Fifty pounds of sadness.
I should be writing something sentimental about how we officially moved out of the apartment today and how tomorrow is my last day in Schenectady for two months, but instead I'm writing this in hopes of shedding the sadness from my body. I can't vomit it, I can't sweat it from my pores, and I honestly don't want to talk about it with anyone. This journal will have to do. Today was pretty good as far as bittersweet goodbyes go, but it was all ruined a half hour ago because of one awful exchange of words with someone at a gas station. This kid that I was pretty good friends with way back in middle school and through some of high school saw me there. I usually avoid eye contact with people I once knew because they've taken drastically different roads in their life and are therefore not at all interesting to me. Thankfully, I've burned a lot of bridges and most people are equally as uninterested in me and the roads that I've taken. I was just going in to use the ATM and get a fucking soda. That's all.
Kid: Is that dave gunn's fat ass?
Me: *sigh* Yeah.
Kid: You're getting pretty fat.
Me: *sigh* Yeah, I know.
Kid: That sucks.
Me: Yeah, life sucks.
Kid: You look like [your brother].
Me: Yup, people get us mistaken for one another a lot.
Kid: Yeah, but especially now. *He was alluding to the fact that my brother used to be fat.
Kid: Where you livin' now?
Me: I'm actually moving to Philadelphia.
Kid: It's always sunny there, heh heh.
Me: *I don't laugh*
Kid: You look like the one guy on that show!
Me: Yeah, I've gotten that before.
Kid: Well, if you lose weight, you'll look just like 'im. Well, see ya.
And that was it. I don't even think he was trying to be mean. I think he's just like me in that he doesn't know what is socially appropriate to say (though unlike him I know when something is something the person doesn't want or need to hear). That's the way he always was, I guess. Regardless, his words cut into me pretty hard. It's one thing to know you're fat and to walk around every single day knowing it. It's a whole other story when someone else reminds you out loud. I almost forgot what I was doing at the ATM because of it. I just leaned against it and felt like I was going to cry. I decided to not get a soda. My fat, disgusting body did not need another soda inside of it and at that point I felt like I didn't even deserve the satisfaction of a yummy soda trickling down my throat. The sadness and insecurity felt like an additional fifty pounds on top of the fifty pounds I wish I could get removed from me. I really didn't need that interaction with someone tonight. It's bad enough to feel ugly and worthless and gigantic every time I leave the house. It's bad enough that in the last two days I've had to hear my grandmother repeatedly say, "You should go to the doctor and get your thyroid checked! That might explain your weight!"
I was the fat kid when I was younger. I don't know why, but I was. Maybe it was what my parents fed me, I don't know. I was raised on a pretty American diet, but that doesn't make every American fat. I had cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch up until my school got heated lunches around the 1st grade, a basic dinner (with at least one vegetable), and sometimes a snack of cookies and milk before bedtime. We only ate fast food like McDonald's or Burger King once in a while because we couldn't really afford it. Neither my mother nor my father are very big, with the exception of my father's prevalent beer belly. So I have no idea why I was the fat kid. I was picked on for it throughout my time at the Catholic school, which was from pre-K up until I finished the 5th grade. The bullying was so bad that I would cry before and after school. I was eventually given a gross white liquid medicine to help with my stress-induced stomachaches. I was so young, but during class I would lean back on my chair and worry about how fat my thighs looked while sitting down. They'd expand on each side by several inches, I remember, and rubbed together when I walked. I was the only fat kid in my class and just about everyone, girl or boy, ganged up on me about it. During the 6th grade, I got a friend or two and started going outside and riding my bike a lot. My dietary habits didn't change, but I started losing weight. I came into my own through puberty and finished middle school a relatively thin person. I had a little tummy that you couldn't even notice unless I was shirtless and could (and did) pass as "cute" to the opposite sex. My hips were a tad wide, though my hip bones even stuck out a little bit. Going vegetarian seemed to help me even more when I was 14 and just about to finish the 9th grade. I felt okay with my body and girls were receptive to it for a long time. That whole time, I always hated when people would make fun of others for being fat, because I knew firsthand just how terrible it feels to be fat and for the world to ridicule you for it.
