I was 168 centimeters (5’ 6’’) tall and weighed 87 kilograms (192 pounds) by the end of high school. I didn’t track anything, I didn’t think of myself as someone with a weight problem. I was just a kid who ate what he wanted, when he wanted, as much as he wanted — and nobody had yet given me a reason to care.
That reason, when it arrived, wasn’t health. It was girls.
I wanted a romantic life, and I had none. I looked around and noticed that other people had one. The connection I made — rightly or wrongly — was that my body was part of the problem. So, I went on my first diet the summer after graduation, lost 12 kilograms (26 punds), and started university feeling, for the first time, like someone who had taken control of something.
Boy, was I wrong. I should have known that a change built on the wrong foundation doesn’t hold. Was my body really a crucial, unavoidable part of the problem? No, but it didn’t help. What about my personality, too shy and reserved? Now we’re talking.
Looking back at my childhood relationship with food, I don’t see disorder in the clinical sense. I see a kid who had found one more thing that couldn’t reject him.
Video games gave me stimulation. Food gave me pleasure. Both were always available, both asked nothing of me, and neither could hurt my feelings. In a life that was socially almost empty, those were not small things.
I didn’t eat because I was hungry, I have never been hungry as a child. I ate when I was bored, I ate when I had nothing else to do, I ate when I wanted to feel one damn positive feeling for once. I would have kept eating until someone stopped me — thankfully, my parents usually did.
I lacked any reason to stop, even when the reason threw itself in my face when I was out of breath after two flights of stairs.
The honest version of my weight history looks like this.
End of high school: 87 kilograms. First diet, down to 75 (165 pounds). Still too much, but manageable.
University, social life, movement: the weight goes up and down. Sometimes I came back to where I started from, but in the end, I always managed to get down to 75. Finally, when I moved out of town for my first job, the slow creep back up. Year after year, until early 2020: 102 kilograms (225 pounds). The heaviest I have ever been.
Then lockdown happened. I spent it with my parents, which meant I couldn’t eat in secret, couldn’t order delivery at midnight, couldn’t pretend the day hadn’t happened with a plate of something I shouldn’t have. Trapped in a house with people who noticed, I lost 26 kilograms (57 pounds) in a few months (stabilizing again at 75 for a while).
When I returned to the office, a colleague jokingly asked if I was the good twin or the evil one. More than one person didn’t recognize me at all.
I should have felt victorious. Instead, I felt like someone who had won a battle with outside help — which meant the war wasn’t over.
I was right, it wasn’t. A little up and down still happened in my life, while I always seemed to hit a wall at 75 kilograms.
Up until that point, I was always with a nutritionist. Some time ago I decided that my problem wasn’t that I didn’t find the right external person to help me, it was that I wasn’t helping myself enough, always slipping way too much.
I’m 69 kilograms (152 pounds) now. The lowest I’ve been as an adult. I got here without a nutritionist, without a program, without anyone checking on me — just decisions made alone in a kitchen that is entirely mine to manage.
Some days it’s fine, some days it isn’t, but I’ll be damned if I go on another up and down.
There have been evenings when I came close to tears — not metaphorically, I actually felt like crying — because I wanted to eat something and I wasn’t going to let myself. That’s not a comfortable thing to admit. It doesn’t sound like the controlled, rational adult I’d prefer to be.
But I didn’t give in. Not once, since I started this last stretch. And I’ve learned something about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way: when I decide something matters, I am considerably stronger than I thought.
The relationship with food isn’t fixed. I don’t think it will ever be. What I have now is management — the ability to hold the line with a relatively small effort, most days. That’s not the same as freedom, but it’s real, and it’s mine. I’ll take it.