Image 3/Side effects 4

This is a post I am not sure is worth writing. I am not sure this is something that necessarily contributed to my remaining overweight, or even made me want to stay fat. I think it’s more of a flaw with my body in general, that gaining a lot of weight only made worse. Seriously I am sitting here and I don’t like thinking about this, because it’s something that is now part of the way my body looks and will always look, it’s not going to change with the weight loss and it was there before the big part of the gain, and it sucks.

I have always had bad skin. It dries to the point of bleeding, I had acne that could be described as horrifying when I was a teen, and it is generally easily irritated by all manner of things. So it shouldn’t have been any surprise to me when I found the first stretch mark. This started to happen when I was 16/17 during a summer when I was in the best shape of my life (excluding currently). I was getting strong, could run 10 miles and was very healthy. However, it seemed that my muscle growth was outstripping my skins ability to cover them. So the first place the marks showed up were on my biceps, shoulders, and chest.

What’s better is that the kind of markings my body gets aren’t those barely noticeable ones (in comparison) some women get during pregnancy these were deep angry red things, that looked like some large animal raked its claws deep into my flesh wherever they popped up. If I had trouble taking my shirt off before, you might as well have painted it on after the red lines started crisscrossing my body. It got so bad that I begged my doctor for some solution to get it to stop. When someone would catch a glance they assumed I had got into some accident related to farm equipment, which I never outright denied, because its better to have scars than stretch marks.

Now because of how far I let myslf go before I decided to get back on the straight and narrow, it appears as if I spent most of my youth in knife fights for all the ugly furrows on my chest, arms, sides, stomach, back, shoulders, legs, and just about everywhere else. If I managed to get ripped one day I doubt you would ever see more skin that a well fitting tshirt would reveal because my body underneath is some ugly to me. In truth I doubt most people would comment, and my wife (great to me) never mentioned it to me once, but in my mind it is all I see when my shirts off.

This is something that I am going to have to work on for a long time I think. I may be ready to stop eating like an idiot and to work myself to the bone, but I am still several steps away from seeing anything but my flaws whenever I look at myself.