I’m 42 and trying really hard to not fall apart physically. I could have said the same at 32, or 22, or 12. I always considered myself to be a fat kid, and I was heavy, but 80's heavy; I wasn’t in the realm of what we see on reality TV these days, and I sincerely hope that’s not a fair representation of any significant population. But I was convinced I was Fat, not husky or big boned or anything like it. Fat. I was a fat kid.

As a child, I remember the day I weighed 100 pounds; I was 12. It was terrifying. My thinking about myself changed drastically, and I started to judge myself, to really harshly criticize myself. I began to only hear the criticisms of my peers and family. Even if they were mild, I amplified them internally, judging myself with what I imagined they were truly thinking. An echo chamber of how fat I was. My mom, for reasons that I’m unfamiliar with, was one of the most critical voices about my weight and activity levels. I used to stay with my dad over the summer (my parents divorced when I was 8), and after one particular summer when I was deep in the steamy heart of a very lengthy puberty, I gained some weight, maybe 15 pounds over the course of 12 weeks. On finally coming home, the very first thing my mom said was “Wow, you’ve really put on some weight! How did you get so fat?” She hadn’t seen me in 12 weeks, and the very first words out of her mouth were critical of my gut.

As a kid, I had severe stomach and digestive problems. From the last little bit of the previous paragraph, you don’t have to be much of a psychologist to understand why. My mom took me at one point when I was 8 or 9 years old to what was described to me as a “special” doctor, who asked me questions about how I felt emotionally before handing my mom a prescription to a “special” stomach medicine that I was told would take care of my stomach problems. I was 18 when I bothered to read the label; the medicine was a placebo made from lime bitters, some sort of bitter plant, and simple syrup. I remember it tasting absolutely revolting, and it never helped my stomach, but when I had to take it I would say that it had worked in order to not have to take any more of it. The taste was that bad, and made vomiting really, really nasty.

There I was, then, during the pre-teen and teen years when the microscope of your peers is trained on and amplifying every flaw, when even without the extra amplification what was happening was pretty darn gross. There I was with a mom who helped further amplify that to a level that was hardly healthy. Yet my fitness was actually quite good. We lived on the edge of a few hundred miles of desert in southern New Mexico, a gigantic, empty playground of sand dunes and arroyos. Pretty much every free moment was taken with either geeky pursuits (video games and programming) or athletic pursuits (running through the desert, getting into rock fights, bicycling, playing football and basketball, swimming, that sort of thing). I was extremely active considering my nerdliness. Of the very few pictures that exist of me in that era, I was chubby but certainly not the forklift-requiring land whale I saw myself as being. It was during those years that I started working out: weight lifting, running in the desert, “training” with my brother and friends. Trying to not be fat.

My brother is three years older than I am. He was blessed with an inherent athletic ability, and has a charm and charisma about him that is hard to explain; you really have to see him in action to understand how much mojo that guy has. My brother got all of his physical traits from my mom but all his spirit, his mojo from my rockband drummer / chef / working man / raconteur father, whereas I look precisely like my father (except for my hair, which is definitely from my mom’s side of the family) but have none of my father’s considerable confidence and charm. My childhood friends were much the same way: athletic, smart, confident, capable. Most important: they were muscular, thin and good looking. I was sort of an oversized runt in that litter, socially inept and trying very hard to keep up with them physically. Weight lifting seemed to be the way to do it. Chicks dig muscles, right?

Having nothing but soldiers and farmers in my lineage, I put on muscle almost as quickly as I put on fat. When I was 15, I was bench pressing 1.5 times my body weight and squatting twice my body weight. In high school as a senior I was in a PE class that had no structure; the class was all freshmen and myself, and the coach used the hour locked in his office to work on the varsity high school football playbook. Left to my own devices and a fully stocked free-weight room, I went a little nuts, lifting to failure just about every day. However, though I was normally the first or second biggest guy in the room in most rooms, you’d never have known it from looking at me; I hid my muscle with as much shame as as I hid my fat; it was all “size.” Being muscular wasn’t helping my self image. Being “big” meant having a bit of a target on my back. Being big is a bit like being a fast draw with a six shooter: lots of people challenge you. Unlike a gunfight, the challenges are odd, nonlinear, insignificant, and annoying. I’d get people bumping into me all the damn time, or trying to trip me, or miming my walk with an exaggerated arms-out chest-puffed swagger, calling me names to my face that they’d normally reserve for my back. And since I wasn’t a jerk, I would basically shy away from confrontation.

In my twenties I was lifting more weight than I’d ever lifted, ever. Having ballooned up a bit on a year’s diet of cheap “poor people food” (my wife and I lived on less than $20 a week for food for a pretty long time, so cheap pastas and cheap fats and sugar with everything was pretty normal) I’d finally started going to a gym, and on moving to Texas started at a bodybuilding gym known locally as the place for steroid users. I was there four or five days a week at 5am, working hard on free weights for an hour. When I managed my first 315 pound bench press, I was mildly questioned about my choice of “supplements” by the front desk guy who’d been spotting me, and whether I wanted to “really get big.” No steroids for me, thanks; I was perfectly capable of injuring myself without them. Plus, why would I want to get bigger? I was already a small house.

