August 2021

Hello, everybody, Antoni here, and I am really happy to tell you that I am now in my healthy weight range. After years of diet yo-yoing, the wavering motivation, the denial of my own weight, and the realization of why I had to lose the excess weight in the very first place, I have finally accomplished what I have wanted to pursue for the longest period of time. Barely two years ago, I was at my second heaviest weight of 17 stone 3.6 lbs (241.6 lbs or 109.6 kg). I realized that it was time for major change, which further propelled my realization that I can live on less food, avert binging, be more physically active, and find healthier alternatives to my overall lifestyle. Keeping up with my weight loss progress one year on, I ended up losing 3 stone 1 lb (43 lbs or 19.5 kg), thus making me land at 14 stone 2.6 lbs (198.6 lbs or 90.1 kg). Speaking to all of you today, I have now lost another 3 stone 1.2 lb (43.2 lbs or 19.6 kg), thus making me now 11 stone 1.4 lbs (155.4 lbs or 70.5 kg) and clocking my total weight loss at 6 stone 2.2 lbs (86.2 lbs or 39.1 kg). I am so ecstatic and proud of myself for making it this far and I am greatly elated to know that I have a new lease on life which will last for a long duration of time. My whole struggle with my weight has not been a story that was entirely new to me. I used to enjoy all types of food as a child, but the awareness of my weight started when I was doing ballet as a child from 5 to 10 years old. Being in ballet may have commenced my love of the performing arts, but I realized that I was one of the chunkiest children out of all my former colleagues in the ballet school I attended. Even when I looked back at the performances I was in, most notably one of the children from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker”, I realized that I could be a whole lot slimmer and I was even told that I should endeavor to lose a bit more weight if ever I were to pursue a career as a danseur. Thankfully, this was not going to be the case because, as much as I enjoyed my ballet classes after school and on the weekends, I knew fully well that I was not going to be a danseur in the future although I had an idea of how I should be able to control my body, especially when it came to dance, when it came to my participation in various school plays, and getting myself into physical activities such as rock-climbing, soccer, and basically participating in playground games with my school mates, classmates, and friends. With my experience of participating in a multitude of school plays and immersing myself into playing the violin, I knew how much I had to polish my craft in order to gain a sense of passion and determination through the fields I liked. My weight might have been a part of how I was going to look on stage, but it took a backseat to how much I had to practice my lines and be familiar with stage blocking and my growing ambition to want to be in the entertainment world. The increased awareness of my weight began to perpetuate when I was a 12-year-old sixth-grader. Sure, I did start developing acne when I was an 11-year-old fifth-grader in the later stages of schooling, but the discourse of my youth was revolving around my weight. Ever since I tuned in to a lot of infomercials focusing on fat-free cooking, muscle-toning gadgets, and a huge bevy of weight loss products, I became more aware of what I was eating, even though I did not buy any of their products. A part of the motivation of why I wanted to lose weight and be acne-free mainly involved my passion for the performing arts, my dream of wanting to become an actor, a singer, and a voice actor, and how much scrutiny there was going to be should I step in front of the camera and/or go on stage. Coupled with my increasing love for anime and my first experience traveling as an unaccompanied minor to Oxford, I was starting to fully convince myself that I could and should be a lot thinner if I was more mobile and if I kept the will for independence top of mind as my motivation to keep losing weight and be healthier. This thought of me wanting to become thinner perpetuated when I was a 13-year-old seventh-grader from becoming more conscientious of calories to looking up to a lot of the Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, GMA, ABS-CBN, FOX, and ABC stars of the early to mid-2000s to even aspiring to become as thin as Jeff McCallister from Home Alone 1 and 2 and Edmund Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe respectively played by Michael Maronna and Skandar Keynes. Stretching the thinness appeal was my fascination of goth clothing as a means for me to express my creative and artistic side, especially where my love of literature and anime was concerned, and the equal appeal of having a dark, prosaic, gloomy viewpoint of the world around me. I even remembered during my middle-school swimming lessons that my instructor noted how loose my swimming trunks became on me, considering that I also tried to flatten my belly with the use of a Nestlé cereal drink which claims to reduce bloating. My middle-school battle with my weight was not as egregious as I thought it was because of how it was more of a prioritization of vanity rather than the health implications I would have acquired if I did not maintain a healthy lifestyle. Things were about to change when I…