Hi, My Name is Cameron and I’m Fat

Anyone who asks me, “why are you fat?” is just going to get sent this post from now on. People seem to be mystified about my weight. So here’s my story. 
I was a thin, normal child until age 7. I could run and play just like all the others. However, when I was 7, I was diagnosed with severe asthma. I spent 6 weeks in the hospital, 10 of those days in ICU. After that, I could hardly walk. When I was in the hospital, I was drug around in a red wagon because walking was just too much for me to accomplish. The recovery was tough. Due to the steroids that I took,  I gained and lost weight off an on throughout the rest of my childhood. In school pictures, you can see the times I was thinner and or heavier, and my weight continued to bounce around. 

Around age 10 or so, my parents came up with a new punishment for me: running up and down the basement stairs. It was miserable to have 200-1000 stair laps to run. Any time I got in trouble, I was running. It was miserable because my lungs were not a fan of this sort of thing but I will say that I did lose some weight with all that cardio. That ended around the time I was 13 or 14. I was still taking the corticosteroids daily for my asthma at adult doses because I was already growing taller and getting bigger. To give you context, my Mom is 5′ 10″ and my Father is 6′ 7″…I wasn’t going to be a small person! 

When I was 15, I started to ween myself off those meds because they are known to cause weight gain but my adrenal glands were already quite gone by that time. I thought it would be the key to losing weight but it did not work. Around the same time, I started dieting in earnest. My parents had bought a treadmill and I started walking. I would put on afternoon TV and walk at least 3 miles an hour for at least 1 hour and often 2 hours. I was careful with how I ate. I ate less and my parents talked often about portion control. I spent many nights going to bed hungry but always trying to run a calorie deficit. I quit drinking regular soda and switched to diet, then I quit diet soda to eliminate a source of sugar. My weight stayed at 280 for a while, then jumped to 300. We would all weigh ourselves on a daily basis and while I would lose 1-2 pounds, a few days later they would come right back. I was stuck at 300 for the rest of high school. 

Clothes shopping sucked. I still only shop at 2 places. Back then I could shop some XL and 2 XL stuff at target if it was cut right and long enough. I wore clothes that didn’t really fit or were too tight so I could try to be fashionable but it never really worked out. When I bought my first suit at Men’s Warehouse, they brought me one jacket that would fit me. I tried to dress in such a way that I could look thinner. I would dress in layers so it looked like I was big because of the clothes and not me. Bear in mind that I was actively auditioning for youth orchestras, theater, and other fine arts at the time. In that world, looks matter. That would be a theme going forward. Free t-shirts are events that were mostly out of the question. But I kept working at it and I was convinced that if I tried hard enough and wished bad enough that one day I would be thin. I cried, berated myself, and all the things that you do when you just can’t change your body no matter how hard you try. I went to college without any changes. I had major body issues and some terrible diet experiences to show. 

However, I was in luck, there was a student gym. So I made time in my busy college schedule to workout. Food was available and I ate carefully, avoided carbs, and visited the gym, and worked out for at least 1.5 hours. I learned how to lift and do isolation machines. I would spend 30 minutes on the running track in the walking lane and I would walk as fast as I could without my lungs launching into a full-blown asthma attack. I found I could lift without really bothering my lungs so I focused on that. My goal was to replace all this fat with muscle. I didn’t really work. I lost access to the gym in grad school but times were tough in 2009 and so I wasn’t eating too much anyway and I had a girlfriend by that time so I was getting a very different form of physical exercise. I got another gym membership in 2010 after I was hospitalized with asthma again and my best friend went with me and we worked out for 2 hours at least 3-4 days a week. People would walk up to me and ask how much weight I’d lost but I wasn’t really noticing any changes. Looking back at pictures of the time, there wasn’t much of a visible shift in things. I’ve always had the same basic body shape. I have hips, a barrel chest, a big butt, and broad shoulders. 

I learned a great deal about lifting by working out with my best friend and then I graduated from grad school and moved back in with my parents. I got another gym membership as a gift from a family member and so I started working out there too. 2-3 times a week while looking for a job. Even at the height of working in downtown Denver at a popular magazine, I would always leave the office, go to the gym and work out for at least an hour. I swam, did cardio, and kept lifting. 

I then had a chance to do some serious working out with a personal trainer. He was a client of mine, so I worked out with him 3 days a week and sometimes more often. I was in good enough health to actually do some running for short periods, and I did everything from lifting to grappling and wall sits. I became very strong. It wasn’t just the exercise either; I changed my diet, eliminated dairy, and started taking supplements to fix my hormones. My body actually started to make some positive changes. I didn’t end up losing much weight, though. My doctor was excited when she saw I had lost 10 pounds. My personal trainer, on the other hand, cried. I quit working with him a few months later. My nutritionist client was working with me, and she was convinced that I was cheating with food at home at one point. My trainer asked me where I stashed candy and other sweets, and I told him he was welcome to search my place any time he wanted. 