By that time I was mostly muscle, with a body fat percentage in the low 12 range. Yet I still saw myself as being grossly, drastically overweight; at six feet tall, I’ve rarely been under 250 pounds (and then only briefly, after a ketogenic diet that left me with gallstones and overwhelming fatigue). That 250 number is my nemesis, it’s something I still can’t get past. It haunts me.

A number of years ago I had a low back problem that resulted in two years of damn-near bed rest, and once I had surgery and started moving again I was horrified to find myself at 290 pounds. I’ve seen pictures from that period of time and for once the physical reality matched precisely what I felt. With a good portion of my longer muscles atrophied from paralysis and lack of use, and with my usual diet, I’d become precisely what I thought I was all along.

I started running in 2010, starting with the Couch-to-5k plan using an app that told me when to run and when to walk. During that time, I was also doing body weight exercises. I managed to get down to 250 pounds in less than 60 days. By the end of 2010 I was averaging 15 miles a week.

After two years of running, I was averaging 25 miles a week and my long runs were anywhere from 12 to 15 miles. My body weight? 250 pounds. My caloric intake and physical activity were obsessively logged using a few different tools, and all told the same tale: no more than 1800 Calories in, a few thousand out, no change in weight. I completely stumped two different doctors who specialize in just this sort of thing. They’re still stumped.

As crazy obsessed as I was, it was inevitable that injury would again take me out of things: I broke my right foot being shoved off a trail by a group of men in marathon training who didn’t know how to run in public. Around that time my lower back started acting up again, keeping my range and speed limited. Once my back recovered, I stopped running and started weight training again, and my back finally gave out entirely. All the while, my weight hovered at 250 pounds.

Here I am, then, at 42 years of age. Physically, I’m alright: there is some lingering paralysis in my legs from the back injuries, I have occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation, my right shoulder has a tear in the rotator cuff from too many years of bench pressing with bad form, and my right foot didn’t really heal properly. Plus I have three disks in my back that will eventually collapse; I’m hoping surgical technology stays ahead of them.

Mentally, I’m never comfortable with my physical form. I’ve started growing my hair out as it has thinned. I use a beard to disguise the double chin (my mom’s contribution, genetically; most of the males on her side have this double chin regardless of body weight). I’m never seen in public without a shirt. And while I can still move heavy things, I’m more careful about what I move and how I move it, very aware of the injuries that my obsessive behavior can cause. And yet.

Unlike my grandfather (who is alive and well in his 90s), I have an anxiety about how I look that overrides any anxiety I have about my health. This vanity is long legged and overly consumptive. It uses more than it gives; unlike what I think of vanity (a sort of self-admiration, a shade of self-esteem), what I have is an obsession that always burns in the background, mocking me, driving me. Some days it burns bright, some days it’s barely a flicker, but it is always present. It doesn’t drive me to getting healthy, it drives me to getting injured. I weighed myself this morning, and I weigh 256 pounds. My last appointment with my spine doctor was as blunt as the previous five: “You need to lose weight. Your back can’t handle the load you have on it.” My spine doctor doesn’t color his language with any pleasantries, and I appreciate that. What he can’t provide is what it would take for me to get under 250. Diet and exercise, obviously, which despite not having worked in the past is, ultimately, my own fault and obviously I need to work harder.

See how that voice works?

On a positive note: my brother (who gained a significant amount of weight after leaving the Marine Corps and gaining a life that involved too many hours of work, a wonderful wife and two great children) has recently lost a gigantic amount of weight, a life changing amount of weight. A person’s worth of weight. He did so with some tangibles (vast expenditures of energy through exercise, plus a completely redesigned diet and totally different eating habits; he did the extreme version of eating less and exercising more) and with some intangibles (fantastic support from friends, from his employer, and from his family, plus a complete and total faith in himself). He’s a model for what can happen physically, and in talking to him you understand that he’s a model for the mental side of it as well: he’s grown to accept himself, but he’s also trying to improve what’s already pretty darn great, doing it because it makes him feel better and also will make him live longer in a life that he enjoys. To that end, I’m still learning from my brother. I suspect I always will be.

Looking at the pictures here, you’ll note that I do not appear unhappy, nor do I appear drastically overweight. Indeed, I’m not generally unhappy. Somewhere in the back of my head, though, is the constant ringing criticism, the drum beat: I don’t work hard enough, I eat too much, ultimately I don’t deserve the health I enjoy, but I do deserve the broken back, the ripped shoulder, the broken foot. I suppose writing about it is as close as I’ve ever come to being honest with myself about my body. Maybe, then, I can start to see what you, the viewer, are seeing…whatever that is. I have to tell you, though, that I fear I already know what you’re thinking.

Pushing past that, then, is at least as important as losing the weight; I have to do it not to appease some never ending internal critique, but instead to embrace some version of me that isn’t defined by that critique. Find joy in the struggle, something to live for rather than something to live against.

Easier said than done.