In 2005, I got myself into a long-term relationship, dropped out of high school, and for the most part voluntarily abandoned whatever social life I had. I hated everyone and didn't want to go outside all that often. My only friend besides my girlfriend was Matt. Both having grown up differently than our peers, we were really close, and because we had little interest in what our peers were doing--especially since most of them were already long gone into the world of drugs and alcohol--we found ourselves lost in our area code with nowhere to go to pass the time. So we ate. A lot. Our daily routine was comprised of jumping from one food place to another, eating and then loitering around for long periods of time. This was when I was still just a mere vegetarian and had no financial obligations whatsoever, so fast food was very convenient and affordable. On a typical day, I was sometimes eating pizza from Dominos (the 5-5-5 deal of five medium cheese pizzas for $5 each) with Burgundy, then going out to Taco Bell for a late dinner with Matt, and then after they closed going to Denny's to sit around all night, eventually getting either a veggie burger or the french toast slam (subbing hash brown for extra eggs) and ending it all with several Coke refills and sometimes an Oreo sundae or something as a dessert. Just that year, I gained over twenty-five pounds. I didn't even really notice until one day I went swimming with some friends in Scotia and my brother announced, "Yo, dave, you're getting an Underoath belly!" I remember later that day going into the bathroom and looking at myself and suddenly noticing that I was developing some sort of gross gut. It made sense: I was eating a lot of food, all of it was extremely gross and terrible for me, I was an emotional eater and very depressed, and was doing little to nothing with my body or time outside of sleeping and fucking with my girlfriend and sitting around fast food chains and diners with Matt. I deserved that weight. I earned it. I was mean to my body and I made it more deformed than my shitty genetics already had it. Of course, I didn't really care all that much. I was very much in love with my girlfriend at the time and as long as she loved me unconditionally, I didn't even think twice about how much bigger I was getting. Sure, fitting into my favorite shirts was getting a little more uncomfortable, but I was still coming home to a beautiful girl who loved my body enough to touch it almost every single night. At the time, I sincerely believed we'd be together forever, so my physical state and the fact that no one had expressed interest of any kind in me at all during those three years for the most part never really bothered me.
Burgundy left me in the summer of 2008 and I was thrust back into the single life. It wasn't long before I was forced to face the fact that I weighed about 215 pounds and that I was not at all thin enough to even be considered visible by the opposite sex, particularly the thin and petite girls I found the most attractive. I went vegan the month I was officially broken up with by Burgundy and didn't lose a single pound in doing so. I found that a bit off because when Matt went vegan (due to a bet back in 2006), he immediately began to shed pounds gained by our destructive dietary habits. My friend Brian went from chubby to lanky just by going vegetarian. Not even the severe depression had an effect on my weight. After a while without sex with anyone and returning to the world of frequent, pathetic, soul-crushing masturbation, I tried to remember what I even used to do that lead to sex with people. I could hardly remember, in part because my sex life was more or less effortless when I was younger and thinner. Nine times out of ten, the girl I had my eyes on wound up by chance having her eyes on me as well, which was a very convenient and fortunate position to be in. While I for the most part had spent most of my youth in several consecutive long-term, monogamous relationships, I was still able to fill the void in between break-ups with one night stands. All of the girls I'd fucked were gorgeous, too. I tried to have crushes on people and definitely noticed other people pretty quickly who were at least somewhat compatible with me. I had a crush on a girl named Jackie. She had a crush on literally every person around me during the few months we knew each other, but never me. The only thing they had that I didn't that I could notice was thinness. I also had a crush on a girl named Courtney for a little while and she actually flirted with me online a lot. The one time we hung out in person was the last and she immediately stopped talking to me afterwards before fucking my cousin, a short but muscle-clad boy. Again, I could only see the differing variable being my size and shape. I tried to hook up with a girl I'd slept with in the past named Heather; a girl I'd had sex with before I started dating Burgundy and then had sex with again during a break from my relationship with Burgundy. She was single and sometimes acted interested, sometimes even grabbing my dick while we slept on the same futon, only to quickly reject me and tell my brother behind my back that I tried to force her into sex. I knew these girls owed me nothing, but considering my personality was enough to lure them into wanting to get close to me, and that they quickly developed crushes, flings, or relationships with the thin people around me who treated them like total garbage, I could only conclude that it was my physical state that got in the way of anything happening outside of our friendship. After all, when I was younger, everything always played out the same: my personality allowed me to develop friendships with these girls, and after a while we would have sex, or maybe even date, which I'm assuming was due to being physically attractive in addition to being a gentleman with a halfway decent or likable personality.
I was generally not attracted to bigger girls. Whether or not those were my true preferences or the ones taught to me is up for debate, but that's what my eyes, brain, and body believed to be true and I certainly couldn't change my dick's mind. The first girl since being dumped to show any sort of interest in me was named Laura. I wasn't physically attracted to her at all, but she had a great personality and I was enjoying becoming good friends with her. I knew she'd had a crush on me while I was Burgundy, but I assumed there was no way she still would or could at that point. However, she wound up practically begging and even going as far as trying to guilt-trip me into taking her virginity. I gave her a night to sleep on it. I genuinely thought she should lose it to someone she cared about/cared about her and, like I said, I wasn't even physically attracted to her. Overnight, I started thinking and came to the realization that this was probably my fate: having sex with girls I wasn't even attracted to because I'm fat and ugly and most people aren't going to want me. I felt like I needed to hurry into accepting that reality, so I wound up having sex with her. I ended up having trouble maintaining erection and not even ejaculating and I credit that entirely to not actually being attracted to her. A day later, I stayed at her dorm with her and found a crumpled up piece of journal paper in her trash can. It was about me and said, "I was surprised at how unattractive dave had gotten since I last saw him." Apparently, I wasn't the only one fucking someone because I didn't think I could do better and should take whatever opportunities arise (or, alternatively, remain involuntarily celibate).
