Elstro

It depends on the individual, but I have always thought that these have gone hand-in-hand. Throughout childhood and most of my teens I was quite slim, growing from a skinny child into a broad-shouldered yet reasonably thin boy. I had no confidence in myself at all because I struggled with bullying and fitting in at school (yeah bring out the violins). Although I was never bullied for my appearance, people thought of me as a freak  because I refused to be a sheep. In my late teens I went through a few dark times, and the thought of leaving sixth form (that’s high school to any American readers) a virgin was too horrific to bear.  I lacked the knowledge and confidence to go out on the scene, so I tried going online. First guy I tried to meet with when I was 17, and he came to my work…but that backfired, with an idiot colleague’s interference and subsequent harassment at work from local chavs. The icing on this cake was my talking to the guy online again that night. I was called “podgy” and “unfanciable.” And we never spoke again.Charming.

Me at 18 - Grossly overweight

So with the stress of striving for Uni, work, learning to drive, and the realisation that I would never get laid, came the comfort eating. By the time I left school in May 2007 I was 18, weighed a whopping 17 stone, heavier than I’d ever been in my life. Proof that being a teenage chicken doesn’t always guarantee men lining up to bed you.

It is the classic cliche you find in Take A Break, but it really took a set of holiday snaps from a holiday to Cornwall to shock me into seeing what I had become. I used to work at a shabby convenience store back then, and I use to lard up with junk food purchased every shift before going home for my tea. Quite often the entire contents of my un-necessary shopping would be shovelled down my gluttonous neck  before I went to bed. At the time I was finally in my first relationship, and I was the most arrogant, cockiest bastard you could meet. Now that I’d lost my virginity (unbelievable when you see how appalling I looked at the time) I thought I was the dogs bollocks and treated my poor then-boyfriend as a free rent boy, only seeing him when it suited me. I even went out on the North Bucks gay scene once to try and see if I could cheat (yeah, my delusion really knows no bounds sometimes), but as expected, people were repulsed by my drunken sweaty waddling.  I naively didn;t realise this at the time, but obviously there is only so much shit you can put someone through in a relationship before they walk away. My boyfriend dumped me via MySpace in July 2007 when I came back from holiday – but to be honest by then I’d got so enormously fat that it was only to be expected. I spent that summer immersed in GYUK chat rooms, with horrendously photoshopped pictures, trying desperately to see if I could grab male attention. Of course it doesn’t work,  I got bullied relentlessly online for my weight, despite never putting up one body shot. One incident sticks out most in my mind, and it still haunts me to this day: Some skinny shades-wearing queen (according to his display photo) under the username “gay richie 1991″ (if you ever read this, weep you shallow cuntbag) minced into a chatroom and proclaimed at large “the maximum jeans size should be a 36, anything over that is chubby and gross” and also came out with the corker “6 stone is the sexiest weight”.  Already feeling insecure and having already been on the receiving end of online fat abuse prior to this, I challenged him. Without a flinch, he called me chubby and gross (which I was anyway), despite knowing nothing about me or who I was.

My few forays onto the gay scene have always made me feel like shit. Partly because I never pulled, and partly because it makes me feel horrendously insecure. Throughout early 2008 my weight fluctuated, and during a long and depressing summer between first and second year, I went on a major exercise regime and by September I managed to go from 16 stone 7 to a respectable 13 stone. My shirt size dropped from an XL to an M but I only managed to shift 3 inches from my waistline, going from a 40/38″ to a 36″. I later dropped further to a 34″ waist around January 2009.

Me at 20: January 2009 - slim but still not happy

Second year I managed to keep the weight off, with only a few pounds gained here and there, but I still wasn’t Mr Gay UK material, and by that time I was terribly unhappy. I mhad managed to slim down, but I was being eaten away inside by the fact that I was approaching 20 and still had only been with 3 men. The moment I arrived back at Uni, every spare day was spent meeting men met  off gaydar. In my eyes, I felt I couldn;t be a proper gay unless I’d had a sexual track record as high as the Millau Bridge. My sluttiest phase (for me) was fucking one man a day, every day (& on 3 occasions, 2 men in 1 day) for one continuous week.  The sad thing is, for some, that’s playing it cool. That week was extreme, but I still averaged two new sexual partners a week for most of that time. In my eyes, I had 3 years to catch up on to gain the sufficient amount of sexual experience for a modern gay 20 year old boy…when I was 19. My weight and negative body image had held me back for so long and now that I’d lost a lot of it, I realised that I’d wasted my entire late-teens worrying about trivial stuff. As far as I was concerned, I should have been a skinny little twink, with a Toni & Guy haircut (which I did have by this time funnily enough) and getting it in the ass from about a hundred men. Not the flabby nerdish loner I actually was. I felt like I was a disgrace to the word gay, because I wasn’t a cookie-cutter scene queen. Even now I am shit scared of going into a gay club or bar for fear of the barrage of nasty remarks from skinny queens.

August 2009 - At my slimmest and happy with my life

Looking back on second year in my current state, I  long to be that shape again, even if AussieBum wouldn’t have been in any huirry to ask me to model for them. In recent months, standards have slipped somewhat and I have started to gain weight again. I am still wearing M-size shirts and 34″ jeans, but they are a tight fit as opposed to a loose fit. Since being with my boyfriend I expunged my neurotic lifestyle of Slim Fast and casual sex and finaly felt happy in my body and life.  In August-October 2009 I was regularly cycling and eating healthily, and in September I went on a vegan diet. The veganism didn’t directly result in weight loss, but it certainly added to it. Now despite now being a vegetarian, I once again am having flashbacks to 2007-8 and I know that my weight is starting to creep back up – on my 21st birthday I was dismayed to see that I had passed the 14 stone mark once again. The only upside to this weight issue is that just after Christmas, some 34″ jeans from Primark that I’d bought in November  wouldn’t even come up over my thunder thighs, but trying them again a fortnight ago, they actually fit me again. So I guess I have lost some pounds in the last few months, but gained plenty more (this was evident when I bought some new skinny jeans from Topman last month, and they would barely do up, despite my owning another 34″ set)- in short- I have to face facts, change what I eat and get my arse back on that bike!

April 2010 - After Weight Gain; you can see the M-size tee is under a heck of a strain

I don’t know what my current weight is, and what’s more, something is stopping me from telling everyone. I’m scared that people might sneer at me and turn on me for letting myself get so fat. I’m also aware that I may be judged for making blinkered attacks on my fellow gays and for being such a laughably virginal gay teen.

This probably is unusual for me because I don’t consider myself a typical gay blogger. Writing about my weight issues online has been a cathartic experience, espeically because I’ve correlated it with my experiences of gay culture, but I would really like to hear your views on this issue I’ve raised here.

Have you felt pressurised to be super-skinny because of what you;ve seen in Gay Times?  Have you struggled with weight issues yourself since coming out? Has anyone else comfort-ate? I want to know your views an experiences!

Feel free to comment, tweet direct message or email and I will respond to you as soon as I can (usually on the day, but bear with me, I will get back to you!)