Chapter 1: The Beginning

Hello!  Welcome to my blog "290-100= LIFE"...just incase you're wondering, let me take a moment to explain what the title means.  At the age of seven I was a healthy elementary school student.  I played on the playground during reccess, and upon arriving home after school my mom couldn't keep me inside.  I was always outside playing games with my siblings or simply running around.  It wasn't long after this that I started gaining weight.  By the age of 16 I weighed over 200lbs.  My freshman year of high school I weighed around 250lbs.  However, people really never made fun of me for it.  Ocassionally I would hear someone yell "Fatass" or "Shamu", but that happened very rarely. 

I am a Vocal Music Performance Major at the University of Memphis and I've always said my voice and sense of humor helped to cover up the fact that I was severely overweight.  It was as though whenever I would sing people would forget, for that moment, that I was fat.  During middle school and high school I learned that if I could be funny and make people laugh with me it was save me the pain of having people laughing at me.  Therefore, my voice and sense of humor became my facades.  It hid what I really felt. 

I was never the "fat kid"...I was always the "kid that sings".  I hated gym class because I was always the biggest person.  However, for a large person, I could run fairly quickly and I was very competitive.  I always overdid things to make sure that people couldn't label me as the "lazy fat kid". 

Around my sophomore year of high school my mother underwent weightloss surgery.  It was not until then that I really stepped back and began to evaluate my own personal weight problems.  Sure, I knew I was fat, but I was also happy; or so I thought.

*For those of you that still haven't figured out what the title of this blog means I'll explain it:  At my heaviest I weighed in at 290lbs and my goal is to lose 100lbs by my 20th birthday...290-100=LIFE...get it? :)