I've been single for five years as of this August. Sex, or any physical interaction with other people, has been infrequent, bordering on the "few and far between" sort of situation. I had sex three times in 2012. When I think about the people I've gotten to have sex with in the last five years, most of them have been either overweight like me or severely insecure, which has lead me to believe with all certainty that the only people capable of wanting me are people who are as heavy as or heavier than me who have, like I once did, accepted they are only allowed to fuck people of comparable physical status or so mentally ill and self-loathing that they have set their sights low enough to think someone like me is what they deserve or should settle for. Then again, for the most part, not even heavier girls have pursued me. I've had a lot of crushes over the last five years. None of them have amounted to anything. And I'm not playing the "nice guy" card or whatever (I'm playing the "ugly guy" card, if anything). I was content with being just friends with these ladies if given the privilege, but as they proceeded to tell me how great I was and got close to me and then proceeded to tell me about the boys they liked and how terribly they were treated by them, or when they told me they had a one night stand, I could only assume the reason I was neither one of their flings nor their love interest was because my personality was never good enough to compensate for my fat body and deformed face. I don't think it's unreasonable to think this.
It's no secret that being fat in today's world is pretty awful. I hear people talk about fat people. Even friends of mine have talked about fat people around me. I know they know I'm fat, but they still go on. They talk about fat people or people they know who've gotten fat like they were lepers. "Have you seen [such and such]?" they say emphatically as if they had just run into a friend who's undergoing chemo or has lost a limb at war. "Yeah, they're getting pretty big." Just like with the kid I ran into today, it's no surprise that someone's physical state is one of the first and most obvious aspects of a person you haven't seen since, say, high school that one notices. Take a society that is obscenely shallow and taught that one size and shape is attractive from birth and it becomes the only thing worth mentioning. Yeah, I've gotten fat since high school, and I was reminded of it the entire journey to 215 during that time. I heard it from Tom whenever I'd ride my bike to the mall. "You're getting big, man." I heard it from Hana when I saw her for the first time since high school. "Dave, when did you get so big?!" Most people are not that polite about it. That's because being bigger is one of the single worst things you can be in this world. You're characterized as unhealthy, lazy, and are invisible to the objects of your affection or lusts unless they're gawking at you and harshly judging you with their friends.
A very skewed version of reality popular amongst body-positive feminists don't think that conventional beauty standards affect men in the same way they affect women, but it's just not true. I am surrounded by media that shows you two types of male: the thin man and the buff man. Both of them are completely hairless (even on the ass!), both have some version of the abs and pubic V, and both get sex and attention regardless of how despicable and callous of a human being they are. If you get any spotlight whatsoever as a fat man (or woman) in the media, you're the comic relief up until you inevitably can afford a personal trainer (or develop an eating disorder) and lose all your weight later in your career. Fat men grow beards because it can sometimes distract from how unattractive the rest of them is and because it helps them hide in a weird way. That's definitely why Matt and I have ours. And sure enough, it's the only thing about us that gets any compliments from girls unless I'm wearing a t-shirt that stands out like my Daria one. Even then, I find myself getting complimented by other straight men far more often. From what I've experienced, it's often easier for an overweight woman to find physical situations than an overweight man. I don't know why this is; perhaps men are sexually desperate in a way that women are not? It seems to be a popular generalization that "men will fuck anything that moves" and maybe it's for the most part pretty true. The chubbier or heavier girls I know get dick with ease, and not just from similarly shaped men, but from guys who are by all means conventionally attractive. I look at people a lot (because I'm busy staring in awe at how beautiful they are and/or envying them) and from what I've noticed, there are far more heavy girls with thin or fit guys than there are heavy guys with thin or fit girls; and by a long shot, too. "Chubby chaser" is almost always a term associated with a man. Even in porn, fat women have their own genre, while fat men are pretty much limited to Ron Jeremy, who while owning a humongous cock is openly single (and very lonely) and referred to as hideous by most women I've spoken to. Obviously, this is a debatable generalization, and maybe I'm just projecting, but this is what I've noticed.
Obesity is a legitimate health epidemic, too. While the health aspects thankfully don't apply to my situation, I might as well be socially quarantined with the rest of the lower-torso stock video people whose protruding guts and tight khaki pants and Hovarounds show up in every news outlet's report on it. Fat people's health and worth are assumed solely based on their weight and we get lost in the obscured backdrop of the social ethos with amputees, homeless people, and senior citizens. Generally speaking, most people do not like fat people. Fat is a bad thing. It's one of the first and easiest insults for people to grab at when talking about someone they don't like. It's the butt of constant jokes on TV. It doesn't make it to magazine covers unless the person is dressed up in a humiliating manner. When someone begins gaining weight, they might as well be slowly dying as far as society is concerned. In a world where how someone looks is usually the first thing you can judge about another human being, whether or not you're subjectively attractive (which typically requires you to be thin or fit) has a lot to do with whether or not someone even wants to speak to you or get to know you. Fat people don't even usually like fat people. I desperately peruse online dating sites and personal ads online. 99% of the time, self-proclaimed BBWs ("big beautiful women") who are admittedly heavy-set on Craigslist still make a note to include that, while they are bigger, they are not attracted to bigger men. On OKCupid, one of the first things I do when I find someone who I might be interested in is go to their answered questions and check to see if they've answered the ones, "Can overweight people still be sexy?" and, "If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?" Regardless of whether or not they themselves are bigger, they almost always say "no" and "yes", respectively. It doesn't take much to know that fat people are heavily stigmatized and being attractive is almost synonymous with being fit or thin or muscly, depending on your gender. Even elementary kids knew it way back when when I was the fat kid instead of the fat adult. Even the body-posi Tumblr feminists seem to primarily be into tall, lanky boys with body hair only in the right places. "Body positivity" for overweight people begins and ends with women on that site. Everywhere I turn, it seems fat men have no place outside of the bear community in the gay scene, which I am not particularly interested in at this point in my life.
