Throughout my youth I was skinny. Not just thin, not fit, but actually skinny. My friends used to joke that I looked unhealthy, and I couldn't get near a dinner table without someone - usually an aunt or the mother of a friend or some such - trying to stuff me as full of potatoes, beef, and other fatty foods as was possible.
And I gladly indulged. Part of being skinny was a bottomless pit of an appetite, one that was particularly insatiable when it came to meat. Whether it was steak or hamburgers or fried chicken or pork chops, if it once was alive then I wanted to eat it. And to eat as much of it as I possibly could.
That was how I exited, culinarily speaking, from the time I hit puberty til the time I was twenty five. Fatty foods, and as much of them as I could find, was always the menu of choice.
Then, one day right around when I turned twenty five, my metabolism stopped. Overnight I went from six-foot-one, one-hundred fifty-five pounds to six-foot-one, one-hundred ninety-five pounds. It took maybe a month to pack on that weight, the first I had gained in over ten years. And it was ghastly.
Seriously, I had man boobs. Moobs. They jiggled when I walked up or down stairs. I began busting out of certain shirts I had worn forever. I couldn't exercise - I never exercised growing up, so the prospect of doing so, now that I was grossly overweight, was just out of the question.
I had to improve my diet. And I really, really didn't want to.
But making those choices, the tough choices that we really don't want to make, is what makes us an adult. You get to eat all the fatty foods you want when you're a kid, all the mashed potatoes, all the steaks, all the cheeseburgers with extra bacon, all the ice cream, all the anything, because you're a kid. Your body can process tupperware at that age, for god's sake.
But when you get older you have to be realistic. Everyone's metabolism slows down one day, and the risk isn't just weight gain. You're also risking your health and your very life, and that's something everyone should be willing to take into account.
So I cut out the fatty foods. Dairy was the first to go, and red meat soon followed. Desserts turned from ice cream or pastries to fresh fruit. And within a year, I had dropped twenty five of my new pounds.