Of how it all started: School Life

Lets rewind all the way back to my school life for a brief history lesson.

Right back to the beginning. I was a very chubby child and grew up having to live through being "the fat one" in middle school. It was not a happy time for me. I must have managed to block out most of it because I have remarkably few memories from middle school at all.

I remember that growing up, I lived in a house where my mum always mentioned trying to be healthy, but my parents were never really able to follow through on what they talked about. They were both pretty big themselves, and food was very much used as a treat - "If you've been good, you can have sweets". I guess a lot of kids grew up fat this way, with parents who meant well but were far too ready to dismiss their children's  weight gains as "puppy fat".

That's what everyone used to say it was - "puppy fat" - but I didn't think so, and I guess eventually mum started to think otherwise too because at some point there was a definite shift towards trying to get us all healthier. I remember one day I came home from school and mum declared that we weren't having chips for dinner (fries, for the yanks) because chips were now only going to be once a week. Nor could we have a fry up, because she wasn't going to fry much anymore, instead opting to grill the sausages, bacon, and anything else she could fit under the grill.

It was far from a complete change in diet, and arguably wasn't really enough, but luckily at the same time I also had a sudden growth spurt that never seemed to end, so by the time I went to Upper School I was extremely tall and super, super skinny.

Fortunately at the same time as graduating onwards to my next school, I was also being moved to a different family of school, so I was to meet a whole new set of friends who had never known the fat version of me. The fat kid had been all but erased from history, but it wasn't quite that easy to shake off the way I felt and in all honesty I was always "the fat kid" in my head for a few more years.

My 4 years at upper school were very, very active. I may have been thin when I started, but I was in peak fitness by the time I left. My friends and I had become quite heavily into basketball, and it didn't seem to bother us that none of us were very good at it. We played before school, after school, at lunch time and at both break times. We usually went out cycling every night after school too.

We didn't do it because it was exercise, we did it because it was fun, but nonetheless I was very fit at the time, and I didn't have an ounce of body fat on me.

I weighed just over 150lbs. Considering my height, this was arguably too small, but I felt good and I felt like I looked good.

I had finally shaken off the fat kid persona from inside my head.

This was late in the year 2000. Life was good.