I'm perfectly healthy. I'm vegan, eat vegetables, most of the food I enjoy is very low-fat and low-calorie, and have three well-rounded meals a day. I normally don't eat beyond feeling full and never eat before going to sleep. I'm physically active as long as it's not winter and have spent the last four years doing physically strenuous things like bike-riding and/or walking everywhere and hitchhiking all over the country. According to doctors, there's nothing wrong with my thyroid, I have perfectly normal sugar levels, my blood pressure is healthy, and I have no cholesterol problems (in part because my diet is cholesterol-free). My body works just fine and I for the most part appreciate it for being so efficient. But over the last year or two, I've actually managed to gain weight after a year or two of the 215-pound plateau. Back at the beginning of my reintroduction to single life, I consoled myself with the fact that at least I wasn't gaining anymore. It's funny, when I look back at pictures from that weight, I now think I looked just fine. The latest weight plateau for me going on a year is 255. I have no idea why and have lost my mind trying to figure it out. I don't eat like a fat person. Less and less clothing fits me, which is devastating, and I'm only becoming more and more unappealing to the world. I am technically overweight, and by a significant margin. I spent an entire month with Matt trying to lose some weight. We hit a very extreme regimen at the gym four to five nights a week for a month, even quitting soda for the entire duration and eating out significantly less than we had been. After the first month, I'd lost five pounds. Matt gained a pound, I think. Some might say it was premature, but I was devastated, and promptly gave up. It just didn't match up with any of the success stories we'd read up on Reddit or with the kid we looked up to at the gym who had lost 150 pounds in less than a year just by adopting the Subway diet and doing mostly treadmill every night at the gym. Putting so much effort into changing myself just so a society I hated would accept me physically was beginning to only make me feel worse. At this point, I'm not sure which is worse for my self-esteem.
I feel deformed and like I am permanently trapped in a flesh prison. I feel like a big bag of trash on the side of the road filled with enough garbage that my plastic is beginning to tear open. I want to be touched. It's only during sex that I feel like I can escape this body, but no one wants to have sex with me. Even when they do, I feel like a charity case or like I'm fucking someone who must be mentally ill (which a lot of them legitimately have been), and then I feel like I need to go above and beyond to over-compensate for being unattractive. I'm a sweet, empathetic, compassionate, intelligent, funny, genuine guy. I think I have a lot to offer. And even though it doesn't matter since I'm not getting laid, I'm a generous, respectful, talented lover. But the former is not enough to cancel out how fat and gross I am and the former is irrelevant when no one goes far enough to discover it. I want to die every single day because of this trap. No one ever thinks they're going to grow up to be a fat person. When I was in high school, I thought this part of my life was behind me. But now it consumes me. This gut of excess fat and sadness is stuck on me like a tumor; like a bookbag of textbooks that I wear on the front of myself. I think about it every second of every day. Every time I see someone attractive, male or female, I want to run and dive into the sewer because I know that's where I belong. On the beach, I keep my shirt on because I don't want to make anyone's day worse, let alone my own. I go days avoiding seeing my reflection because a single glimpse can ruin my entire month. I showered at my grandmother's today, where one entire wall is a series of mirrors. I had to see my entire figure in its hairy, lumpy shame, covered in stretch mark stripes like a tiger that's lived off of fast food its entire life; like a Halloween costume that my muscles and skeleton are urgently trying to tear themselves out of. Every day, I think about how I desperately wish I could just stab into myself and start tearing all of this fat out of me; carve away at myself until I was a lovable, or at least fuckable, shape. I see the terminally ill and think to myself, "At least they're skinny!" I pray for a terminal illness that would emaciate me like them, even. I'd rather be dying than be a healthy fat person, in all honesty. I daydream about finding some health care loophole that would finance a liposuction. If I won the lottery tomorrow, it'd definitely be the first thing I invested in; if I were granted three wishes, the first one would be to be thin again. I'd been worrying about being the fat person on the PETA team I'll be on this summer. Matthew Sheldon said that it'd be good to be a heavier vegan to show that we're not all stick-thin and unhealthy, but I don't want to be the fat vegan. After that quick exchange with the kid in the gas station, I wanted to abandon the PETA tour altogether just because I don't want anyone to see me. I don't want to be a fat person in crowds of hundreds. It gets harder every day and I know that, if anything, I'm only going to get bigger and my chances of love or sex slimmer. Even worse, I know it's probably only a matter of time before this size does begin to affect my health, whether it be heart problems or back problems from lugging this shitty frame around. I want to starve myself. I want to buy ipecac and puke up every single meal I eat. And every week, I get closer and closer to reaching that point.
