How did I get so big?

Mapping out the path I took to weighing over 570lbs.

A question I’ve started to get quite often is “How did you get so big?” There are many quick answers that immediately come to mind, but they tend to feel incomplete when I think about it. Generally my answers could have been summed up as “I neglected the basics for far too long.” This is true, but for those who want a more complete explanation, I feel I can do better. This is where I will be laying out everything in entirety to the best of my ability.

I think telling this story can help others consider what to avoid, but more importantly understand the pitfalls many experience on their way up. With years of hindsight and a more complete understanding of my situation, I think it’s crucial for me to understand the entire ordeal from start to finish. In preparation for writing this I decided to record a video of myself explaining it all from memory. This was helpful, but will not be shared. There are many details that could be elaborated on, but I’m choosing to focus primarily on how my weight was impacted over the years.

It feels like the logical way to answer this is to lay out my story chronologically. It certainly didn’t happen all at once. For over a decade things went from troubling, to worse, to horrifyingly dire. I’ll need to go back to my earliest memories to draw out the fullest context I can. Being as large as I was, is a horrific tragedy that I wouldn’t wish on others. The road to getting that big is painful and takes it’s own toll on you. It greatly saddens me that very often, relatives and loved ones often have no idea how to stop and reverse the downhill spiral. Not only does this add to the guilt and shame, but it also makes it easy to begin avoiding loved ones. My hope is that by understanding and sharing my experience, others can be better equipped to help themselves and their loved ones.

In hindsight, there are many things I can think of from my childhood that definitely had an impact long term. Only recent events have made me seriously take a look over those years and reconsider the impacts. I had a very controlling and aggressive father. He had a nasty habit of squeezing me and my brother’s hands until the knuckles moved around and hurt as a means of ensuring compliance. Like many other things, I didn’t at all appreciate the significance of what it truly meant.

My father didn’t work for many of my childhood years. Instead my mother had to provide for us, including working nights. I have many memories of him taking me and my brothers out of the house so she could sleep. Generally, these outings involved a fair amount of sugar or empty calories. Quite often we would go to a grocery store and get cookies, bread and soda. Other times he would take us to McDonald’s. I have many memories of having their pancakes during these outings. These moments were fun at the time, but I have a very different understanding of them now.

Over time, I began to grow a bit of extra weight. I remember my father bullying me over it. He would take me outside and have me jog, but then grab my stomach and exclaim “this is what you have to get rid of!”. Later he would then lecture me that running while fat is only going to hurt your joints. Despite all this, he did eventually join the military and had to spend time away from home. Many of my childhood troubles gradually faded away after he was out of the picture, including the weight. I became a very active pre-teen and ended up in very good shape by grade 9.

Teenage years

Being in such good shape, I certainly grew into having quite the ego. I was having loads of fun biking and swimming, and developed quite the invincibility complex. For much of my teenage years, I didn’t really think that I could get obese again. Part of this was because I was active enough that I truly never had to give any thought to what I was eating. I was proud of being capable and took it for granted. I really enjoyed biking and swimming. Since I could bike from home to a beach nearby I would go very regularly and even bring friends. I was notorious for hosting regular beach parties during the summer and I ended up building quite a close-knit group of friends that I had met all over town. Being a natural extrovert it was incredibly satisfying to bring cool interesting people I met to meet each other.

It didn’t last terribly long, because in Ontario, gym class is only mandatory until grade 10. While I was still active outside of gym class, that too gradually faded over the years, and I finished high school much heavier. I remember when I started putting on weight this time, it was schoolmates who would be the ones making comments. I also had a relative out-of-the blue ask me if I was depressed. At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary and perspective to explain what I was feeling or why. All I knew was that I had an outsized appetite compared to other kids, but always attributed it to my activity level. In hindsight, there was a constant nagging desire to feel “normal” despite glaring signs things were not normal.

After some drama, my parents finally split. This was the beginning of many years of a long and drawn out stressful saga. When I tried to explain it to others, the idea of a messy divorce dragging on for years sounded bizarre. At the time, I felt completely unable to get people to understand the stressors and pressures enduring it placed on me. This was strange to me at that point, but with information I have now it makes a lot more sense. Growing up, I couldn’t comprehend why my father who had so little to do with my life at that point, would always suddenly choose to involve himself out of the blue. He would do absolutely deranged things like stalk my friends and message them on Facebook saying bizarre things. One day he even showed up at one of my beach parties. That in itself is quite the story, but my twin brother thankfully spoke to the lifeguards and got the police to remove him.

