Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [14]
Ben Goldsmith’s Story: Weight Loss Was an Unexpected Benefit
Being overweight is difficult at any age, but it’s particularly difficult, I think, for those of us who were overweight as children. Comments about our weight by strangers, family, and friends—however harmless they were intended to be—were incredibly painful reminders of a reality over which I had virtually no control and wanted so badly to change. As a kid I didn’t know what carbohydrate or calorie meant. All I knew was I looked different from my friends, and I wanted more than anything to fit in.
I became self-conscious about my weight pretty early on. As a ten-year-old, I dreaded swimming lessons at summer camp because it meant taking off my shirt. I avoided looking down, particularly in pictures, because I knew it exaggerated my double chin. Riding on the school bus, I’d keep my knees together and try to take up as little space on the seat as possible.
My diet was never all that different from anyone else’s. We mostly ate dinner at home and only had fast food occasionally. My parents packed the same ham and cheese sandwiches in my lunch that my friends’ parents packed in theirs. But, for some reason, I always tended to be a little heavy.
Even though I had friends and a loving family, being overweight as a child made me feel sad and alone. It’s a little hard to explain, but I always felt like I was different and that there was something wrong with me. The sadness went away when I did things that allowed me to forget about my body, and there were a few things that could always cheer me up. One of them was being around animals. Animals saw me the way I wanted to be seen: as a person just like anyone else.
Like many high schools around the country, my school allowed students to leave campus for lunch. And, like most schools in the United States, there were several fast-food restaurants within walking distance. Beginning in ninth grade, my friends and I ate fast food for lunch virtually every day. Not surprisingly, that’s when I went from being heavier than my friends to being significantly overweight. By my junior year, at roughly five six, I weighed just over 200 pounds.
Having been overweight my entire life, I think at some point I just gave up. It didn’t matter if I was a little heavy or seriously overweight. I was a fat kid and that wasn’t going to change. The best I could do was eat the food my friends ate; at least that way I’d be one of them. At one point during my sophomore year, my friends invented a weekly event they called Meat Fest. Meat Fest, held at lunch on Fridays, entailed eating as much of as many different kinds of meat as we possibly could. My Meat Fest meal of choice: A double bacon cheeseburger with gyro meat and sausage from a local fast-food joint that was conveniently located on the same block as my high school. With fries and a Coke, I think it probably cost around $7.
I was never a particularly sedentary kid, mind you, even during the glory days of Meat Fest. All of this happened prior to the proliferation of wireless Internet connections, high school kids with cell phones, and Xbox Online. Hell, I was on the tennis team! I was a normal American kid eating normal American food doing normal American things. As I would come to find out a couple of years later, low and behold, the problem wasn’t how often I ate or how little I exercised. The problem was the food I chose to eat.
On a spring day during my junior year of high school, my friend Katie and I had plans to catch a movie after school, and she’d invited a friend of hers, Ryan, to come along. The plan was to pick up Ryan on the way to the theater, and Katie and I decided to stop at McDonald’s before heading to his house. While we were eating,