I’m finally starting to lose weight again, after a month of watching the scale slowly rise. I’ve been avoiding dealing with it, because confronting weight gain is pretty much the worst thing ever. This, and, my editor being a mean asshole who yells at me all the time were solidly in the lead of the motivation list for getting my shit together. Also, I realized that I’ve been on this diet for a year now. A year, on the same diet. I don’t know if that’s just dumb, or super impressive -- either way I’m proud.

I definitely feel better about myself, and I’m not even talking about me edging my way back into the ‘wear t-shirts in public’ phase. Shit is getting done, I’m waking up at reasonable human hours, actually eating breakfast -- which I’m inexcusably bad at for being a fat guy -- and I’ve worked out enough this week to be acutely aware of almost every single muscle in my upper body.

Turns out that dodgeball is totally fun. Being a comically fat kid, that game was always ranked very high on the humiliation list, above tag, but below getting picked for the wrong team in anything “Shirts vs. Skins.”  I couldn’t throw for shit, which was secondary to the harsh truth that it doesn’t matter how much you try to dodge when your skeleton is surrounded by warm marshmallow filling -- you’re never getting all of you out of the way in any sort of quick fashion. Plus, a ball slamming a fat kid in the gut looks like someone getting Matrix-punched, and even I will admit that looks kind of awesome. Not anymore, though; throwing doesn’t seem to be a problem, and I still stand by the fact that I’m surprisingly agile for a hippopotamus. After the game the entire apparatus that makes up my throwing arm was screaming in pain. From experience, I was pretty sure that today was going to be a 24-hour hurtfest as rarely used muscles revolted against the abuse I subjected them to. Turns out I was wrong as shit; my arm just feels comfortably sore right now. Thanks, boxing!

What am I supposed to do here? After actually having a good week I’m somewhat at a loss. It’s really hard to hate myself. No wait, hold on guys, I found some pictures of super fat me from four years ago, when I was in Hawaii. Ha, awesome. Here's the original and my recreation, for comparison.