Control: Fat and Hating It — and Hating Myself for It

I, Dalton Lewis, weigh over 280 pounds. Yikes — right? That’s more than anyone except for a professional football player to weigh. It doesn’t make sense for me to order donuts from Starbucks and coffee cakes, knowing that they will make me gain weight. I eat Burger King chicken sandwiches and french fries and apple pies and chocolate chip cookies even though I know they make me fatter. I eat them even though Burger King maybe isn’t the greatest restaurant in human history.

Sometimes I eat healthy food. I eat bananas for a snack sometimes, and I can eat salads and turkey sandwiches on flatbread. Then something happens — I lose badly at a game of 40k when my black legion loses turn one to an aggressive tau army. Someone makes fun of me online for sucking at strategy games. I publish a novel which doesn’t sell much at all. I get in trouble for spending too much money on stupid stuff. Any of these triggers happen, and suddenly I find myself gorging on cheeseburgers and eating desserts at Dave and Busters, the chocolate cake with the ice cream on top. You know the one.

Working out — I sporadically work out when I should exercise six times a week. I don’t know why — why don’t I exercise every day? It doesn’t make sense. Life doesn’t make sense. Everyone should be responsible and skinny and not use drugs or drink alcohol. Life isn’t how it should be, and it confuses and scares me. People don’t act as we should. I am fat and hate myself for being fat.

What will happen in my future? Will I lose one hundred pounds? Will I write a bestseller about a fantasy universe that people love? Will I die of diabetes at fifty, sad and alone? Will my paranoid schizophrenia finally be cured or handled in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of my life? Will my parents die, leaving me alone in this world? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and they terrify me.

I know a lot of overweight people and a lot of skinny people, and the skinny people have eaten burgers, fajitas, and occasionally fattening desserts. They also drink regular Coke whereas every overweight person drinks Diet Coke or Coke Zero and expects that to help us lose weight. It doesn’t — Diet Coke and Coke Zero have fake sugar that the body processes like real sugar. The overweight people just eat these fattening foods with more regularity and don’t have healthy meals most of the time. We fattening people also don’t work out regularly like they do.

I know that people swear by diets in which they eat 500–1000 calories a day. I say that those diets are scary dangerous and ineffective. Instead a lifestyle change and eating relatively healthy most of the time is my new goal. I don’t want to eat more than two unhealthy meals a week. This plan will almost undoubtedly fail, but I want to try it. I also want to try to exercise — both with walking and lifting weights with dumbells at home. I have to try — give life an effort, try to change, to become something marvelous, to improve my place in life, to try — just to try.

Thanks, and take care, friends.