I haven't always been fat, but I've always struggled with being or becoming fat. Friends who knew me in college or even high school might be surprised at that, but that's only because I was winning the battle at that time of my life.

About half-way through high school, I noticed that I needed to keep buying new jeans not because my inseam grew, but because my waistline did. At the same time, I took an interest in the opposite sex and realize that my interest would not be reciprocated if I continued to get fatter and fatter.

I had a 34-inch waist (at 5' 6" in height, at the time) and was continuing to grow (sideways) at the beginning of my junior year of high school. So, I took a radical step, and asked the coach if I could practice with the swim team. Swimming was a great way to work out, because it was non-contact and, since I wasn't on the team, I didn't have to worry about being criticized for not doing it right.

Swim practice involved something like two or three hours a day, five days a week (if I recall correctly, and it's possible that I don't). I would also often lift weights at a friend's house, who was a bit of a body builder and was an excellent personal trainer for me at that stage of my life.

Much to my surprise, the coach would egg me on in ways I'd never expected. At one point, he told me I couldn't practice with the team if I couldn't swim five lengths in the pool without stopping. So I did that. Then he'd put me in relays with the team members. Then he coached me to swim better. Then he coached me to swim faster. Then, when everybody on the team expected me to compete in our first meet of the year, I just sort of fell into it. Thus, without meaning to, I joined the swim team, became competitive, and eventually reached all-city honors.

So it should come as no surprise that by the end of my senior year, I had a 29-inch waist (and 5' 7" and still growing taller) and no flab to be found. This was not the result of being a naturally skinny guy. This was the result of hours of work every day, while also imposing some weird dietary rules upon myself. Hard, hard work. It paid off.

I didn't swim competitively in college, but my alma mater was located in a very hilly location, and I typically walked over a mile to get from home to class, and then vice versa at the end of the day. Up and down a couple of hills. I did swim as my elective phys. ed class for many semesters, and took fencing and ballroom dancing as well. Senior year, I lived all the way down the hill from campus and halfway up the next hill to the next college over. Yeah, that was a lot of strenuous exercise. So again, maintaining my "fighting weight" was the result of work, not of natural predisposition.

But anyone who knew me then and who knows me now knows that I've put a lot of weight on in the time since. Why? Well, I have a lot of reasons, but they all boil down to one simple fact: I've been taking in more calories than I burn.

It doesn't take much of an imbalance in that direction to push your weight up to 100 pounds over the ideal weight for your height. Imagine averaging gaining no more than, say, a pound a month. That's not much, right? Not much at all.

I graduated from college fifteen years ago.

Do the math.

Depending upon which charts you use, I'm probably about 80 pounds overweight, plus or minus ten pounds, for my height (I'm now comfortably between 5' 8" and 5' 9"). So I'm not doing quite so bad as gaining a pound a month. Also, my weight has not always been on an upward trajectory; there have been several periods where I've either lost weight or kept level. But the upward trend has prevailed over the long haul. I just don't have the two to three hours a day to maintain the kind of body I had in high school and college. Or, at least, I choose to do other things with that time (like stay married, stay employed, spend some time with my son, maybe write a short story or two, etc., etc.).

Last summer, I managed to bicycle to and from work, which boiled away roughly ten pounds. Then the weather got ugly, and my time became tighter as we prepared to buy a house, and the next thing you know, the scale slowly made that ground back up. By the time our move started, I was back up to where I'd started at the beginning of last summer -- at the highest weight I've ever been in my life.

The move has naturally siphoned away four pounds or so. Funny how, if you spend a couple weeks burning more calories than you take in, the weight goes down instead of up.

But the fact is that I've got a bit of a predisposition to take in more calories than I use. The problem is: what do I do about it?

[to be continued...]