Lifelong Struggle with Weight Loss

I’ve struggled with weight my whole life.  In fact, I went on my first diet when I was 7 years old.  I remember having to buy “husky” jeans at JC Penney's when I was a child.  And nothing changed as I grew older.  When I was 13 I even went on RAGBRAI which is a 7 day, 500-mile bike ride across Iowa.  Even though I was in shape enough to handle that without any trouble, I was still overweight.

Part of my identity has always been “the fat kid”, not a part of my identity that I particularly like. I’ve always been overweight.  I don't know what my weight was every month or every year, but I do have a few moments where I remember my exact weight.  My sophomore year of high school I wrestled in the 168-pound weight class.  Given my height, I was easily the most overweight person on the team.  And I remember having to cut weight to make the weigh in.

My junior year of college I went on a low-fat diet and did lots of exercise over the summer and was able to get down to 210 pounds.  I'm guessing I was somewhere around 230 at the beginning of the summer.

I did the Atkins diet from April 2001 and went from 317 pounds to 262 pounds in about a year.  By August of 2003 I was back up to 345 pounds.  My weight fluctuated and I had some points getting as low as 325 in the following years.  My weight still rose and by October of 2016 I was topping the scales at 397 pounds.  This was my wake up call, but we’ll get back to that later.

In general, after I stopped a diet I'd usually gain back all of the weight I lost, plus a few extra pounds.  I began to wonder if I would have been better off if I'd never tried to diet.

In my next post I plan on discussing my first success with a low-carb diet, the Atkins diet in 2001. You can also read my previous post in this series which discussed my ketoversary.