Prologue
Welcome to my war on food.
It’s a battle that’s been raging my whole life and one I’ve grown accustomed to losing. The sweet and salty sense of defeat lingers every day, at every meal, with every bite. Still I refuse to surrender, even if it dooms me to an endless cycle of failure.
During my heaviest days, I had people tell me I was lucky not to be addicted to anything dangerous, like the drugs or alcohol which tear apart so many lives, families, and communities. I knew what they meant and I agreed with the sentiment, yet I hated them for seeing my fatness as a minor threat or, even worse, as an insult to my character. Because the people who said these things were not being honest. They did not really believe my food addiction was an addiction at all. To them, being obese was a clear sign of laziness. If I just tried harder, or cared more, surely my problems would go away. They thought size was a choice, because for normal bodies like theirs, it probably was.
Many years later, I’m beginning to understand the nuances of my war on food. Too much time and energy was spent getting me to this point. I wasted decades blaming myself, blaming others, blaming the corporations and their cornucopia of processed goods. Yet the true culprit for my obesity will, to some degree, always remain a mystery. Such is the nature of the disease. So I apologize in advance if you came here expecting to find the holy grail of weight loss advice. That’s not what this is. And trust me, it’s for the best. You really shouldn’t come to a washed-up reality star for expertise on anything. So instead, please sit back, relax, and let my pain become a twisted form of entertainment for you.
Welcome to my one-man show.
First things first, I need to make a correction. Calling myself a television star is vastly overrating my contributions to the modern media landscape. During my heyday, I merely filled a niche within the saturated sea of cable channels, finding success in an era when reality TV was still a novelty. My weight was the main spectacle, of course. Viewers were tuning in, with morbid curiosity, to gawk at calories and pounds and other measures of gluttony.
Television gave me a career, a livelihood, and a platform. I’m thankful for that. Television also tried to kill me. But I survived to keep fighting the war and tell these tales of bloodshed. As a pacifist, I promise this is where the military metaphors will end. Now the real story can begin.
In order to fully understand my relationship to food, we must turn back the clock. So let’s rewind past my fifteen minutes of fame, back before I found love from an ocean away, and before I met the family that was too good for me. Let’s go all the way back. Before I knew what it meant to be fat.
Welcome to my life.
