Okay, I’m sure you can all see that the TeamRAGE crew are pretty dedicated athletes and are in great shape. But, unfortunately, I do not fall into this category.

I have never been in great shape. Actually, I was overweight most of my life up until I graduated from high school. When I was a kid, I loved eating. My parents constantly bought me and my brothers take out because it was cheap and convenient. My parents had immigrated from Vietnam after the war and have been working the same labor intensive job for almost 30 years. The days were long and exhausting so it was easy for my parents to buy us Happy Meals after they came home late from work to appease our appetites. But, as a result I became overweight.

Being overweight didn’t quite hit me until I was about 8. There was a boy I really liked around that age and we used to weigh ourselves and compare our weight from time to time. We were the same weight for months until one day, I was a couple pounds heavier than him. I remember him gloating that he was lighter than me. It really bothered me. I didn’t understand why i was heavier than him. Shouldn’t I be the lighter one? The next time we weighed each other, he remained the same but I got even heavier. And that’s when the kids and adults started talking. I stopped comparing my weight with him because it was clear that I was gaining more and more pounds.

I was extremely insecure about my body for a long time (and still am). I was constantly teased about it. I couldn’t walk by kids without getting hurtful comments such as “breaking the bed/chair” I was sitting on or kids chanting “Jenny Craig” as I walked by. There were countless days where I came home crying over it. I rarely went shopping for clothes. If I ever did, I always had to do it fast and buy the largest size they had in stock. Feeling anxious whenever I stepped into a clothing store, I couldn’t stop imagining that people were pointing and laughing at me as I tried on the clothes. I felt the only thing that helped me hide my body was to be swimming in name brand sportswear t-shirts in men’s XL. When I finally bought jeans, my largest jean size was a 14 (32″).  I can’t even tell you what my highest weight was because I had stopped weighing myself at 150lbs—which wasn’t even at my heaviest. I was only 4’11″.

My mom always told me that if I had not started to lose weight by the age of 13, it was over for me and that I would be fat forever. Thanks mom, for the wonderful encouragement. But I did however, lose the weight—only after I turned 13. To be honest though, I did it by accident. Well, it was never my goal to lose weight. After the 10th grade, students at my high school had the choice of taking PE or not. I absolutely hated PE. All my life, it was my least favorite subject because I was uncoordinated, couldn’t run for the life of me, and afraid of any kind of sports ball! I cowered every time a ball came near me and picked last for every team sport since kindergarden (seriously, they need to stop doing this in elementary school because it is so bad for the self esteem!).

But anyway, of course I opted out on PE for my final two years. But I also knew that if I didn’t have any physical activity in my life, I would continue to spiral down this overweight path. My dad had bought a treadmill on a whim because he wanted to be more active. But like I said earlier, my parents work a very labor intensive job. Naturally, my dad left the machine to collect dust. Now that I didn’t have PE on my time table anymore, I made a conscious decision to run on the treadmill everyday to make sure I got my daily physical activity. I started out running for 20 minutes. My first day running was hard. I was beet red, sweating beads and gasping for every breath after only a minute of running. I absolutely hated it. But I knew I had to do this.

As I got better, I started increasing my time. I ran for almost a year and without even realizing it, I had dropped a ton of weight. My pants were getting bigger! In that one year span, I dropped through a range of sizes—from a 14, to 12, 10, 8, and then finally, a 5. At my lightest (5’3ft, 107lbs), I was a size 3. Even though my pants were shrinking, it didn’t hit me until people from my past ran into me and either didn’t recognize me or were blown away by how much weight I had lost. I even had one girl tell me that her mom was telling her that I had lost so much weight, that I was like “model skinny”. I wish!

Since then, I have been up and down with my weight. As soon as I started college, I found myself so busy with school working on projects, that I began horrible eating habits and stopped exercising. My pants started feeling tighter and I began to notice my double chin returning. Luckily though, I caught it early and started running again. But because I had stopped working out for so long, it was extremely hard for me to get back into it as I found myself bored and looking to see results. And when I didn’t see them, the frustration began. Working out was a lot easier when I wasn’t paying attention to how much I was losing.

This was only the beginning of my body battles. To keep me on track, I’m doing a monthly body log on SMR. So until then, here are my goals for the next month:

Goals for October:

• Workout at least 6 days a week.
• Integrate conditioning into my workouts
• Improve yoga postures
• Improve kettle bell swings and lateral step-ups

Jennifer Duong

Jenn works in design and loves to cook and try out new recipes! She specializes in coming up with great recipes for RAGE and also designs, illustrates and maintains majority of this site.

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