I gained 52 pounds my freshman year of college. When I went home for Christmas my dad asked me if I'd shrunk my clothes in the wash. And sadly, I didn't even notice until I developed the pictures from spring break and saw what I looked like in my bikini.
Growing up I was always really active - soccer, basketball, theatre, marching band, track - and living in a house where there wasn't much junk food, I never really over-ate it.
Then I went to away to college.
I have no idea what happened in my brain, but one day I woke up and I started eating like a hoarder. Ice cream at every meal - cheese on everything, a case of Dr. Thunder (the Walmart version of Dr. Pepper - a whopping 290 calories a can and probably 6 pounds of sugar) a week and tube after tube of Pringles in between. A typical breakfast (and yes, I got up for breakfast every single day) would be a donut, bagel with cream cheese, whatever egg food they were serving that day, bacon, sausage links, a stack of pancakes, a bowl of cereal and of course, a banana. EVERY day. For lunch I'd make my own cheese fries by piling my plate high with french fries and then getting a stack of the American cheese slices. A few fries wrapped in a cheese blanket and then popped right into my food hole.
If I'm being totally honest, I also did that at dinner.
Oh, and I started drinking alcohol. Some kids start in high school at parties, but because I never went to any of those, I didn't start drinking until college. And worked hard to make up for lost time.
My cousin came to visit toward the end of my first year and we were sitting at lunch having our second serving of ice cream (they had a soft serve machine AND an ice cream cooler - so obviously we needed both), and he looks at me while noshing on his strawberry shortcake cone and says "man, no wonder you got so fat - this is really good".
That should have been a turning point for me, but sadly, it was not.
In addition to eating my life away I also stopped exercising. It wasn't a deliberate choice, but it happened. The schedule of college life was overwhelming and all my habitual sports were replaced with other things. Soccer conflicted with Marching Band. Basketball conflicted with the theatre department. Track lost to the Radio station and if I'm being honest, I wasn't ever fast enough to matter anywhere on the field. But day by day, pound by pound I became the fat kid.
Because I'm so tall, it spread out evenly. So when I look back at photos of myself back then, I can see that I was over 200 pounds, but people who didn't know me then, just think I was a little chubster. It's taken me ten years to figure out a way to win out over my constant desire to stuff my face - to find a work-out routine that I can stick to.
But yesterday, it all went to shit. Yesterday I ate like that oblivious fat kid I thought I'd left behind so long ago. I felt like some starving orphan took over my body. I do not, however, have the metabolism of said orphan and will be working off the ice cream and buttery pasta and cookies and double helping of french fries and cereal and donut holes for the next several weeks. I woke up feeling hung-over even though I only had one glass of wine. My body needs a detox from all that crap I shoved into yesterday - and of course, today is my day off from the gym.
Just in time for my 10 year college reunion I suppose - heaven forbid I not be the fat version of myself when I walk back on campus.
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