Fatties, and What to Do About Them

I am a fatty. Fat AND big boned. (No, that photo isn't of me.)

At 6 and ½ pounds, I wasn't born a fatty, but enplumpened rather dramatically in the fourth grade. This was back in the Seventies when chubby kids were still anomalous enough to stand out for ridicule. Since I was big for my age and had a violent temper (I was once forcibly ejected from church after repeatedly smashing another boy's head into the wooden pews during the middle of a service), I managed to keep the teasing at bay. But of course, the teasing is just the beginning.

Just like any other kid, I wanted to be "cool." And fat kids can't be cool. I was too fat to stand up on water skis. Too fat to stand up on a surfboard. Too fat to climb trees, to climb a boulder, to ride a dirt bike up a hill. Too fat to even smoke (or at least, to look cool while doing it).

Looking back at photos of me as a child (and there aren't many, as I self-consciously avoided the camera like the plague) I don't really appear that fat—at least by today's morbidly obese standard. But it negatively affected every day of my childhood, if not every hour.
I can't imagine how cool it would be to be a non-fatty boy (skip the intro and jump ahead 45 seconds):



And then there were all the doctor visits. Standing in my tighty-whities on the scale, followed by a long lecture (appointments were longer back then) on how I should be taking the skin off of baked chicken before eating it. Do you know how many pompous doctors have told me to take the skin off of baked chicken throughout the years? There must be some sort of "Baked Chicken Skin Removal 101" class required in med school. I was eating baked chicken once every two months. Maybe.

Of course, once you get to middle school, the real fun starts. I went to an all boy's school. Couple that with being a fatty, and you're never gonna get any.

And so began the "diets."

The first diets were straightforward fasts. I believe I picked this technique up from my sister and her friends (none of whom were fatties, I might add). I've never lacked willpower—despite what skinny people think, willpower has NOTHING to do with fatitude—so I simply stopped eating. (Okay, maybe I ate one small meal a day, but no more.)

The fact that I was still a kid allowed this to work. I managed to get down to a less embarrassing weight, join the wrestling team, and even got to hold hands with a girl at camp. Of course, I stopped growing (vertically), which leads me to believe that this approach permanently stunted my growth (I'm six feet tall, but that's actually shorter than my father and both my grandfathers—not to mention my six-foot-eight cousin).

I was also quite literally starving, which is why as a long term strategy, it was a dismal failure. When starving, the body's primitive homeostatic system will eventually override any cerebral willpower and force you to eat. The starvation response evolved long before the ability for higher thought.

Unfortunately for me, just as I was discovering the futility of fasting, the Low-Fat Craze hit…

[Given its length, I'm going to divide this into multiple posts. Part 2 coming tomorrow…]