This is a true story about me and my fear of being overweight.
Enjoy!
132. I thought to myself as I saw the number appear on the scale. I wasn't overweight. Not yet, but I was on the verge of it.
I hated being chubby. I've been chubby my whole life. It was awful. I felt like I looked bad all the time and my stomach poked out from all my shirts. I had to do something about it. That's why I joined the gym. Luckily twelve was the minimum age to join the gym and seeing as how I was twelve at the time, I couldn't pass up this opportunity. Even though it was expensive, that wasn't really my problem seeing as how my parents paid for it.
I got off the scale and headed for the elliptical. At first I would do simple workouts. Just ten or fifteen minutes on the elliptical, then I was done. But as the summer progressed on, the workouts got more and more challenging. I moved from the elliptical on to the treadmill. I started off running for just fifteen minutes, then to twenty minutes. Then to twenty-five and on to thirty. I also sped up over time. I started off on four point five miles per hour and got all the way up to six point three. By then I started lifting weights, too. One day I would run for thirty minutes and the next day I would run for twenty and life weights for ten.
Every week the number on the scale went down and I began to get skinnier and skinnier. By the end of the summer I was at about 120. I had lost a lot of weight but wasn't as satisfied. Through the rest of the school year I would go to the gym every day after school. By September I started getting up at 5:30 AM to go to the gym before school. It was better than going after school because I got it over with and I had more time to do my homework.
By about December I was down to 112. My body definitely looked better but I still had that little stomach that poked out of my shirt. I hated it, but I had to deal with it because if I got any skinnier I'd be underweight.
Even though I'm satisfied with my body now, I'm still terrified of being fat. I read the Half Their Size issue of People and see all the overweight people and always think I would hate to look like that.
Did you know about 97 million adults are overweight or obese in the United States alone? It seems to be a real big problem here.
Maybe I'm so scared of it because I feel like it's a disease that i could catch and die from. It's just not that simple. I like to think that if I felt myself getting heavier I would do something about it. But what if I couldn't? What if once I started gaining weight, I couldn't stop, no matter how little I ate and how much I worked out? That's my worst nightmare.
The only problem with staying thin is that I love to eat and I hate to exercise. Exercising is no fun and eating is lots of fun. I love cake and cookies and ice cream. I don't like meat though. It makes it easier to stay skinny since I'm a vegetarian. I'm not a vegetarian because I want to stay skinny, I'm a vegetarian because I love animals and don't want to eat them. I just thought I would clear that up.
I'm yet to have dreams about becoming fat which I'm surprised about. I always have nightmares about my worst fears, like being late for school. But I'll talk about that in another story.
I'm absolutely horrified of becoming overweight. I had to deal with it enough when I was younger. My homeroom teacher hung up our fifth grade class picture in the hall and I want to vomit every time I pass it because I look like a tub of lard.
I remember in third, maybe fourth grade that I tried on my mom's jeans one time. They didn't fit. I couldn't get them past my thighs. That's when it hit me that something was wrong with me. I always knew I was big because I could see it in the mirror, but I never saw it as a problem until then. If a little eight year old couldn't fit into her mom's jeans because they're too small, what was wrong? I still can't fit into my mom's jeans, but this time for a different reason: they're too big.
I don't think I ever was overweight, but I sure was close. My mom and the doctor always told me I was average, but we all knew I was about a pound away from being overweight.
Being overweight seems like the end of the world to me. I'm sure it's not as bad as I think it is, but I don't want to be fat.
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