My Story

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been overweight.



Lately I’ve been looking through old photos of myself from when I was a kid, and I can literally see myself getting bigger. I think the last time I was actually skinny was when I was around 8years old. Thing is, at that age I looked up to my Uncle Chris and my dad a lot. They both were overweight… and they were strong. I wanted to be strong too, and being at that age I didn’t know that you needed a lot of muscle to be strong, I assumed you just needed to be big… so I ate, a lot. I would over eat just so I could be as big and strong as them. Year by year I got bigger and bigger, and when I was 12 I learned that you needed a large muscle mass to be strong… but by then it was too late, I’ve grown into my overeating habit, and I’ve grown to be 180lbs. (I remember this because I weighed myself with my dad when we went to Louisiana for a summer trip…and saw the disappointment in his face. I’ll never forget that look.) Because of this, I wasn’t always “attractive” to females, lol. That, and I had these nerdy ass thick plastic red glasses. I looked like the typical nerd, and no one wanted to be friends with a “nerd.” So from 7th grade until my Junior year of high school, I wasn’t part of the “popular crowd.” I stayed to myself, quiet, refusing to interact with anyone with fear of being rejected, even as friendship. I always allowed people to come to me. My 8th grade year, we all had to take part in this fitness challenge,where over the course of 8weeks (if i remember right), you do various exercises and see how much muscle you can gain, and how much fat you can lose. After the 8 weeks, I lost maybe 5-6lbs according to the machine they gave us. And I believe I lost 2% body fat (i cannot remember what the total percentage was). After losing that 5-6lbs, I started to feel motivated to lose more. After my freshmen year, I was even more determined to lose the weight, I wanted to better myself. So that summer, (going into my sophomore year) I decided to go out for the football team. I signed up for the 2week football camp, I liked playing football as a kid so I figured why the hell not? I refer to those 2 weeks as “hell week” til this day, lol. I had fun, but I wasn’t used to getting hit like that, especially by people who were 3 times myself. And one day during the 2nd week, I got hit by 2 guys at once, one hitting my back, the other hitting my arm. I swore I thought my arm was broken,lol, it was just sore. The next day on the way there, the main road was closed off to the school due to construction, and since I was new to the area and barely had any friends at this time, I had no idea what were alternative routes to the school. I ended up leaving the football team because of this, but I had another reason that I never wanted to tell anyone… I was scared of getting hurt.

For the rest of the summer, all I mainly did was sit and lay around the house eating all day, nothing active at all. I lost all motivation to lose weight and at this point just stopped caring. I gained another 20lbs by the middle of the year and just lost all hope, that’s where I believe I first started suffering from depression. I met a few friends who invited me to the weight room with them but after going just once I never went again. The strange thing is, I’ve always loved working out. I even had my mother get me a workout bench for Christmas, but I only used it once every so often. The only time I truly worked out was when I took gym in high school. I even used to get mad when they didn’t offer the weight room as an option, lol. It was just weird, now that I think about it, how could I not be motivated to lose weight, but loved working out so much? So from my sophomore to my senior year I signed up for the weight room whenever I could. I would lift lift and lift, and I got stronger, but I didn’t see any difference in size or weight. I never knew what the problem was then, but I loved doing it, so I stayed at it. It kept my mind off everything that was bothering me, and made me feel less depressed. Finally, by the time I graduated I was around 250lbs. I don’t know if I gained or lost any weight because I refused to weigh myself because i was scared of what I seen. But just from looking in the mirror, I hated what I seen. I knew I could do better, BE better, but just seeing what I’ve become made me feel more depressed about myself. Over the next 2 years, I’ve never worked out again. I’d occasionally use the bench my mother gave me in the basement, but it’d be out of boredom, once every so often as before. But, I was active, not with sports, but I met a lot of new people and I’d be out of the house a lot. So when I turned 20, out of curiosity, I decided to weigh myself, and I weighed 230lbs. How? I have no idea. Til this day I still don’t know, but perhaps me being active for once had something to do with it, but 20lbs? lol. I was happy with myself, even cocky to a point, haha. I eventually got a job and I was able to maintain the 230lbs for a while, I even thought I was losing weight because they worked me hard and I was sweating a lot, lol. A few co workers even said I looked like I was losing weight, and to me, I looked like I was too, but it was all an illusion. I never weighed myself during this time, so after a year of working there I did weigh myself… I weighed 260lbs. How did I gain 30lbs, and not even look it? I assume it was muscle… but even when you gain 30lbs of muscle, you would look bigger. After being confused for a week, I decided that it was no longer time for bullshit, I was growing closer to 300lbs… and that’s a weight I refused to get too. So after talking to a few people, I decided to join a gym.

The first gym I joined was Cardinal Fitness. It was a cool gym, I liked it. It had a cool atmosphere, the people who worked there seemed pretty cool. So I joined, 20bucks a month, 60dollar join up fee, wasn’t too bad ykno? So I went for a week straight, after that, I went for a couple days, then after a few months…. I rarely went at all. There was times where I would go 2-3 weeks without going. My motivation was gone, I don’t know what happened. I know I didn’t want to get bigger, but for some reason I just couldn’t get myself to go to the gym. So instead of wasting my money, I decided to end my membership there. I told them I had no time to go because of my job, when in truth I was just unmotivated to do anything… lazy. The strange thing is I still wanted to lose weight. So instead of working out, I dieted. It seemed easy enough, just eating healthy foods. Lol, I was wrong. I had NO idea what I was doing. Just eating fruits and veggies and eating right wasn’t enough for me. I lost maybe a pound or 2 but it just wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Plus, I was always hungry, haha. So I would eat a lot of the fruits and veggies until I was full. Also I barely took in water… I had no idea how important water was to a diet at this time. So after talking to a friend of mine about it, he told me I should start going to Quality Classic, a gym he goes to in downtown Park Forest. I’ve never heard of it, so I went to check it out. I met Earl (the owner) and he showed me around, showed me the ropes, and told me what he thinks I could be. Since most of my friends who went there were power-lifters, he said he thinks that I should do it too, and probably be pretty good at it. I told him I’d think about it after I achieve this weight-loss goal that I want to have first. I went there the next day, just ran on the treadmill for cardio. and I enjoyed it, it was pretty cool. I came the following week and started the real work out. It was hard but I went through it okay. Although my right calve muscle was hurting I lived, lol. Because of that, instead of wanting to overwork my calve by doing cardio the next day, I decided to use that as a rest day, hoping it’d be better by the next day…it wasn’t. I took the rest of the week off since I could barely walk on that leg. I grew accustomed to this, and barely went to the gym for another couple weeks. After some, um, “motivational speaking” (more like yelling through a status comment lol), I grew more motivated than ever. Its funny how it takes a big bulky guy yelling at you to get someone motivated. That night, I stayed up looking up diets that I could do, but I never found anything that worked for me. So after hours of researching and finding nothing, I decided to just make my own diet, everything from scratch, completely made up by me. I took a few weeks to get the diet together and from the diet alone I lost around 6lbs in 2 weeks. I was very satisfied with that. Getting to the gym took a little longer for me to get into the routine. I started by going twice a week, then forcing myself to go 3times a week, and finally, since April, I’ve been going 4days a week, and have lost an additional 10lbs so far. I’m slowly growing closer to my goal, through all the unmotivated years I’m finally aiming to better myself. I feel like I’m destined to be the best, so from this point on, I’m aiming to prove myself right.

-Anthony