Kyle Hepp

October 24, 2007

Let’s see, where were we….

Oh yeah, I was in high school living a pleasantly plump, quite happy existence as a star athlete. Like I said before, in high school losing weight really wasn’t a huge issue for me because I was satisfied with what my body could do, rather than judging it based on appearance.

I got to college and everything changed.

I attended the University of Tampa. If anyone has ever been to Tampa you’ll know there are basically two demographics that live there. One half of the population is composed of people over 190 years old who have sunbathed so much during their years of living in the Sunshine State that their wrinkles are at least 3 inches deep. The other half of the population is made up of college students/really, young rich families mostly coming from up North who were so repressed from years of winter coats, hats and boots, that they now want to show off as much skin as possible and therefore work out incessantly in order to have the body to show off. I was SHOCKED by how attractive everybody at my college was when I first got there. Maybe the reason I was never unhappy with my weight in high school was because I hadn’t realized girls could have six packs abs. No self respecting female at my high school ever walked around in low rider jeans and a shirt so small/tight it looked like my sports bra. Girls at UT went to their 8am classes like that. At first I really wasn’t bothered by the fact that my body looked nothing like that. In fact, my first year was spent lounging in the cafeteria (which has delicious food, btw) eating massive amounts of french fries and ice cream. I was also introduced to the wonders of alcohol and partying. Shots of tequila and nights spent playing cards (aka drinking games) were not doing wonders for my physique. I was no longer physically active so I went from working out pretty much every day of the year in high school to doing absolutely nothing in college. Unless you count walking around campus, drunkenly pulling the safety alarms and then running away from Security as exercise. Fun? YES. Healthy? Not so much.

To add to my growing weighty concerns, I started working as a waitress at an Italian restaurant that year. We got a free meal for every double shift we worked and I usually worked 4-5 doubles a week (yeah, I worked and partied MUCH more than I went to class. I actually would schedule myself at work during times I knew I had class just because it was so unnecessary to actually be there for the lectures). So I was eating HUGE plates of pasta, sipping on Coke (regular, GASP) out of the little cone cups at the beverage station on my downtime (and since the restaurant was well on it’s way to being out of business by the time I started there, we had a lot of those moments) and drinking really low-cal drinks every night like chocolate martini’s.

All the muscle I ever had turned to a blobby mass. I was really upset about how I looked and felt. I was tired all the time, and unable to do things I could do before. Like a simple backhandspring, for instance. I used to be able to do up to 20 in a row, I could traverse the length of the football field flipping. I tried to do one out in the common area in front of my dorm one night thinking it would be a piece of cake like always. My arms gave out and I fell on my head. Granted, I was drunk, so that probably wasn’t the best measure of success (note to self: although drunken gymnastics always sounds like such a fantastic idea it never ends pretty). I was horrified at what my body could no longer do. I used to be able to do backhandsprings even when I was too sick to walk (momentum people, it works wonders).

At my largest I’m sure I weighed more than 180 but I never got on the scale to find out. All I know is that my size 16 jeans were a too small. WAY too small. I didn’t buy new ones, I just wore sweatpants constantly and convinced myself it was the college style.

I decided I needed to lose weight. But, I had no idea how. Exercise was something I had always done with the end goal of winning. Individual sports were totally foreign to me, as was the concept of working out just to get yourself healthy or thinner, not because you were at practice with your teammates. And don’t even get me started on diet. I mean, bagels as big as my head are really healthy right? I was clueless.

The first thing I did was switch from regular Coke to Diet Coke. I lost 10 pounds instantly and I could fit back into my size 16′s. People started noticing the loss (although that might have more to do with the fact that I started dressing in real clothes again, rather than constant oversized hoodies and sweatpants). I felt good about my “diet,” and wanted to continue. I just wasn’t quite sure about the next step. Fortunately, I had just changed my major from International Business to Sports Management (GENIUS decision, btw, because there’s a huge market for people like me in a country where girls don’t play sports and even on men’s sports teams they’re too corrupt/macho/or totally lacking in funds and infrastructure to hire people who know what they’re doing). I signed up for fall classes and one of my requisites for Sports Management was a Biokinetics and Conditioning. I had NO clue what that meant but a friend told me that it was like field day back in elementary school, you got to go to class in workout clothes and compete with the other kids. The only thing missing was a blue ribbon for the winners. Well, she obviously had a different teacher than I got because my Biokinetics and Conditioning class was NOTHING like the gloriousness that was field day.

On the first day of class we had our fat measured with pinchers. In front of everybody. At UT most kids who are Sports Management majors also play on the school’s athletic teams (UT is a very competitive DII school). So in a class with boys who had 7% body fat and girls with 14% my 34% really stood out. We were told that almost our entire grade would be based upon creating a fitness plan based on the things we learned along the way in class, and proving that it worked by following our own fitness plan and measuring our results at the end of the semester. The next class was a two mile run, and we were told we would be doing the same at the end of the semester as well, to show our progress. I didn’t come in last. I beat a group of chain smokers who were also anorexically thin. How’s that for a win?!?

I finally realized that I really and truly was not even close to being able to call myself athletic anymore.

To be continued…