It’s outside the scope of this post to explain, but from my early teens I was absolutely certain that my father had to be out of my life. Much of these years were constant frustration from seeing him given the benefit of the doubt. He was absolutely excellent at appearances when the situation called for it, he would often be in his military uniform on these engagements. Over the years, after more and more nonsense I only became much more certain over time that being distant was the right call. Despite my twin brother attempting to mend bridges, he too would experience things that showed me my resolve was justified. Even now, I know so much more that makes me incredibly grateful I was so stubborn about it from the beginning.

But no matter how strong I was, this took a toll on me. It interfered with my school life, causing stress in other areas. As I grew more insecure I began to distance myself from the community I had put together slowly but gradually. I genuinely underestimated the impact that not having a guiding loving father in my formative years would have on me. Without a real focus on activity, I let life changes get in the way of maintaining a high activity level and often relied on fast food for comfort. In many ways I see that I was replicating those experiences with bread and soda with my twin brother as we would chat over large amounts of fast food. This was one of many things I left unexamined until quite recently.

One such outlet for this nagging desire was to play video games late into the night. As a child I would stay up late talking to my twin brother (much to our parents dismay). But later when we had our own rooms I would stay up very late playing video games. While this on its own isn’t unusual for a millennial teenager, my problems were rarely in kind but rather degree. In hindsight I believe I was using revenge bedtime procrastination to hold on to some independence outside of my life that felt very out of my control. Onling gaming was also a great surrogate activity to fool myself into thinking I could still be social while retreating from the world. This really was the beginning of leaning in to my worst coping mechanisms for problems I didn’t understand.

While being overweight as a teen was a source of insecurity, it was nowhere near as challenging as things would get as I grew larger. When entering early adulthood, I was desperate to prove that I could seize control over my life and fix everything, but this was foolish when I didn’t even comprehend the scale of my own self-deception. Often I would get well-meaning approaches from strangers trying to offer advice. Some even had their own experiences with obesity. My mental response was always the same “that’s nice but I can’t do it”.

Early adulthood

As I entered the workforce, I was incredibly grateful to finally be making enough to live independently with my twin brother. I finally felt like I had the breathing room to build the life I wanted. The independence I craved for so long was finally mine. For the first time in a long time I felt like I could move on from my family troubles. This optimism was still muted by an undercurrent of denial. Even though I still hadn’t truly examined my eating habits, I had hope that things would begin to resolve themselves as they had in the past. I was still able to bike around to places, and spent some time having friends over which was really nice. I felt

I underestimated how my habits would worsen while working security. I became quite the stereotypical “obese security guard”. Shift work, with the occasional overnights took my bad eating habits and made them a great deal worse. Instead of fast food being an occasional splurge it became my normal way of eating. While things seemed reasonable at the start, eventually I would be clearing out enough food for a party over the course of an overnight shift. In an attempt to carve out more time for myself, I supported an idea pitched by a co-worker to adopt a schedule of only 12 hour shifts. This greatly condensed the logistics of working shifts, but I chose to take the overnight portion of the schedule. In hindsight this was a terrible idea.

If I had a better understanding of how to properly manage poor sleep, I think it’s something that could have worked out better. But in practice what ended up happening is that I added unexamined sleep troubles on top of my unexamined eating troubles. Part of this was a foolish idea that trading my present health for comfort in the future was something that would work out. Later, I finally began to understand that my size was beginning to limit me. One of the hardest moments was when I got on a bike and collapsed the front tire, having to carry it all the way home in sadness and shame. I would experiment with buying bikes that could carry me at a larger size, but that only worked so long.

This was where the maladaptive patterns really began to fly in. I had to work to keep my independence, so health didn’t seem like a high priority even then. I figured as long as I fueled myself with enough calories and caffeine to keep pushing, I could fix things after I purchased more ‘breathing room’ in the future. At some point, that opportunity did come. I was introduced to the “keto diet” and researched it as much as I could. Once I had a grasp of my plan and determined to turn things around, I started biking and doing keto. For a time, this worked really well.

