30 Days of Truth – Day one – “Hate”

I’ve came across something called 30 Days of Truth (courtesy of Elexxa, go check her out) and figured that I’ll give it a go. Those of you who spend any decent amount of time on the likes of Facebook will have heard of this kind of thing before, usually along the lines of posting a song that reminds you of something or whatever. Normally I neither do nor really like that sort of thing, but it gives me something to talk about in a bit more of a structured way than normal. And it can be treated as a sort of faux-interview, as I write whatever comes to mind at the time, this may bring about half decent things I wouldn’t often talk about. Not on this first day though, because it’s a fairly obvious what it’ll be. I’ll also be keeping them seperate from other blog entries, because I’m a neat freak like that. It’s grown into a biggie, so the meat’s after the jump. Enjoy…

Day One – Something you hate about yourself.

An easy one to start with: my body. More specifically, what I’ve done to it. I’m not cursed with a horrible body, I’m not going to be forever doomed to never looking good, I let it happen. How? A combination of things, namely that I stopped exercising, started eating a whole load of junk food and was in a long term relationship that was never going to end because she’d love me no matter how I looked of course. There were warning signs, big red lights, numbers getting steadily higher and a feeling of being unfit. I ignored all of them. I was lazy, *tucks away pride* greedy, and didn’t have to compete with other guys for the affections of girls. It was easy street: all the tastiest foods, no physical stress yet still I had sex on tap. Was awesome man!

I’ll rewind for a moment, back to the good old days. For extra shame please bear in mind that I’ve just turned 22, I can’t blame middle-aged spread or that I’m harking back to my long-gone youth. I played rugby for ten years. I wasn’t fat back then, at around 15-17 I was a bit of a brick shithouse. I didn’t have the most carefully controlled diet, but I burned it off. I trained twice a week with the club and played every sunday, and with the school it was training once a week with a game on saturdays, captaining both teams. So that was five days of the week I’d spend getting battered about and doing the battering too, and as I was a prop I’d spend a lot of time practicing line-outs. That’s the bit where they stand at the side, one player throws the ball in and a fully grown man is lifted into the air. I was fit, I was in shape, and I cringe to look at pictures of then and think about how I look now. I was tall and muscular, and didn’t realise then how good this actually was.

So oblivious was I that a few months ago I was talking on the phone to a girl that was in a few of my classes back then, we laughed about all the daft things we did and who we still saw and she said “Do you remember when X had that massive crush on you?” I told her I had no idea, and she added “God yeah, so did Y & Z too!” My heart sank when I heard this. “X, Y & Z” were girls that were quite gorgeous and that to my eyes were always a hundred miles out of my league. I wasn’t exactly shy or lacking in self esteem, I just didn’t see myself as some sort of Adonis and, yeah, I suppose I should’ve aimed higher. So I ended up spending more than a year with one girl who was pretty but not stunning (the pre-emptive cockblocker who I had the really bad breakup with) followed by a quick flurry of shagging then five years with Ex. Due to a different kind of laziness I suppose, never bothered my arse with anything.

Speaking of bothering my arse (hoho!) it was when I was 17 and had my operation that things started spiralling out of control fairly quickly. Dunno if I’ve mentioned it, probably have at some point, but the op was pretty much an arsecrackectomy. It looked like the entire Time Team squad had heard I poked my jacksie with Roman pottery and decided to start excavating.

I still have nightnmares about him.

What was the cause of it I hear you being scared to ask? A cut caused by getting kicked by a rugby stud got infected and started to spread, creating tunnels heading downwards, seventeen in all, and if they had run out of space they’d eventually have worked their way inwards until I was seriously ill or dead with blood poisoning or a broken bladder/colon. The doctors said that most people who get it are in absolute agony when it’s around an inch or two long, mine’s was the length of the average forearm and I’d played two seasons of rugby with nothing more than mild discomfort. The doctor also said I had an “abnormally high pain threshold”, which is great because I sound like Rambo, but I’d have rather had all the pain and went to the doctor far sooner than waited and ruined so much time. Again, laziness.

So for eighteen months I had to deliberatly rest and let the skin and flesh regrow. This meant spending as much time as possible lying on my bed, preferably wearing nothing on my lower half, and watching films and TV with the odd book thrown in for good measure. Might sound like a dream, and for the first week or two it was, but remember that it wasn’t all I could do, it was what I had to force myself to do to make sure I didn’t cause more damage to the wound and to keep it healing at a decent rate. I could walk for a while without getting too tired (all my energy was elsewhere obviously) and had nearly normal mobility, but that was about it. Couldn’t sit for hours in school for the first three months afterwards, hit a bit of a downer and couldn’t be fucked studying after not being put forward for the PE exam, got moved down a class in maths, and missed out on a probable A in geography after not having sat one of the mid-term tests despite being allowed to sit the final exam. Socially I couldn’t go to the leaver’s dance, couldn’t enjoy the summer and it marked the permanent end of the vast majority of my school friendships.

