I have always struggled as the “fat kid”. My search for happiness led me to food

I have always struggled as the “fat kid”. My search for happiness led me to food and I still couldn’t find it.

One of the greatest lies we tell ourselves is that our happiness is conditional:

“If I get that promotion at work, I’ll feel fulfilled and finally have happiness!”
“My life would be complete if only she loved me back!”
“If I lost weight, I’d be happy.”

When I was a kid, I used to tell myself this lie every day. I felt incomplete, and different for feeling so much. I felt like my sensitive heart had a hole in it waiting to be filled. I tried filling it with religion, love, lust, friendships but these proved fleeting when the person or support system would go away.

I filled it with addictive behaviors: video games and other obsessions but mostly I just filled the holes and numbed the pain with the greatest distraction that was always around: food.

Feeling sad? Grab some ice cream. Want to celebrate? Grab pizza! Bored? Put on a movie and grab some popcorn. Angry? Get some Doritos. That’ll fix it.

I believed I was broken and missing something so I kept looking until one day I came face to face with reality and a blank tennis ball and I knew the truth for the first time:

“I didn’t need anything to be happy or healthy. I had everything I needed and the time to live the life I was born to live had come.”

I stopped looking for perfection and focused on practice. I stopped using food to bandage wounds and started really healing. I stopped blaming and pining and feeling not good enough.

I didn’t become better losing 250 pounds. I became the man I’d been the whole time.

(quote by e.e. cummings)