I stayed committed, and I believed that I could do it if only I tried just a little bit harder. This continued into my time in Seattle. I kept up my gym membership, and despite the 30-45 minute drive to a 24 fitness location, I stayed working for 2-3 days a week. I changed my routine, tried HIIT (as much as I could), and learned new machines. My frustration was growing. It was always there, but I had seen people come in and see results in just a few months while I was still struggling. I liked the more muscled look I had going on, but beyond that, my body wasn’t really changing.
In 2016 I gave it all up. I crunched my first Audi in my first major accident, and I was off the road while all of that was worked out. It wasn’t practical to go to the gym for a while, and I realized that I had been on some diet or worked out since 2003. I had a whole list of foods that I didn’t eat. I watched everything I put into my body. I counted calories and took supplements. And I just stopped it all. I still take stuff for various things, but I quit going to the gym. I started to eat some of those foods that I never eat. I embraced eating again. Food was the enemy, and I had to make peace with it. I’d like to end this story with a report that I’m thinner than ever, I look amazing, and I’m having more sex than ever, but I’m here to say that I’m about the same shape. I miss some aspects of being a muscly guy. Some of those muscles turned to fat (looking at you triceps), but otherwise, my body remained largely the same. I’ve gained some weight since I quit working out. I threw out clothes that didn’t really fit and bought new clothes that actually fit me properly. Mostly my body has stayed the same. 

I don’t really mind being fat. It seems to bother other people more than me. I only get bothered when traveling by Air. I only recently had to get a seat belt extender because I only need about 2″ longer so I end up with a very long seat belt. I’ve seen how passengers look at me. In Atlanta, one gate attendant asked if anyone had spoken to me about “safety” which is code for “has anyone asked you if you’re too fat to fly?” I reported that I had flown there in a middle seat no less and no one seemed terribly bothered. I was let on the plane and everything was fine. I mostly put my things away, sit in the window seat, and think thin thoughts. The middle seat person either works with me on space or asks to get reseated. It’s never been a problem so far. 

My friends ask me why I’m fat. They’ve eaten with me and they say things like, “I’ve been out to eat with you and you eat like a normal person, you don’t even overeat!” I shrug my shoulders and smile and tell them that my body doesn’t like losing weight despite some herculean efforts. This attitude extends to my public persona. One of the most common attacks that have been thrown at me during Twitter battles is about my weight. “Fat boy” gets thrown quite a bit. I’m not quite sure why they have to emasculate me and call me fat at the same time but I can always tell when they run out of talking points because the next comment is always about my weight. I joke about it because it’s so common. One of the best comments I ever got on Youtube advised me to go to the gym instead of making youtube videos. At the time, I was working out 3 days a week. I replied that I was pretty sure I went to the gym more than he did. I got no reply. This sort of thing has gone on most of my adult life. 
I still eat fairly healthy. You won’t find cakes, cookies, candy or sweets in my home. I keep my home chemical-free to reduce hormonal triggers. I keep the use of plastic limited (although I need better food containers!) and I find ways to build in cardio when I can. I’m still strong and I still do physical things. I did all my own moving and decorating. I walk whenever I can. I stay active and moving. I’ve thought about getting back into working out again after a 4-year break. I just bought some home workout equipment and an exercise pad. I’m looking forward to trying it all out and doing some bodyweight exercise and some old school calisthenics. I liked going to the gym. I didn’t mind the hard work. I’m industrious. 

I don’t need to call anyone out for the weird comments that have been mentioned over the years. I’d like to finish this off by saying that I’m not unaware of my weight problem. I remain healthy and I’m going to give up drinking soda soon (that was one addition to my diet I probably should have avoided but it’s so damn good!). I remain committed to my own health. I don’t eat  4 bags of fast food and call it a small snack. I usually only eat around 1-2 times a day and I don’t even really snack in between. I wrote this entire post in two sittings (split by a phone call) and I’ve not eaten a thing. I still don’t do dairy beyond small amounts of cheese (life is too short) a few times a week. I have a brick of cheddar sitting in my fridge that’s about to go bad. I’m not irresponsible I just have a difficult body. My only clarion call is this: please don’t judge others and their weight loss/gain journey. Be kind to others who may not have the same body shape as you. I get all the biological reasons we prefer thin and good looking. But please try to treat people fairly and please keep the personal questions and diet advice to yourself. I guarantee that every overweight person has heard your diet advice and they don’t owe you an explanation for their body. I’m not a big proponent of the “fat positive” or “body positivity movement” but I do think that some of what they are asking is just simply human decency. If we can manage to treat each other decently no matter our body type I know the world can be a much better place.