I grew up skinny. Unfortunately, I also grew up anxious and depressed. And I was born with a serious sweet tooth, so soothing my troubled brain with sugar was a regular event. It’s not an exaggeration to say sugar got me high; it was my drug of choice. The combination of my genetic predisposition to craving sugar and my tendency to self-medicate with it resulted in what I can only describe as an addiction. I grew up a sugar addict.

Food in general was comforting to me. In addition to chocolate and ice cream, I loved pizza and pasta. I just could not get enough of those calming carbohydrates. And my pattern of finding comfort in food stayed with me into adulthood. My skinniness, sadly, did not. Maybe my metabolism just slowed on its own, or maybe the antidepressants I eventually began taking stimulated weight gain (some psychiatric medications are notorious for this), but whatever the cause, I started struggling with a bulging belly in my mid-twenties.

I am not a sedentary person. Long ago I recognized that strenuous exercise elevated my mood and calmed my anxiety. Getting my heart rate up on a treadmill and then pumping iron was not only mood-boosting but therapeutic. I’ll be honest: I do not enjoy working out— I have to drag myself to the gym. But I do it because I have no other choice. My medication cocktail is not enough; I have to exercise in order to keep my particular demons at bay.

I started working out regularly at about age 20 (I can’t explain why I didn’t do this before; perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate the benefits on my psyche). While I never approached a Schwartzenegger physique, I did pack on a significant amount of muscle. I had mildly bulging biceps, unusually pronounced pecs, and a serious six-pack. This self-assessment may be an exaggeration—my body image has always been a bit out-of-whack—but I was fit. I had a 32-inch waist and certainly no sign of a bulging belly.

By age 24, though, I started developing a paunch. I remember getting a rented tuxedo for my older brother’s wedding, specifying what I thought my measurements were, and finding it a surprisingly tight fit. I’d lose that bulge by being a little more careful with my food consumption (especially sugary indulgences), but it would intermittently return.

I don’t recall struggling that much with persistent weight gain until I went to work for a large monster of a technology company (the name of which rhymes with “hell”). The work environment was demanding and stressful. It provoked anxiety (and occasionally despair) in me, and my diet descended into poor meal choices like lunches at Wendy’s (a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke—often polished off with a Frosty).

Like many of my peers in Hell, my body morphed into an apple shape. I remember there being a weight-loss challenge one year, and I weighed in at a whopping 250 pounds. But I was overworked and stressed all the time, so I didn’t lose any weight during that challenge.

I should mention that I was still exercising somewhat regularly during this time (as far as I remember, anyway). It’s just that diet is a bigger factor than exercise when it comes to weight management. So I was a solid 250 pounds, but I was still fat. And because I had some muscle on me, I chalked up my increasingly high BMI to being muscular in addition to having some excess fat on me. It was probably a delusion.

While my job in Hell was intellectually stimulating and sometimes almost satisfying, I hated the environment. Anyone familiar with having a job in the corporate world is familiar with the lack of work/life balance and the strain of meeting performance metrics. I hated the constant pressure of the place, which was only made worse by bouts of mandatory overtime and intermittent asks (more like demands) to eat our lunches at our desks. So I actually left the place…more than once.

I went backpacking across Europe in between bouts of working for Hell. I’d spend four months wandering around, walking sometimes for hours per day. I didn’t eat large meals, and I quickly lost weight. When I returned home after the first of my extended excursions, I’d lost 30 pounds. After my second long backpacking trip two years later, though, I hadn’t lost much weight at all. I’d weighed roughly the same before this trip as I had before the last, and I’d done just as much walking during it, but I remained kind of chunky throughout this last excursion.

I was in my mid-thirties when I was alternating working for Hell and bouncing around Europe. Two things happen when human beings reach that age: metabolism slows down and muscle mass diminishes. (There is new research that challenges the first of these assertions, but my experience was that it became harder to lose weight in my mid-thirties).

After several years of toiling away in Hell, I finally quit for good and went back to school. In fact, working there drove me to it: I couldn’t imagine living the rest of my life being just another (perpetually discontented and burned out) cog in the wheel of a giant corporation. And I could never accept not finishing my education (as a biology major, I had dropped out of college after completing less than two years).

I’ve always been a student, and going back to school was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I absolutely thrived there. My brain was stretched and stimulated in ways it hadn’t been for years, and my mood and stress levels were kept in check with regular trips to the gym between classes. But by this time, there was no denying it: I was a chunky monkey. I tend to underestimate my chunkiness, but I think my weight during the earlier years of my return to school was probably around 220 or 230 pounds. I was “fat but fit.”

I spent several years in school and didn’t pay much attention to my weight. I figured that as long as I was going to the gym regularly, that was good enough. However, there came a point where my workouts got shorter and less intense, and my belly began to expand. I remember noticing this when I had a hard time fitting into a desk in one of the classrooms at the university I eventually attended (I’d started my journey back to school at a community college). Granted, the desks didn’t seem to be made for bigger adults (the university’s liberal arts classrooms were particularly in need of renovation), but I remember this situation bothering me. I guess I started minding my eating a little better, and that bulging belly shrunk a bit.

What happened during my last year at the university was sort of terrifying. I’d been on an SSRI for years to keep my OCD and depression at bay, and the medication seemed to stop working (a phenomenon known as tachyphylaxis). My on-campus psychiatrist changed up my medication regimen a few times, but nothing seemed to work (there were likely other factors that contributed to my downward slide). I even tried ketamine infusion therapy, but my experience was that the positive effects lasted for only about 24 hours, so I stopped. For the entire school year, I felt like I was just trying to hang on to my rational mind (I did not succeed).

The reason I mention this harrowing time is that by the time I was nearly finished with school, I started rapidly losing weight because I was so anxious and depressed that I could no longer figure out what to eat. I distinctly remember standing in between the aisles of frozen food in Trader Joe’s and not being able to decide on what to get. So, for a period of about five months, I literally ate the same thing every day: an apple for breakfast, some raw broccoli and hummus for lunch, and a Trader Joe’s black bean burrito for dinner. Again, I’m not very conscious of weight changes in my body (even if they’re drastic), but I started having to buy smaller and smaller belts to keep my pants up. Eventually, when I finally got on a scale, it became obvious what was going on: I had lost 70 pounds.

How I finally emerged from the extreme anxiety and depression that plagued me during my last months of school is a long story that I don’t particularly care to rehash here. My point in sharing the story is that I lost a startling amount of weight in a relatively short period of time. I did gain that weight back (all of it) over the course of the next several months, but I think part of the reason for that was because I was aware that I needed to regain at least SOME of it (and I just didn’t stop).

Fast-forward to a few years later, and my weight started to get out of control. I regularly indulged in excessive sugar consumption (I blame the pumpkin muffins at Whole Foods especially), and that was undoubtedly the biggest factor that contributed to a relatively rapid rise in size. Additionally, I made a new friend who also had a terrible sweet tooth, and we brought out the worst eating habits in each other when we got together. There were a lot of movie nights with ice cream or chocolate (or both), and we both started packing on the pounds (she was of normal weight when I met her; that is no longer the case).

After having to buy new, larger pants on a few different occasions, I finally decided that I’d had enough. That’s when the idea of chronicling my weight loss attempt arrived. I needed something to help me be more consistent about healthy eating habits, make me think about my relationship to food, and hold me accountable. Thus far, it’s been a great tool for fulfilling all of those goals, and it’s made me sit down and write every day. The ultimate goal is, of course, to lose a significant amount of weight, (specifically 80 pounds in the next four months), and, while I’ve got a long way to go, I think I can reach that goal.