I'll end this pathetic entry with an anonymous comment I got on here a while ago from a San Diego IP address that was the precursor to my joining a gym, quitting soda, and drinking apple cider vinegar with every meal. I honestly wanted to kill myself after receiving it and think about it almost every day.
"Ever wonder how you could possibly get so fat? I always believed that if youre eating healthy, youre looking healthy. No, but not you. Instead you look like one gigantic dirty boulder. Just round and lumpy. I think its karma for all the wrong youve done the world."
Kid: Is that dave gunn's fat ass?
Me: *sigh* Yeah.
Kid: You're getting pretty fat.
Me: *sigh* Yeah, I know.
Kid: That sucks.
Me: Yeah, life sucks.
Kid: You look like [your brother].
Me: Yup, people get us mistaken for one another a lot.
Kid: Yeah, but especially now. *He was alluding to the fact that my brother used to be fat.
Kid: Where you livin' now?
Me: I'm actually moving to Philadelphia.
Kid: It's always sunny there, heh heh.
Me: *I don't laugh*
Kid: You look like the one guy on that show!
Me: Yeah, I've gotten that before.
Kid: Well, if you lose weight, you'll look just like 'im. Well, see ya.
And that was it. I don't even think he was trying to be mean. I think he's just like me in that he doesn't know what is socially appropriate to say (though unlike him I know when something is something the person doesn't want or need to hear). That's the way he always was, I guess. Regardless, his words cut into me pretty hard. It's one thing to know you're fat and to walk around every single day knowing it. It's a whole other story when someone else reminds you out loud. I almost forgot what I was doing at the ATM because of it. I just leaned against it and felt like I was going to cry. I decided to not get a soda. My fat, disgusting body did not need another soda inside of it and at that point I felt like I didn't even deserve the satisfaction of a yummy soda trickling down my throat. The sadness and insecurity felt like an additional fifty pounds on top of the fifty pounds I wish I could get removed from me. I really didn't need that interaction with someone tonight. It's bad enough to feel ugly and worthless and gigantic every time I leave the house. It's bad enough that in the last two days I've had to hear my grandmother repeatedly say, "You should go to the doctor and get your thyroid checked! That might explain your weight!"
I was the fat kid when I was younger. I don't know why, but I was. Maybe it was what my parents fed me, I don't know. I was raised on a pretty American diet, but that doesn't make every American fat. I had cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch up until my school got heated lunches around the 1st grade, a basic dinner (with at least one vegetable), and sometimes a snack of cookies and milk before bedtime. We only ate fast food like McDonald's or Burger King once in a while because we couldn't really afford it. Neither my mother nor my father are very big, with the exception of my father's prevalent beer belly. So I have no idea why I was the fat kid. I was picked on for it throughout my time at the Catholic school, which was from pre-K up until I finished the 5th grade. The bullying was so bad that I would cry before and after school. I was eventually given a gross white liquid medicine to help with my stress-induced stomachaches. I was so young, but during class I would lean back on my chair and worry about how fat my thighs looked while sitting down. They'd expand on each side by several inches, I remember, and rubbed together when I walked. I was the only fat kid in my class and just about everyone, girl or boy, ganged up on me about it. During the 6th grade, I got a friend or two and started going outside and riding my bike a lot. My dietary habits didn't change, but I started losing weight. I came into my own through puberty and finished middle school a relatively thin person. I had a little tummy that you couldn't even notice unless I was shirtless and could (and did) pass as "cute" to the opposite sex. My hips were a tad wide, though my hip bones even stuck out a little bit. Going vegetarian seemed to help me even more when I was 14 and just about to finish the 9th grade. I felt okay with my body and girls were receptive to it for a long time. That whole time, I always hated when people would make fun of others for being fat, because I knew firsthand just how terrible it feels to be fat and for the world to ridicule you for it.
In 2005, I got myself into a long-term relationship, dropped out of high school, and for the most part voluntarily abandoned whatever social life I had. I hated everyone and didn't want to go outside all that often. My only friend besides my girlfriend was Matt. Both having grown up differently than our peers, we were really close, and because we had little interest in what our peers were doing--especially since most of them were already long gone into the world of drugs and alcohol--we found ourselves lost in our area code with nowhere to go to pass the time. So we ate. A lot. Our daily routine was comprised of jumping from one food place to another, eating and then loitering around for long periods of time. This was when I was still just a mere vegetarian and had no financial obligations whatsoever, so fast food was very convenient and affordable. On a typical day, I was sometimes eating pizza from Dominos (the 5-5-5 deal of five medium cheese pizzas for $5 each) with Burgundy, then going out to Taco Bell for a late dinner with Matt, and then after they closed going to Denny's to sit around all night, eventually getting either a veggie burger or the french toast slam (subbing hash brown for extra eggs) and ending it all with several Coke refills and sometimes an Oreo sundae or something as a dessert. Just that year, I gained over twenty-five pounds. I didn't even really notice until one day I went swimming with some friends in Scotia and my brother announced, "Yo, dave, you're getting an Underoath belly!" I remember later that day going into the bathroom and looking at myself and suddenly noticing that I was developing some sort of gross gut. It made sense: I was eating a lot of food, all of it was extremely gross and terrible for me, I was an emotional eater and very depressed, and was doing little to nothing with my body or time outside of sleeping and fucking with my girlfriend and sitting around fast food chains and diners with Matt. I deserved that weight. I earned it. I was mean to my body and I made it more deformed than my shitty genetics already had it. Of course, I didn't really care all that much. I was very much in love with my girlfriend at the time and as long as she loved me unconditionally, I didn't even think twice about how much bigger I was getting. Sure, fitting into my favorite shirts was getting a little more uncomfortable, but I was still coming home to a beautiful girl who loved my body enough to touch it almost every single night. At the time, I sincerely believed we'd be together forever, so my physical state and the fact that no one had expressed interest of any kind in me at all during those three years for the most part never really bothered me.
