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Vanity Pounds
"From elementary school on into high school, kids suddenly had a buffet of insults to use, and my lack of self-confidence made me more than willing to eat them up."
By Quincy Mosby
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Through dieting and exercise, Youth Radio’s Quincy Mosby – within a span of one year – has taken a transition in his life. He has lost weigh dramatically. Quincy receives a variety of compliments from his peers, but his immediate family just won’t approve.
For a lot of people, the holidays are a time to reflect on everything they’ve done the past year and to plan for what they will do in the future. For me, it was a time to reflect on how big I had gotten.
You can’t tell by looking at me now, but last year at this time I weighed 312 pounds. Even though I’m happy about what I’ve achieved, it seems at times like my family is more skeptical than proud of what I’ve done.
Until I turned ten, I was the scrawniest kid in my class. But a combination of my family’s horrible eating habits and a lack of physical education during junior high school changed all that. Suddenly, physical activities I used to enjoy, like kickball and freeze tag, weren’t fun anymore. My parents never made me feel bad about my increasing weight, or suggested I eat healthier. With my peers, it was a totally different story. From elementary school on into high school, kids suddenly had a buffet of insults to use, and my lack of self-confidence made me more than willing to eat them up.
My friends and family tried to help by saying things like, “You have a great personality, and if girls don’t see that they don’t deserve you.” But when I stepped on the scale and saw that I was over 300 pounds I couldn’t be angry at anyone but myself. And at that moment I decided that nothing was going to keep me stuck in that overweight body.
At first, my mother was very supportive in helping me lose the weight the right way. She tried her best to fix healthier meals, and she asked me to write down a list of diet-approved foods for the grocery list.
But it seemed like the closer I got to my weight loss goal, the more annoyed my family, including my mother, became with me. “What can you eat?”, my mother and sister would say when I wouldn’t touch the Chinese food we ordered every Friday. And when I hung out with my dad, he wasn’t much better. Right after he’d complement me on how good I looked, he’d follow it up with a comment about how unlikely it was that I’d maintain these eating habits. It seemed like the roles in my world had reversed. Just as I was beginning to receive all this positive attention from outsiders, at home, I’d have to defend what I was doing and prove to my family that I wasn’t starving myself. It felt like now that I didn’t need my family to heal my bruised self-esteem, they didn’t know quite how to interact with me.
Some people might feel it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to worry about a child going through drastic weight loss. But I don’t feel mine have the right to be concerned about my weight now, considering all the unhealthy habits they passed on to me as a child. I understand there are a lot of factors that went into the way we ate growing up. At times, we didn’t have much food. So when your aunt shows up with three cheeseburger meals, you don’t send her back for hummus. Even knowing this, it’s still irritating that my family had nothing to say when I was on the verge of diabetes, but is riding me now that I’ve worked so hard to be healthy.
But I have to admit that their criticism does help with my resolve. I’m not sure if I could have made it as far as I have without them constantly teasing me. Just like I couldn’t have come to the point in my life where I decided to lose the weight…without the insults from my peers.
So I guess I should be thanking my family. Because there are those times when I’m by myself and could just go downstairs and pile a plate with a mountain of spaghetti covered in ranch dressing. It helps knowing that if I gain five pounds, even though the people who are outside my home won’t notice, I know my family will, and that they’ll comment on it. For now, that’s one more reason for me to keep turning down that greasy Chinese food every Friday
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