The numbness in my arms was the first indication something was wrong.

Throughout my life I'd find myself sleeping on my stomach, arms tucked under my body for warmth – something I no doubt learned in the Canadian winters when I was too lazy to get another blanket – but when I began to awake without being able to feel my upper limbs, I became concerned. After a few months of hoping it would go away, I finally resigned myself to seeing a doctor and got the news: my blood pressure was high and I was severely overweight.

Since I was a child I've battled with my weight. Always on the heavier side, I fluctuated between highs and lows, but I had never let it get overly bad. In fact, I thought I was doing quite well. When I had first moved back to Victoria after film school, I was the slimmest that I could recall. However, that was 5 years previous, and in the interim I had slowly piled on the pounds to finally reaching nearly 300 lbs.

In hindsight, I knew I was getting bigger. My purposefully loose clothes had gotten decidedly less loose, and I had all but stopped looking in reflective surfaces – I actively avoided the full length mirror in my room. Until the tingling started, I never let myself acknowledge the problem, and now I had to.