During this time I’d kept eating like I did when I was training constantly, but was leading such a sedate existence I was practically stationary. The weight started to pile on, the muscle size and tone was gone, I’d become pudgy, and the weight gain was so rapid I’d even gotten a couple of stretchmarks on my side. Maybe it was comfort eating, but it was definitely boredom eating. I’d have to sit (after the first seven months or so I could sit tilted over to one side so there wasn’t too much pressure on the wound) or lie for hours every day, so I’d munch on crisps or chocolate and watch more cunting films on my bed.

And so it carried on, I got steadily bigger and bigger despite my wound having healed, and other than a brief hiatus where I was almost back to what was then still “normal” after hitting the boxing gym for a couple of months but stopping over something ridiculous like not being able to afford the bus fare and arguing with my parents over a ton of shit, I slowly but surely got fatter and more unfit. Eventually for all intents and purposes it became almost an identity. Now being a fat cunt was the thing that identified me as me, and rather than guilt-tripping me into doing something about it I used it as an excuse for yet more continued laziness. It’s worth noting that at this point I was still living in a self-contained little world that was either my house or Ex’s. I’d drifted away from my “outside” friends a year or more before, and the people I worked with at that point were either middle aged women or all men. There were no clubs, pubs and regular stuff like that in my life. No social pressure on me not to be a fat bastard basically. That only came when I started college.

I’d found myself thrown back into the world. There were crowds, there were people! I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d missed it. Now for a quick confession: College wasn’t just for the qualifications or something to do after another contract had run out, it was a safety net to make sure that I wouldn’t be completely and utterly alone after I split with Ex. Yeah, I’d been thinking it for months, but could never find the right time. I wasn’t thinking of college as a support group as I didn’t think I’d make the friends I did, but I knew I’d definitely need a bit of human contact after I’d done it. The side effect of becoming a social creature once more meant that I’d realised how out of shape I was, how far from the ideal or even from the norm. Add to this the fact that the majority of the people on the course were of the fairer sex, and a disproportionately large amount of them were quite gorgeous. If my fifteen year old self could have seen me sitting with, among others, a hot german blonde, a stripper, current and recently former models, a pretty face with massive awesome tits, a petite nympho, a couple of milfs… he’d have probably tried to beat me senseless for letting myself go so badly. I became good, once or twice even best, friends with all of them, and putting aside my desire to have gotten my dick wet they’re all awesome, hilarious, interesting, smart people and I’m better for meeting them. The split with Ex happened and suddenly I was free to do whatever I pleased, hand in hand with my larger-than-I-could-count BMI. I did what every guy would do in that position, I hit that gym like a mad cunt and got myself a sexy six pack!

Did I fuck. Want to know what I did? I took it as a challenge. I had a grudge against everything and felt that the universe owed me something for the shit I’d put up with. I didn’t change my diet or exercise, I bet myself that I could pull just fine and dandy being a chubby Lothario. This despite me saying aloud to other people how you can’t fuck a personality and that looks do in fact matter. I just wanted to make it harder for myself for some idiotic reason. And now and again it actually worked. I couldn’t go on looks, so I relied on sheer fucking gall to get me through. Must’ve gotten myself extra points as a result or something. But you don’t get many repeat customers being an ugly fucker, even if you do have an odd genetic quirk that means you possess a rotating vibro-cock. Food was the rut I was still stuck in, combined with fat being my new identity and plain old laziness. At college I’d have two rolls and sausage for breakfast, then whatever greasy shit they were serving for lunch, in between there’d be fizzy juice and a chocolate bar or bag of crisps, and a few times a week I’d be sat in the car with Marsha and we’d have a McDonalds as a matter of course. I actually got worse over that time and ballooned to the weight I am now.

What’s changed and made me want to lose the beef and get fitter? I’m going to blame it on the dry patch, me looking back over the past year, and that I’m just plain sick of how I am. In many ways my body is ruined, I have stretch marks like a pregnant woman across my stomach, as well as my armpits and flesh coloured but deep ones on the undersides of the top of my arms. You can feel them happening as well, the inner layers of skin tearing apart forever. It feels like a sharp jab, I didn’t realise what it was at first, and then later on without you even noticing it they appear. Most likely my stomach’ll never tone up properly again and it won’t matter if I have next to no bodyfat and more well-defined ab muscles than a bodybuilder, there’s always going to be the loose skin around it, like a balloon that’s been inflated and deflated too many times. If it ends up being particularly bad I may even nag my GP for surgery to get it cut off. All of this is my fault, I can’t blame anyone else for it. There may be reasons, but there are no excuses. Was I addicted to food? I don’t know, because I never really went through withdrawal or felt cravings or anything, it was just there so I had it. Now it’s still there, and I feel no need for it. I just stopped. Maybe it’s just me hunting out the challenge, trying to pull with a fat suit with all the stuffing pulled out of it. I’ve done myself irepperable damage, I’ll just need to live with it.

All I can tell you is that right now, this isn’t me. I’m not one of those people that “suit” fatness. I haven’t always been this way, I’m not the rotund spherical jolly fat chap, I’m the six foot plus tank that’s let himself go. This shit doesn’t belong to me, and I’m getting rid of it. The title of this blog stemmed from one I made almost three years ago to shame/motivate myself into getting fitter. I’d become desensitised to the name, but not anymore. The ball’s begun rolling in the other direction now, I’m going to reclaim the lost time, I’m digging myself out of my own body.