Burgundy left me in the summer of 2008 and I was thrust back into the single life. It wasn't long before I was forced to face the fact that I weighed about 215 pounds and that I was not at all thin enough to even be considered visible by the opposite sex, particularly the thin and petite girls I found the most attractive. I went vegan the month I was officially broken up with by Burgundy and didn't lose a single pound in doing so. I found that a bit off because when Matt went vegan (due to a bet back in 2006), he immediately began to shed pounds gained by our destructive dietary habits. My friend Brian went from chubby to lanky just by going vegetarian. Not even the severe depression had an effect on my weight. After a while without sex with anyone and returning to the world of frequent, pathetic, soul-crushing masturbation, I tried to remember what I even used to do that lead to sex with people. I could hardly remember, in part because my sex life was more or less effortless when I was younger and thinner. Nine times out of ten, the girl I had my eyes on wound up by chance having her eyes on me as well, which was a very convenient and fortunate position to be in. While I for the most part had spent most of my youth in several consecutive long-term, monogamous relationships, I was still able to fill the void in between break-ups with one night stands. All of the girls I'd fucked were gorgeous, too. I tried to have crushes on people and definitely noticed other people pretty quickly who were at least somewhat compatible with me. I had a crush on a girl named Jackie. She had a crush on literally every person around me during the few months we knew each other, but never me. The only thing they had that I didn't that I could notice was thinness. I also had a crush on a girl named Courtney for a little while and she actually flirted with me online a lot. The one time we hung out in person was the last and she immediately stopped talking to me afterwards before fucking my cousin, a short but muscle-clad boy. Again, I could only see the differing variable being my size and shape. I tried to hook up with a girl I'd slept with in the past named Heather; a girl I'd had sex with before I started dating Burgundy and then had sex with again during a break from my relationship with Burgundy. She was single and sometimes acted interested, sometimes even grabbing my dick while we slept on the same futon, only to quickly reject me and tell my brother behind my back that I tried to force her into sex. I knew these girls owed me nothing, but considering my personality was enough to lure them into wanting to get close to me, and that they quickly developed crushes, flings, or relationships with the thin people around me who treated them like total garbage, I could only conclude that it was my physical state that got in the way of anything happening outside of our friendship. After all, when I was younger, everything always played out the same: my personality allowed me to develop friendships with these girls, and after a while we would have sex, or maybe even date, which I'm assuming was due to being physically attractive in addition to being a gentleman with a halfway decent or likable personality.
I was generally not attracted to bigger girls. Whether or not those were my true preferences or the ones taught to me is up for debate, but that's what my eyes, brain, and body believed to be true and I certainly couldn't change my dick's mind. The first girl since being dumped to show any sort of interest in me was named Laura. I wasn't physically attracted to her at all, but she had a great personality and I was enjoying becoming good friends with her. I knew she'd had a crush on me while I was Burgundy, but I assumed there was no way she still would or could at that point. However, she wound up practically begging and even going as far as trying to guilt-trip me into taking her virginity. I gave her a night to sleep on it. I genuinely thought she should lose it to someone she cared about/cared about her and, like I said, I wasn't even physically attracted to her. Overnight, I started thinking and came to the realization that this was probably my fate: having sex with girls I wasn't even attracted to because I'm fat and ugly and most people aren't going to want me. I felt like I needed to hurry into accepting that reality, so I wound up having sex with her. I ended up having trouble maintaining erection and not even ejaculating and I credit that entirely to not actually being attracted to her. A day later, I stayed at her dorm with her and found a crumpled up piece of journal paper in her trash can. It was about me and said, "I was surprised at how unattractive dave had gotten since I last saw him." Apparently, I wasn't the only one fucking someone because I didn't think I could do better and should take whatever opportunities arise (or, alternatively, remain involuntarily celibate).
I've been single for five years as of this August. Sex, or any physical interaction with other people, has been infrequent, bordering on the "few and far between" sort of situation. I had sex three times in 2012. When I think about the people I've gotten to have sex with in the last five years, most of them have been either overweight like me or severely insecure, which has lead me to believe with all certainty that the only people capable of wanting me are people who are as heavy as or heavier than me who have, like I once did, accepted they are only allowed to fuck people of comparable physical status or so mentally ill and self-loathing that they have set their sights low enough to think someone like me is what they deserve or should settle for. Then again, for the most part, not even heavier girls have pursued me. I've had a lot of crushes over the last five years. None of them have amounted to anything. And I'm not playing the "nice guy" card or whatever (I'm playing the "ugly guy" card, if anything). I was content with being just friends with these ladies if given the privilege, but as they proceeded to tell me how great I was and got close to me and then proceeded to tell me about the boys they liked and how terribly they were treated by them, or when they told me they had a one night stand, I could only assume the reason I was neither one of their flings nor their love interest was because my personality was never good enough to compensate for my fat body and deformed face. I don't think it's unreasonable to think this.
