every shortcoming I’ve had during the lion’s share of the past couple of decades, being the fat kid was something that I interpret to having been the catalyst for the self-destructive behaviors I’d eventually adopt. I remember things would go on like that until a few months before my 24th birthday. That’s when all hell broke loose for me. Many of us, we have a rock bottom moment in which we essentially open our third eyes, recognize the proverbial shit hitting the proverbial fan, and decide to get up and do something about it. The chain of events that I’m alluding to would serve as a transition into my next (and current-ish) state of mind.
A self-preservationist.
It’s a strange concept for me to wrap my brain around. It’s almost as if I reached a specific boiling point in my life, in which all at once I just decided I was fed up. I had issues with school that left me feeling worthless and pathetic, death in the family that I was handling very poorly, and stacked on top of that I had serious family drama and serious drama with a friend of mine at the time. Everything seemed to be converging in the worst way possible. I can’t think of too many ways that my brain could have snapped worse than it did during that specific summer (2018). I told my family things that I’d only told myself at my darkest moments, things that I often pretended didn’t exist; I often felt that I was just being dramatic, and I probably was. All of the sudden, people other than me knew just how much disdain I felt for myself. It was humiliating for me, but it was also eye-opening. I remember sitting there next to my sister - we were both crying. I don’t think I was quite there mentally though. If there’s ever been a moment in my life in which I’ve dissociated, it was then.
For a brief moment, I retracted into my mind and told myself that things needed to change. That I couldn’t just sit there and wait for my inevitable demise. I’ve sustained too much mental damage by my own hand at that point (and believe me that the bulk of it was very much self-imposed), and it was time that I started doing something to fix it.
I needed to protect myself.
So for the next year, I (with the help of a mentor who I treasure dearly) figured out what it meant to accept myself for who I was. There was no physical health progress during that year, but the mental progress was immeasurable. Suddenly I learned what it meant to value myself, to not hate myself for merely existing. Life gets a whole lot easier when you begin to accept the aspects of yourself that may be considered off, maybe even unorthodox. When you stop feeling so damn ashamed for being fallible.
It was after that year that I began focusing on my physical health; I even remember the exact day I started (July 31st, 2019). I didn’t know it right when I started, but it was through losing so much weight that I learned (or at least rationalized) how much being fat had affected my mental health. My realizations about my weight being the root of many of my mental issues were only apparent to me when I almost neurotically began chipping away at it week after week, month after month. In some ways, it almost even seemed like a desperate, hellbent endeavor. Plateaus used to upset me way more at the beginning of my process than they do now. If I was stuck on a plateau for too long, I remember succumbing to my own sorts of hysterical mental breakdowns. I won’t go into detail about what that entails, but just know that it was, in itself, humiliating enough that discussing it brings me some amount of shame. It wasn’t until around November (2019) that I began making peace with the concept of weight plateaus. I made peace with the patience that you need to slowly sculpt your body into what you want it to be. With that peace came a sort of code that I’m still abiding me, and it’s that come hell or high water, I will never give up on myself.
When I said that I’ve become a self-preservationist, I meant this: in the face of anything that threatens my world, I will fight tooth and nail for myself. This can apply to anything that’s internal or external. I’ve become a very proud individual, to levels at which I’d at times (in my moments of clarity) consider to be toxic as hell. I’ve blown up on people who I shouldn’t have. I've become calloused to the people I’m supposed to love and cherish. Vehemently argued against perspectives that challenged my worldview. I used to stand on a soapbox and preach against the sort of person I’ve turned into, so imagine how sobering it’s been for me in the past couple weeks to realize that in some ways I’ve become the exact same thing I used to despise.
If the dial before I started working on myself was pointing all the way toward self-hatred, I feel like I somehow rotated it toward the exact, polar-opposite direction. There’s supposed to be a balancing act between being strong for yourself and still holding on to your humanity for others, and I feel as though in some ways, I’ve lost myself in my efforts to find myself.
If there’s any message that I’m trying to present here, it’s this:
I’m sure that for many of us, weight loss is much more than just trying to be physically healthier. It’s very much a quest for redefining ourselves, and/or learning more about ourselves. Just make sure that you don’t lose sight of the things that you were supposed to be standing for in the process. The more I focused on myself, the less I focused on the fact that I share this life with so many other people, people who should matter more to me than the way I’ve treated them suggests.
I’ve certainly been a monster of my own creation. I need to be better.
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