Although quite a few photos have been lost along the way, there are more than enough left to demonstrate how very much I’ve changed.
This was the first photo I had let anyone take of me in years, and it was shot several months before I started Atkins. My father took it with a cheap disposable camera, for no apparent reason. I half-believe he wanted to prove to his co-workers that he had a son, seeing how at that time I was so terribly reclusive.
Here I am just below my highest weight. I was very into photography at this time but had never taken any photos of myself. When you are over a certain weight, cameras and mirrors are things to be avoided at all costs. I took this as my Atkins before photo, but I had already been on Induction for a week. It was just before I bought a scale, so I’d estimate that I was 445 in this photo.
A friend got me to take this about four months after I started. I had lost about seventy pounds by then, but needless to say, this photo didn’t make me too proud. In hindsight, I see that my face had shrunk significantly. It would be another year or so before I ditched the glasses and the acne, though.
This was taken a day later, when my mother and I drove down from the mountain to see the Delaware flooding. I thought I was pretty stylin’ at the time, but my iridescent Fossil sunglasses and perma-hard nipples must have been alarming to everyone else. And I thought they were staring at my fat. According to the photo info, it was a day before my seventeenth birthday.
My father convinced me to take a vacation, so here I am, standing in front of the Niagara basin. I made it through the trip on beef jerky and no-bun McDonald’s burgers.
Five months and another body shot. This time at Longwood Gardens, a botanical center just south of Philadelphia that I highly recommend. My old graphs show I was 362 when this was taken, which means I had lost about 90 pounds.
After six months of Atkins, the results were really starting to show, as was the sunless tanner that my cousin turned me on to. Never use any product that promises to make your skin sparkle, because “sparkles” are actually glitter.
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