It's no secret that being fat in today's world is pretty awful. I hear people talk about fat people. Even friends of mine have talked about fat people around me. I know they know I'm fat, but they still go on. They talk about fat people or people they know who've gotten fat like they were lepers. "Have you seen [such and such]?" they say emphatically as if they had just run into a friend who's undergoing chemo or has lost a limb at war. "Yeah, they're getting pretty big." Just like with the kid I ran into today, it's no surprise that someone's physical state is one of the first and most obvious aspects of a person you haven't seen since, say, high school that one notices. Take a society that is obscenely shallow and taught that one size and shape is attractive from birth and it becomes the only thing worth mentioning. Yeah, I've gotten fat since high school, and I was reminded of it the entire journey to 215 during that time. I heard it from Tom whenever I'd ride my bike to the mall. "You're getting big, man." I heard it from Hana when I saw her for the first time since high school. "Dave, when did you get so big?!" Most people are not that polite about it. That's because being bigger is one of the single worst things you can be in this world. You're characterized as unhealthy, lazy, and are invisible to the objects of your affection or lusts unless they're gawking at you and harshly judging you with their friends.
A very skewed version of reality popular amongst body-positive feminists don't think that conventional beauty standards affect men in the same way they affect women, but it's just not true. I am surrounded by media that shows you two types of male: the thin man and the buff man. Both of them are completely hairless (even on the ass!), both have some version of the abs and pubic V, and both get sex and attention regardless of how despicable and callous of a human being they are. If you get any spotlight whatsoever as a fat man (or woman) in the media, you're the comic relief up until you inevitably can afford a personal trainer (or develop an eating disorder) and lose all your weight later in your career. Fat men grow beards because it can sometimes distract from how unattractive the rest of them is and because it helps them hide in a weird way. That's definitely why Matt and I have ours. And sure enough, it's the only thing about us that gets any compliments from girls unless I'm wearing a t-shirt that stands out like my Daria one. Even then, I find myself getting complimented by other straight men far more often. From what I've experienced, it's often easier for an overweight woman to find physical situations than an overweight man. I don't know why this is; perhaps men are sexually desperate in a way that women are not? It seems to be a popular generalization that "men will fuck anything that moves" and maybe it's for the most part pretty true. The chubbier or heavier girls I know get dick with ease, and not just from similarly shaped men, but from guys who are by all means conventionally attractive. I look at people a lot (because I'm busy staring in awe at how beautiful they are and/or envying them) and from what I've noticed, there are far more heavy girls with thin or fit guys than there are heavy guys with thin or fit girls; and by a long shot, too. "Chubby chaser" is almost always a term associated with a man. Even in porn, fat women have their own genre, while fat men are pretty much limited to Ron Jeremy, who while owning a humongous cock is openly single (and very lonely) and referred to as hideous by most women I've spoken to. Obviously, this is a debatable generalization, and maybe I'm just projecting, but this is what I've noticed.
Obesity is a legitimate health epidemic, too. While the health aspects thankfully don't apply to my situation, I might as well be socially quarantined with the rest of the lower-torso stock video people whose protruding guts and tight khaki pants and Hovarounds show up in every news outlet's report on it. Fat people's health and worth are assumed solely based on their weight and we get lost in the obscured backdrop of the social ethos with amputees, homeless people, and senior citizens. Generally speaking, most people do not like fat people. Fat is a bad thing. It's one of the first and easiest insults for people to grab at when talking about someone they don't like. It's the butt of constant jokes on TV. It doesn't make it to magazine covers unless the person is dressed up in a humiliating manner. When someone begins gaining weight, they might as well be slowly dying as far as society is concerned. In a world where how someone looks is usually the first thing you can judge about another human being, whether or not you're subjectively attractive (which typically requires you to be thin or fit) has a lot to do with whether or not someone even wants to speak to you or get to know you. Fat people don't even usually like fat people. I desperately peruse online dating sites and personal ads online. 99% of the time, self-proclaimed BBWs ("big beautiful women") who are admittedly heavy-set on Craigslist still make a note to include that, while they are bigger, they are not attracted to bigger men. On OKCupid, one of the first things I do when I find someone who I might be interested in is go to their answered questions and check to see if they've answered the ones, "Can overweight people still be sexy?" and, "If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?" Regardless of whether or not they themselves are bigger, they almost always say "no" and "yes", respectively. It doesn't take much to know that fat people are heavily stigmatized and being attractive is almost synonymous with being fit or thin or muscly, depending on your gender. Even elementary kids knew it way back when when I was the fat kid instead of the fat adult. Even the body-posi Tumblr feminists seem to primarily be into tall, lanky boys with body hair only in the right places. "Body positivity" for overweight people begins and ends with women on that site. Everywhere I turn, it seems fat men have no place outside of the bear community in the gay scene, which I am not particularly interested in at this point in my life.
