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My entire life I have been overweight. In the last couple years, I've become exceedingly self-conscious about my self-image, and consequently, my self-worth has plummeted. I am afraid of people taking pictures of me and posting them to facebook, because I might have been standing too far sideways so you can see my fat chin. I have attempted to compensate for my poor body image by dressing well, but its a band-aid solution to a much bigger problem.
However, I could easily have carried on my entire life as I currently am. I don't like how I look, but I was happy enough in other things in my life, or maybe I was able to ignore the pain I felt from my self-image well enough, that I wasn't ever going to make a true and concerted effort to change myself.
The event in my life that truly has pushed me to the point where my lifestyle is no longer acceptable is that I went on a date with a girl I really liked. She's absolutely beautiful, sweet and has a wonderful mind. I adored how she thought and I felt really connected to a lot her ideas and I really enjoyed speaking with her. We had a great double date with my roommate and her roommate, and I was excited for the possibility of a second date. My roommate and his date had especially hit it off, and were flirting over facebook chat quite a bit afterwards. My friend suggested that if the girl I liked also liked me, so I should just go for it and ask her out again. I took her advice and asked her to an activity that we had already sort of half planned on the previous date. She told me that she wasn't going to be able to make because of work/school/etc, the usual "you're nice, but I'm not interested in anything" sort of response. In the off chance she was actually busy, I responded by asking her if she still wanted me to come by and fix her computer (something else we had talked about doing). Facebook notified me she saw my message around 10:30pm, and she never responded.
I'm not going to lie, it hurt. I hadn't let myself really like anyone is a long time (out of fear of this kind of rejection), but I had left my guard down, went out on a limb and then had a great time, which got my spirits even higher, so it hurt all the more to be brought down. However, I feel that the thing that killed it was how I look. I don't blame others for being shallow, its simply human nature. We want to be with people we're physically attracted to. I'm not bitter about it, nor do I blame her. Its just the final straw. I'm not going to miss out on anything else fantastic in my life because I can't get off my ass and go work out regularly, or that I can't control my eating habits. I stumbled across /r/loseit today on reddit. A guy posted that he lost 110 pounds in 10 months. He started out much more overweight than I currently am, and now he looks so much healthier and I'm sure his life is exponentially better for it.
I'm going to change my life. No more talk, its time for action. Starting today, my diet is going into effect. I'm not eating fast food, fried food, pizza, chips, or drinking sugary drinks (no more arizona tea, soda, juices, etc; just water and nonfat milk). I'm going to stop avoiding running, even though I hate it and its cold outside. Running is the easiest thing to do. I just put on my shoes, get some music and go run outside. There isn't a membership or transportation involved; its entirely up to me. And I'm going to ask my roommates if we can resume our gym trips. Its a litter harder for me this semester because of my evening classes, but I'm going to make it work. When I go back home this spring, I want to have made solid progress to where I feel comfortable at the beach. And by the end of the summer, I want to have a body I feel comfortable with and proud of. I'm going to do it.
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