My Big Fat Life

Since this is my first post on this blog, I suppose I should tell you a bit about myself.  This blog is going to be about my struggle to lose weight (I'm going to try to approach the subject humorously, but probably won't always succeed at it), as well as acting in community theatre and pop culture stuff that I am into.  This post is going to be about growing up and how I became fat. 

Ever since I was a little kid, I was made fun of for being fat, so for years I thought I was always fat.  I definitely am fat now (obese if you want to be more accurate), but a few years ago, I looked at some pictures of me as a child, and realized that I wasn't really fat (and at times not even overweight) until my teens and didn't become obese until I was college age. 

Here's a picture of me from when I played Mustardseed in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, back in the summer I turned 10.

I was a cute fairy, wasn't I?

This was during the period when kids on the playground would make fun of me for being fat.  Looking at the picture, I don't think I was fat.  Hell, I barely qualify for chubby or overweight.  The kid to my right (whom I mostly cut out of the picture because I thought it would be rude to post a picture of someone without their permission) is probably bigger around than I am, and he's not fat either.

Let's fast forward a couple years to 1985.  It was in a lot of ways a very bad year for me, and was very depressed.  I was getting picked on even more than I was when I was younger.  In one particularly bad instance a bully and his gang of thugs beat the snot out of me and left me lying on the ground in the dirt.  Another example is from near the end of the school year, when the teachers had to replace my yearbook because some of the other kids defaced my first one with vulgar insults.  The following picture was taken from when I was in my costume for the school production of The Sound of Music that spring

Nazis aren't as cute as fairies

 Again, I wasn't really fat.  I'm bigger than I was in the previous picture surely, but not what I would call fat.  That summer I would turn 13.  That was also the summer that my parents divorced and my dog died.  I ate a lot to cope with my depression from those two things, and here is how I looked that Summer:

I was playing Johnny Casino (The lead singer of the band that plays at the Prom) in Grease

This is the earliest picture that I think I'm starting to look fat in.  That summer (a few weeks before that picture was taken actually) I was put in an in-patient teen weight loss group, and was put on a strict diet for a while. 

That's me the following winter, when my mom took my sister and I to Hawaii.  I've lost some weight, but I still have a bit of a belly.  Here's me the following spring when I graduated from 8th Grade:

And here's me that summer as Orlando in Shakespeare's As You Like It:

Nice legs

Looking back at those last two pictures, I can't believe that I still thought I was really fat at that time.  I was pretty slim at that point, and then something happened that sent it all to hell:

Not so nice legs

About a week before I started High School, I walked through a sliding glass door at my Grandma's house.  I was immobile for months, and started to gain weight again.  Even when I was able to walk without crutches, my leg would spasm and hurt like crazy whenever I overexerted it.  Over the next few years you can see a steady weight gain.  When I played Schroeder in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown!" the next summer:

The following winter when I miscast as Noah Claypole in Oliver! (the character in the book is described as tall and lanky):

I seemed to have lost some weight a couple months after that when I played Major Magnus Muldoon in The Real Inspector Hound:

What is it with me having bare legs in so many of these plays?

I gained again, the next year when I played Solinus, Duke of Ephesus in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors:

And I really balooned up by the time the Yearbook picture for my Senior Year was taken:

I can't seem to find any pictures right now of the next few years, but after High School, my family moved from the suburbs (where I could pretty much walk anywhere I needed to go) to the country where there wasn't anything within walking distance.  This was when I really became obese.  By the time I moved out on my own, in 1995 or so, I had gained so much weight that it was harder for me to move around and therefore it was harder for me to loose weight.  I did loose about a hundred pounds on a liquid diet in 1997 or so, but when I was off it, I quickly gained it all back.  

Here's some pictures of myself taken at a comic con in 1998, where I'm at a weight that I've pretty much stayed at.  The girls in the pictures are cos-players and/or booth babes so I figure it's okay to post them unedited since they were pretty much there to have pictures taken of them:

In the last six months or so I have lost about 12 inches around the waist (I'm not sure how much weight because I don't have a scale that goes high enough) from a low-carb diet.  Here's hoping I can stick to it this time and keep the weight off.

UPDATE : Okay, so I said yesterday (just a couple sentences above) that my scale didn't go high enough to measure my weight.  Well, just a few minutes ago I decided to check and now I am low enough that it does measure my weight.  So I now weigh 385 lbs.  I think I was roughly 450 before I started losing weight, so that means I've lost roughly 65 lbs.  WOOO!