I'm perfectly healthy. I'm vegan, eat vegetables, most of the food I enjoy is very low-fat and low-calorie, and have three well-rounded meals a day. I normally don't eat beyond feeling full and never eat before going to sleep. I'm physically active as long as it's not winter and have spent the last four years doing physically strenuous things like bike-riding and/or walking everywhere and hitchhiking all over the country. According to doctors, there's nothing wrong with my thyroid, I have perfectly normal sugar levels, my blood pressure is healthy, and I have no cholesterol problems (in part because my diet is cholesterol-free). My body works just fine and I for the most part appreciate it for being so efficient. But over the last year or two, I've actually managed to gain weight after a year or two of the 215-pound plateau. Back at the beginning of my reintroduction to single life, I consoled myself with the fact that at least I wasn't gaining anymore. It's funny, when I look back at pictures from that weight, I now think I looked just fine. The latest weight plateau for me going on a year is 255. I have no idea why and have lost my mind trying to figure it out. I don't eat like a fat person. Less and less clothing fits me, which is devastating, and I'm only becoming more and more unappealing to the world. I am technically overweight, and by a significant margin. I spent an entire month with Matt trying to lose some weight. We hit a very extreme regimen at the gym four to five nights a week for a month, even quitting soda for the entire duration and eating out significantly less than we had been. After the first month, I'd lost five pounds. Matt gained a pound, I think. Some might say it was premature, but I was devastated, and promptly gave up. It just didn't match up with any of the success stories we'd read up on Reddit or with the kid we looked up to at the gym who had lost 150 pounds in less than a year just by adopting the Subway diet and doing mostly treadmill every night at the gym. Putting so much effort into changing myself just so a society I hated would accept me physically was beginning to only make me feel worse. At this point, I'm not sure which is worse for my self-esteem.
I feel deformed and like I am permanently trapped in a flesh prison. I feel like a big bag of trash on the side of the road filled with enough garbage that my plastic is beginning to tear open. I want to be touched. It's only during sex that I feel like I can escape this body, but no one wants to have sex with me. Even when they do, I feel like a charity case or like I'm fucking someone who must be mentally ill (which a lot of them legitimately have been), and then I feel like I need to go above and beyond to over-compensate for being unattractive. I'm a sweet, empathetic, compassionate, intelligent, funny, genuine guy. I think I have a lot to offer. And even though it doesn't matter since I'm not getting laid, I'm a generous, respectful, talented lover. But the former is not enough to cancel out how fat and gross I am and the former is irrelevant when no one goes far enough to discover it. I want to die every single day because of this trap. No one ever thinks they're going to grow up to be a fat person. When I was in high school, I thought this part of my life was behind me. But now it consumes me. This gut of excess fat and sadness is stuck on me like a tumor; like a bookbag of textbooks that I wear on the front of myself. I think about it every second of every day. Every time I see someone attractive, male or female, I want to run and dive into the sewer because I know that's where I belong. On the beach, I keep my shirt on because I don't want to make anyone's day worse, let alone my own. I go days avoiding seeing my reflection because a single glimpse can ruin my entire month. I showered at my grandmother's today, where one entire wall is a series of mirrors. I had to see my entire figure in its hairy, lumpy shame, covered in stretch mark stripes like a tiger that's lived off of fast food its entire life; like a Halloween costume that my muscles and skeleton are urgently trying to tear themselves out of. Every day, I think about how I desperately wish I could just stab into myself and start tearing all of this fat out of me; carve away at myself until I was a lovable, or at least fuckable, shape. I see the terminally ill and think to myself, "At least they're skinny!" I pray for a terminal illness that would emaciate me like them, even. I'd rather be dying than be a healthy fat person, in all honesty. I daydream about finding some health care loophole that would finance a liposuction. If I won the lottery tomorrow, it'd definitely be the first thing I invested in; if I were granted three wishes, the first one would be to be thin again. I'd been worrying about being the fat person on the PETA team I'll be on this summer. Matthew Sheldon said that it'd be good to be a heavier vegan to show that we're not all stick-thin and unhealthy, but I don't want to be the fat vegan. After that quick exchange with the kid in the gas station, I wanted to abandon the PETA tour altogether just because I don't want anyone to see me. I don't want to be a fat person in crowds of hundreds. It gets harder every day and I know that, if anything, I'm only going to get bigger and my chances of love or sex slimmer. Even worse, I know it's probably only a matter of time before this size does begin to affect my health, whether it be heart problems or back problems from lugging this shitty frame around. I want to starve myself. I want to buy ipecac and puke up every single meal I eat. And every week, I get closer and closer to reaching that point.
I'll end this pathetic entry with an anonymous comment I got on here a while ago from a San Diego IP address that was the precursor to my joining a gym, quitting soda, and drinking apple cider vinegar with every meal. I honestly wanted to kill myself after receiving it and think about it almost every day.
"Ever wonder how you could possibly get so fat? I always believed that if youre eating healthy, youre looking healthy. No, but not you. Instead you look like one gigantic dirty boulder. Just round and lumpy. I think its karma for all the wrong youve done the world."