With a stronger bike and armed with a plan, was energized. I would bike to work and back occasionally, reaching over 30km on those days. This was incredibly fun and I really felt like I was going to fix everything. The problem is that unlike during my childhood, I wasn’t confident enough to commute by bike during the Winter. One winter I stopped biking, and by the Spring I was no longer biking to work. The more I think about it, the reason this didn’t ultimately work out is because I failed to properly prioritize my health and focus on really understanding it. I was still looking for simple solutions to what was already a very complicated problem. The fact is, most people you tell about your problems will also give you simple answers. I am now beginning to recognize how changing serious problems is dependent on resolving other problems as well. For this entire time, I was so preoccupied with getting through the week that the idea I needed to take better care of myself felt unimportant. I was too afraid of admitting weakness that I became very weak in the long run.

Doing keto I lost 80lbs in some time under a year. It was a lot of fun, and quite gratifying. It felt great to continue not examining the roots of my eating habits and instead made progress with a “simple fix”. Sadly, this was cut abruptly short as I suffered a stroke that took half of my vision. This was quite the ordeal. Over the next few years, I would recover a quarter of my vision back but I am still worse off from it. The event and aftermath itself were incredibly stressful and I was uncertain of what to even do about it. I had a near-death experience that could have radically transformed my life in other ways, but I was scared. My primary thought during that time was “I don’t want things to change”. I wanted to keep working security and I wanted to stay independent no matter what it took.

In hindsight, I’m convinced now more than ever that the desire for things not to change is a very sophisticated cloak for denial. Even worse, many it’s clear that what I most feared was being forced to reexamine my life. If I had truly taken this event for what it was, I could have taken the opportunity to examine the problems that caught up with me almost a decade later. But that’s not the road I took. The truth was, it wasn’t clear at the beginning if it would happen again. I was in so much mental and emotional pain over the ordeal that I truly couldn’t handle thinking at all. I spend years under the fear that there would be a more fatal repetition, feeling powerless to make meaningful changes.

I was finally at the stage where I felt I had no choice but to ignore my problems and numb myself to their consequences. Tuning out the pain, sadness, and fear was a whole lot easier than facing it directly. I quit keto because I was concerned based off information shared with me that it may had been the cause of my stroke. That’s far from certain, but it was how I saw it. I regained all the weight and then some. This time, the feelings of guilt, shame, and horror were all too difficult to face. During this time I convinced myself that because of the stroke, if anything stresses me out, I should simply avoid thinking about it. This of course exacerbated by inability to tackle my problems head-on.

Prior to 2020, I moved from security to a daytime job at Canadian Blood Services. I felt optimistic about making better changes. Making more money helped me feel like I had more room to properly invest in making better choices. Without actually taking the time to learn what I needed to, it was hard to overcome my ingrained sense of hopelessness. I could certainly make changes and re-prioritize what to eat, but I couldn’t shake the compulsions that were driving me at that point. Despite all this, working at CBS meant a great deal to me. It felt like an honor to be part of an organization working to make people’s lives better. It was both an opportunity to work on my technical skills and do meaningful work. Ironically, this often helped me ignore what I was doing to myself.

Eventually, my mother suggested joining a weight-loss clinic that she found helpful for herself. I decided to give it a try. They generally take people and recommend a variant of keto to them which seems to work for a lot of people. Despite keto being familiar, and me being willing to try it, adherence was a problem. Each session I would explain that it was incredibly difficult for me to stick to the diet. Which was perplexing to me because I had done it successfully before. What was different this time around was that I was no longer mobile enough to exercise and eating habits were in much worse shape. When I took the time to explain the emotional and lifestyle factors that were pushing me to eat and I was outright told “we can’t help you, you should try therapy” which felt like an outright rejection. Convinced I was truly beyond hope, I gave that up and languished further for a time.

Eventually, my twin brother also got a job nearby the office. It was great to regularly drive in together and chat about things. I signed up at a nearby fitness facility (a massive complex with a pool, gym, and other activities) to start getting more exercise. When I went in to sign up, the employee (owner?) clearly had some sympathy for me and gave me a significant discount on the membership. It was an incredibly kind gesture that has not been forgotten. Just a few short months later, the sociological event known as the “pandemic” began as offices announced they were instituting work from home policies. Even if I would have worked up the effort to make it to the facility, the damage was already done. It seems a wave of cancellations prompted them to shut down their facility. As such, when the Covid Crisis began I felt even more certain that I was never going to be able to turn things around no matter what I try.

