Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I bought a pair of 25-lb weights last night. They were surprisingly difficult to get home in my bag--I was worried they'd rip the lining. Fifty pounds of cast iron on the subway is a pain. On the walk home I thought: You're bitching about two weights, but you carried three of them--above your current weight--in fat, all the time, for years. You've lost much more than this; you're carrying three more right now (four if you go by BMI). So at my top I had six or seven of these cast-iron bastards on my ass; now I have only three. No wonder it felt like my organs were ready to explode, and why I needed a special fatty-optimized chair (they make them special for cops) at work, and why regular flimsy wooden chairs had a tendency to explode beneath me.

Admittedly the three weights I've lost were distributed over my body with far more balance and efficiency than the two weights clumped in my bag. Nevertheless, carrying the dumbbells was one of those (physical) object lessons. If someone had made me pick up 75 pounds in said, "you're walking around with twice that on you all the time. Can you understand how it's bad for your body?" it might have helped me understand what was up.

I came home and addressed my weakling chest and arms, and decided I'll do pushups from the knees because, while I can do ten regular pushups, I do them with poor form and I can't/won't do reps because they hurt. It's humiliating to do pushups from the knees; I flash back immediately to elementary school, where that kind of pushup was prescribed for the soft child who couldn't perform the regular variety. Inside every fat person is a hungry child ready to enact a brutal revenge.

Weight: 296.25 lbs