DuckReconMajor: A History

DuckReconMajor

warning: long post

I guess it's about time I made one of these.

My weight has been a constant flux for as long as I can remember. For a lot of my younger life I was skinny, but I always ate a lot, which was something I was complimented and praised for, and when I became interested in reading nutrition facts on boxes I was told "that's not something you need to worry about until you're an adult."

When my stepmom and her children became a part of my family, I was now the odd man out as they all ate in much more reasonable sized portions, and I began to eat less over time as well.

By the time I got to high school I was fairly skinny, but I began to develop pretty bad acne. I had heard that sugar and chocolate made acne worse so I cut just about every bit of sugar out of my diet as I could. I stopped eating candy, started drinking water instead of soda, etc. I got even skinnier as as result.

Well the summer before high school senior year two things happened: I went to the doctor and got prescription medication, which cleared up just about all of my acne, and I heard that recent studies found that sugar doesn't actually have much effect on acne.

This is when the floodgates opened. I started drinking soda by the liter. Eating every chocolate bar and Hostess cake I could get my hands on. My cravings for eating a lot of food rushed back and I started to eat enough food for 2 people at each meal again.

So I went back to school without acne, but with a lot of extra weight. Weight was never something I thought or worried about so somehow I didn't notice. But the more honest people I knew would make comments. I remember one guy I hadn't seen in a while shouted "*******, you got ******* fat!" I stepped on a scale for the first time in many years. It read 250 lb.

I've always tried to keep a demeanor of "I don't care about anything", so I played this off the same way. I'm fat. So what? But about half way through college someone I knew asked me if I'd lost weight. I hadn't, or if I did it was totally by accident. But it felt so good to hear that. I wanted to see how far I could go with it. Taking a page from previous experience, I quit drinking soda, only drinking unsweetened tea, water, and black coffee (after a couple months of this, soda, and anything as sweet as soda has tasted like crap to me, so I've kept this change to this day). I started ordering medium/small sizes of things instead of large everything. Without the soda my sweet tooth faded a lot and I rarely wanted candy/sweets. After a while I stepped on the scale again. It read 200 lb.

Life got stressful again and I started to overeat yet again. However, without the soda and sweets I only gained about 10-20 lb of the weight back, which I kept for several years. When I started working full-time I met people who were doing low-carb, and other who were runners. I started running, and kinda-sorta toyed with low-carb for a while, but in general started eating less. I went down a shirt size and a few pants sizes, and received comments from people. It was awesome. I had to go to the doctor and stood on the scale there. It read 188 lb.

I kept this up for a while until I moved. This was very stressful for me and I started to overeat again and quit caring about my health or weight. It was also hard to find a new place to run and stick to a schedule. But this year I made my first ever New Year's resolution to weigh myself and keep track of it, so I got to record when I stood on the scale and it read 220 lb.

Someone I work with has talked about his time doing the P90X program and how great it was for him. Then this year he says there is a P90X3 version which is only 30 min a day. A 30 min. workout I can do in my house? I knew this would be something I was interested in. So I bought the program, knowing I would not lose weight continuing to eat as I was eating, but after a couple months I felt good enough to actually start logging my food. As a perfectionist I was always afraid to log because I thought I would agonize over not being 100% perfect accurate all the time, but once I actually jumped in and did it I realized this is going to be a new part of my life. I've been weighing in at under 185 for the first time in many years and I am going to hit my goal of 170, I no longer question it .

tl;dr: Hit 250 lb in high school, had several moderately successful attempts to lose the weight that I didn't maintain, this current attempt will be the one where I hit my goal and maintain it from here on out