Running Header: Personal Essay 1

Personal Essay
Seyed Hejazi
Arizona State University (Downtown Campus)
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Abstract

This essay was written for ENG 101 for Michael Pfister at the Arizona State University

(Downtown Campus). The essay is about an obese child who got made fun of throughout school

and got sick of it and lost a lot of weight to make himself feel better.

Keywords​: ASU, Downtown, ENG 101, obesity.

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There is a reason I picked Human Nutrition as my major in college. There is a reason I

want to go to medical school and become a doctor. There is a reason I eat healthy and exercise

regularly. All of these are because I was very obese as a child and most of my teen years. As a

child I was extremely overweight. Ever since kindergarten, every year that followed after, it

seemed like I just gained weight exponentially. It did not help either that our family friends or

my relatives thought it was “adorable” and kept giving me food by the plateful because I was a

“growing boy”. Maybe that was one of the many reasons I just kept on getting bigger. What no

one knew however, was that I got bullied for it.

Let me

tell you

something, little

kids on the

elementary

school

playground can

sometimes be

the meanest and

most nastiest

people, and say the meanest and nastiest things. If anyone on the playground is out of the

ordinary in any sort of way, they will make fun. When I was in elementary school I was a very

short and very round child. I basically looked like a ball. Some would say, my pediatrician for

example, overweight and obese. All I remember from elementary school (besides the carefree
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and fun life of not having to memorize polyatomic ions and their charges) was that the kids I

thought were my friends, would call me names and tease me. They would call me things such as:

big boy, pumpkin and even straight up just call me fat (this is what I looked like at the time of

such name

calling). The

kids would also

pick me last for

team sports, and

everyone in the

world knows as

a child that that

was the absolute

worst feeling in

the world. An absolutely heart dropping, punch in the gut, kick in the nads type of feeling. One

specific thing I remember was from first grade. We were all working on some arts and crafts

project and two kids come up to me. They ask me to jump up and down. After I did that (not

quite sure why I did it but hey I was a kid) they both walked away snickering. After I watched

them leave and snicker without saying a word, I realized they asked me to do that because they

wanted to see a fat person jump up and down because everything “jiggles” and that was funny to

them. I went home and cried that day. I knew I was bigger than all the kids, but I still didn’t like

it when the other kids brought it up.

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One thing, to this day that no one knows besides my parents, is that I was so fat I had to

get surgery. And it wasn’t a surgery that immediately pops into your head when you think of

what surgery an obese person might need. I had to get surgery on my testicles. There I said it. I

won’t go into too much detail because you’re probably drinking a cup of coffee while reading

this, but the reason was because my body fat percentage was so high, a fat cap formed around

one of my testicles and it was unhealthy and an issue. Let’s just say there is nothing wrong with

the boys now, but that was one thing I have never told anybody and one of the factors on why I

wanted to lose so much weight.

When I went to middle school, I thought things would change, they didn’t. Even though

I didn’t go to the middle school all of the kids from my elementary school went to, the new

middle school I went to, the kids did the exact same things, name calling and picking me last in

sports. When I was on my middle school basketball team for example, I never played more than

five minutes a game. My dad asked my coach why, and my coach simply said he can’t run as

fast as the other boys. That was heartbreaking. As well on my middle school flag football team,

my coach would put me on offensive line all the time because “I was bigger than the rest off the

kids” and would never let me play receiver. Even though all the other kids on the team got to

switch back and forth between both.

When I started high school I was five feet eight inches tall and two-hundred and thirty

pounds. I mean damn that is just too big for a freshman, at that point I even weighed more that

my dad, and I actually got really upset when I found that out. I would like to sit here and say it

was all muscle and that I had the biceps and physique of Arnold Schwarzeneggar, but that would

just be a lie, it was all fat unfortunately. Anyways, I was very uncomfortable that first year and
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very shy. I would refrain from talking to people out of fear that they would make fun of my

weight, and it’s not like I didn’t try to lose the weight, I would do a little bit of cardio everyday

but the weight didn’t seem to budge. My sophomore year I thought things would change, and

they did, but not the extent I wanted. One of my friends was on the swim team the previous year

and told me to join. I joined for two reasons. One was that I enjoyed the sport of swimming,

second was that I thought it would be a good way to lose some of the weight I was yearning to

lose. So the swim season went by (August to November) and I was pretty happy at the end

because I lost ten pounds and it felt good, but I was still very overweight and still had a lot of

work to do. Junior year is where everything changed for the better and I blossomed. I was on the

school swim team again, but to just drop weight as fast as possible, I basically starved myself the

whole swim season and then some. For the next six months I ate nothing but two peanut butter

jelly sandwiches a day and swam for two hours. At the end of the season I lost another thirty

pounds and was less than two hundred pounds. I was so happy and felt amazing, for once in my

life I felt like I didn’t have to worry about my weight and it genuinely made me feel overzealous

and over the moon. I was so happy that after the school season I joined a club team with that

same friend who wanted me to join the school team the year before. By the end of my junior year

I was where I wanted to be. I weighed one-hundred and seventy pounds and was happy. Losing

all that weight actually fixed a lot of issues I had in life. I was happy, I became more social and

wasn’t afraid to talk to people anymore, and I had a lot more energy. Maybe I could even give

Arnold a run for his money. I kid, but in reality, I was more than happy. No one made fun of me

anymore and I had genuine friends at that point too. Now I just know how it’s important to live a

healthy lifestyle too.

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Fahimi, P. (2013, April 7). Photograph. Retrieved from

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=509499415774777&set=pb.100001441706298.-220

7520000.1538065198.&type=3&theater

Fahimi, P. (2012, April 7). Photograph. Retrieved from

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=338799399511447&set=pb.100001441706298.-220

7520000.1538065420.&type=3&theater