In the beginning…

Posted July 31st, 2008 by Jeff J. Snider

I remember the first time I realized I weighed over 300 pounds. I was a senior in high school, and the next-largest guy on the football team weighed about 250. I was a lot bigger than everyone I knew, but I wasn’t what I thought of when I thought “300 pounds”: grossly obese, smelly, all that stuff.

After a while, 300 didn’t seem so bad. I was still a very good athlete, and I took pride in the fact that I didn’t look like I weighed 300. I could tell people I weighed 260, and they had no problem believing me. When I went to renew my driver’s license just before I turned 19, the lady at the DMV recognized that I had grown taller since I turned 16 — 5′9″ to 6′3″ — but she didn’t mention the “235″ next to “Weight.” In retrospect, she was probably just being polite, but she didn’t seem to have a problem when I put “299,” even though at that point I was around 330.

Over the years, I have accepted 300. My driver’s license still says 299 — 11 years later — but other than that, 300 has become part of who I am.

Last week, I went to the doctor for a sinus infection. The nurse had me stand on the scale, and I had a bad feeling. I’ve known things were getting out of control for a while, ever since our scale — the one we spent a lot of money on because it went up to 380 — started giving me an “E” instead of a number, but I wasn’t prepared for what popped up on the screen: 401.8.

And that was when reality hit me. I weighed 400 pounds. All those feelings I originally had about 300? Yeah, multiply them by a thousand, and that’s how I felt about 400. I weighed more than even the largest offensive linemen in the NFL. Pick any two of my siblings, put them together, and I had at least 50 pounds on them. I weighed more than twice as much as my wife weighed when she was nine months pregnant. There were no two ways around it: I was fat. Unattractively fat. Unhealthily fat. If-I-don’t-fix-it-I’m-gonna-die-way-too-young fat.

So I am fixing it, and this blog is part of that process. “The Fat Guy” has become part of my identity, and I need to replace that with something. I’m shooting for “The Guy Who Used To Be Fat.”

Like most people with weight problems, my problem is a lot deeper than “I eat too much” or “I’m lazy” or “I have big bones.” All those things are true, but what I plan to explore here throughout my shrinking process are the issues behind the obvious ones. I know a few issues already, and I imagine I will learn a lot more about myself throughout this process. Maybe my experiences will help someone else deal with their own issues, or maybe this project will end up being just for me. All I can really hope for is that it will help me stay motivated to get down to 240. That, and that Ellen DeGeneres will read this and invite me to be on her show.

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