"That's not you. It CAN'T be."

This is the exact response (plus a little gawking) that I got from a friend after showing him a picture of me before I came to college. There were a lot of obvious differences between me in the picture and me holding the picture, but the most striking of them all was how much bigger I was in the picture.

Now, that was not an isolated occurrence by any means. Pretty much, anytime I show a picture of my pre-collegiate-self to a friend that I met in college, they react basically the same way. Since this most recent time conveniently happened right when I was thinking of topics for my first article, I thought this would be the perfect time to delve into all of the disappointing, despicable and debatably disturbing things that I did that led to me being 235 pounds at the age of 14 (with some minor, probably life-long, self-image problems).

According to pictures, because who really remembers being 6-years-old, I was a skinny first grader, and then I was a fat second grader. I don’t really know what started it all the way back then, but I do know what made me continue to gain so much weight at such an alarming rate: my utterly massive love for food, which I still have but now know how to control, and my extremely enormous hate for exercise, which I still have but now know how to ignore.

I’ve always loved food so much so that I wanted to become a chef when I grew up. I competed in 4-H cooking competitions throughout middle and high school, which I never came close to winning but enjoyed because of all of the free food at the end. My days would revolve around my next meal or snack. I’d basically just be occupying myself until I got to eat again.

As cringeworthy as this already is, it gets much, much worse. My parents and I would order pizza every Friday, and I’d generally eat three large pieces, and more than likely eat out at least one other time in the same week when I was in middle school.

This happened until that became too expensive, and then they cut it down to just eating out once a week.

When we went to Zaxby’s, I’d order a large Wings and Things, which comes with five chicken fingers, five chicken wings, two pieces of Texas toast, a lot of fries and a lot of coleslaw, and I’d eat it all by myself. Granted, that might not be a lot of food to some people, but it’s a lot of food for a middle school girl who got exhausted walking up to the counter and carrying her huge tray of food to her table.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “why the hell did your parents let you do this?” Let’s just say that my love for food coupled with the fact that I was/am an only child led to me being able to be very manipulative, and frankly a huge asshole, and eventually get my way. My parents tried to involve me in many different sports (gymnastics, soccer, basketball, softball) but stopped pushing me to do them when they realized that I really hated it and sucked at every one I tried.

With all of that said, my mom was definitely the biggest pushover between my parents. Not only did she just give in easier because she didn’t want to deal with my bratty attitude, but she loved/loves just as much as I ever have too. My mom would always be the one to take me to get food if I had to leave school early or go in late (yeah, I was that kid who tried to walk into class late with a fast food cup, but I couldn’t get the satisfaction because the front office would always make me throw it away before I went in). I remember specifically that if we had Wendy’s for dinner, my mom would buy me a snack wrap that I could bring to school for lunch the next day. She would always concede and let me get a soda at every restaurant we went to.

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Okay. I want to start out this section by stating that I love my mom dearly and can certainly understand what a pain in the ass it must have been to argue with me about not eating out all of the time, BUT these next couple of things are pretty bad in hindsight:

You think your mom takes a long time at the grocery store? Please. My mom will go into the store to get toilet paper and a rotisserie chicken and come out two hours later with a cart full of stuff other than sans toilet paper and chicken, and I was along for most of those times. She would pick me up from school on Fridays and take me with her to our small town’s main grocery store, Wal-Mart, and this Wal-Mart has a Subway inside of it. Like I said, she takes forever to shop, so I would complain to her that I didn’t eat lunch that day, which was a lie, and beg her to buy me a six-inch tuna sub as a “snack” before dinner, which was only about two hours away.

She would usually give in.

Mom would take me to the pediatricians, and my doctor would say this huge speech about how I was obese and border-lining on becoming morbidly obese for my age. After those appointments, I’d be pretty upset, and the thing that would cheer me up the most was food. She would begrudgingly buy me fast food saying, “this is the last time for a while.” It never was.

Those situations sound bad, yes, but I did things to contribute to my size that (I thought) my parents didn’t even know about. I would cut off little slivers of my parents’ Subway subs and eat them. I would also eat chocolate candy all of the time and hide the wrappers everywhere because I thought mom wouldn’t find them. My mom always found them apparently.

Good news, though, I have lost about 90 pounds since I was a sophomore in high school! It’s really unfortunate that it took me so long to fix the problem, though. I let food rule my life for a good ten years, and because of that, I am still suffering both emotionally and physically from being obese for half of my life. Whether my parents or I am to blame for it, it doesn’t really matter because I have lost the weight and am keeping it off, for the most part, because fast food is still really good and convenient and the gym seems to just keep getting more and more inconvenient.