Imagine if you, the reader, were standing in front of a scale; you were in the fifth grade and weighed 155 pounds, and your dietitian said that you needed to lose some weight, FAST.  What would you think? Well, what I thought was that I would always be like that, that I would never be able to change, and that I would be stuck out of shape for the rest of my life. But that isn’t what happened, and here is how that all changed.

Back in the the fourth grade, I started stress eating because I was really struggling with the work back in the day. While I was obese back then, and caused a lot of problems both physically and mentally, I was completely paranoid and self-conscious.  It didn’t affect my actions outside of school until one year later when my mom started becoming concerned about my weight. She said how I was getting 13 minute miles at school, and how I got out of breath just from going up the stairs, so she took me to a dietician.

The results weren’t too great.  After the doctor got her results, she told me the immensely harsh truth. I was five foot two inches and 155 pounds. Tell me, how would you react in that situation? Would you be frightened, or scared for you life? I sure was, and it lead me to all of these gremlins in my head. And with that truth, the  dieting started to come into play. Salads, workout camps, running, all of it. However,  in spite of their valiant attempts to get me fit, none of it worked. And my parents seemed to give up...

But around the same time something that everyone hates started to come into play, running. My mother, without my consent, signed me up for modified cross country in seventh grade. When I heard this I flipped out. Aside from my older sister, my entire family was a running family (still are today), but at the time I wasn’t a runner of any sort! I was part of a running team for fun, but I always came in the bottom three.

I thought that this would be a nightmare! And at first, yeah it was, it felt like torture. My legs felt like garbage after each practice, I always felt bad about myself, being in last, and it felt like a one and one half hour practice was five and one half hours! I wanted to stop as soon as humanly possible. But I soon started to notice something…

After the first meet that I had drastically improved my running speed by about three minutes in only about two weeks! Not only that, I enjoyed the peaceful blowing of the winds when running, and just being outside was a pleasure. And things only got better from there; my mile time changed from a ten-minute, to a seven-minute mile! I felt like I was on the top of the world! I still run today, and I've improved all my times by one minute (in mile time).

So I have come a long way with my weight, but what I’m trying to help you understand is to never give up. Take my story for an example. I was 155 pounds and five foot two inches, but with hard work, I lost over forty pounds and gained six inches, and I’m not in my most fit state yet. Just because something is hard, like losing weight, or writing an essay, doesn’t mean that it is impossible.    As long as you put your mind to it, and work hard, you can succeed, I know it.

-Robert Cusato