Covid years

Working remotely certainly helped me in many ways. I went for walks, sometimes spent time cooking better meals, but eventually that faded. I was consumed with despair over the fact that I knew the measures were doing more harm than good, and I wholeheartedly believe it was intended. My trust in the medical system as a whole was already very low, but this entire saga helped me write it off entirely. Of course, I was not able to “rise above” and make better decisions, eventually the convenience of food delivery apps took over. It is hard to describe my circumstances as anything other than merely giving up on an already dire situation.

On a daily basis I would wake up for work, order a large amount of fast food and drink over 6L of diet soda each day. During this time I let my insatiable hunger dominate my life. I was scared, I felt hopeless, and I felt angry. During lockdowns I had very few healthy outlets for any of this. It was already beginning to be difficult to walk at all, much less for enough time to actually feel any better. Despite working remotely, I was eventually terminated for refusing the “solution” the medical system was coercing people to take after being allowed to cause havoc on society. I worked at Canadian Blood Services long enough to gain a modicum of understanding over medical ethics. The fact that employers were being empowered to force medical products on the general public was a line I couldn’t cross.

It was fascinating and horrifying to meet so many people at “covid dissident” local meetups and encounter many people with similar emotional problems I had. This was an important opportunity, because it helped me see what I wasn’t seeing. Getting to know other people working to shine a light on what was wrong about the covid years has helped me a great deal. I’ve come across many trustworthy people who have given me guidance, and information that has been pivotal in my quest to solve these problems. Not everyone in ‘alternative heath’ is a great person, but the best people are in ‘alternative health’. As I came to learn more, I became cautiously optimistic that it was still possible to reverse my situation. I still had, and continue to have doubts and fears, but I now have a lot more hope.

It was only after the generous support of my loved ones, and a great deal of learning about myself and health that truly turned the tide. Throughout 2023 I noticed my mobility descending into making me all-but-bed-ridden. The love of my life did the difficult and super-human task of patiently pushing me to keep walking despite how incredibly difficult it was. This helped maintain the little amount of mobility I had. During this time, my younger brother confronted me with who my father really was. It was incredibly painful, but my entire life began to finally make sense. I was no longer capable of avoiding my feelings when all the anger and sadness from my youth was relived in an incredibly painful moment of understanding. My life was turned upside down, but when I looked it was turned right way up.

Inspired in part by my younger brother’s strength, and the generous support from friends and loved ones, I realized I had been backed into the corner of the life I lived. As I slowly began to bring together the resolve to take on this mission, I began exploring more ways to improve my many problems. With a wider understanding of my troubles, I recognized I had more to tackle than just weight. I had to improve mobility, tackle my emotions, gain control over eating, become more active, and learn to manage my weight. Last year, (2024) was the most challenging but rewarding year I’ve likely had ever.

The point of laying all this out isn’t to place blame. I could put it all on me, my father, or even society at large. A more nuanced position would be to mix it up in a way that sounded nice. The truth of the matter is that blame is irrelevant at this stage. I think it’s important to understand, but to use that understanding to make rational decisions. It is my responsibility to take care of my body as well as I can and I aim to learn how to do this as well as I can.

Epilogue

In case you’re not aware, I’m already making radical progress turning this situation around. I’ve lost almost 110lbs at the time of writing. I’m feeling much more confident I can continue to approach a healthy body weight. This time really feels different from previous attempts. My head is clearer, I have direction, knowledge, and an appreciation for the stakes. I feel extremely lucky to be able to take on this gratifying journey. I feel compelled to share not just the progress, but the process. This project has been all about me trying to document my experiences turning this massive problem around as best I understand it. I believe that people not only need examples that this can be turned around, but also to put into perspective how challenging it actually is.

Digital Autonomy & Fitness with Zachary Boissinot

I am excited to be healthy and capable for the first time in my adult life. In truth, I am a little scared of looking unrecognizable to myself. While I have no great attachment to how my body currently looks, I’m quite apprehensive about not being able to predict how it will change my appearance. It is certain, that going from over 570lbs to a healthy body weight will be a massive improvement. I’m looking forward to all the things I’ll be able to do again.