Walking It Off

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I’ve been obese since I was eleven years old or so, and it’s been a constant source of pain, frustration, & failure for me. Romance, sports, & so much more is pretty much locked away from fat kids, teens, and adults.

I’m not one to back down from a challenge, but nothing seemed to work for me. Between keto, various exercise programs, the full-on carnivore diet, getting addicted to cocaine (not really)…

Every potent strategy was one I failed to stick with, and every strategy I COULD stick with didn’t seem very potent. What’s worse, each time I tried a new approach, I lost another portion of confidence in my ability to solve this problem - or any others.

I figured out how to stop being fat in a way that works for me, and now that I’m doing it, it’s the most obvious strategy imaginable. Let me tell you a story:

How I Figured It Out:

When my parents shipped me off to a wilderness therapy program to march around the deserts of Utah for months on end, I lost a lot of weight.

Some of that was due to the food, no doubt. Rice, beans, tuna, & cheddar cheese don’t really lend themselves to obesity.

The other piece of it though was that we covered almost 60 miles a week, carrying everything from our cooking equipment, to sleeping bags, to tarps, to clothes on our backs.

It was a really hard existence. The hardest 2.5 months of my life, in fact. It was also the only time I can remember when I was at a healthy size. I remember - even a decade later - that three weeks into wilderness, I thought…

“I want to die. Everything about the last few weeks has been more awful than I can imagine. I’m going to fling myself off the next big ledge I can find.”

A silver lining came in the form of a visit from the program nurse. She took my weight, as she did once a month for each inmate - I mean, camper - and for the first time in years, I weighed in at less than 300lbs.

That tiny ray of positivity was enough to keep me pressing on - knowing that something good could come from the misery that had been thrust upon me.

I've tried a ton of approaches to losing weight, all of which had failed for various reasons, but I finally found something that worked - and it's rooted deeply in those challenging months.

What Seems To Work For Me: