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Hey everyone, posting these pics today is kinda tough for me because it brings back a lot of stuff I’ve dealt with my whole life. You know, from the time I was just a little kid in second or third grade, that’s when I first remember feeling really self-conscious about my weight. It was my birthday party in August—we were all playing some game outside, sitting in a circle with our shirts off like kids do, and someone pointed out my stomach, calling it fat. Man, that stuck with me hard. From then on, it was like this cloud hanging over me—I skipped out on pool parties all through school, avoided anything where I’d have to show skin, and just felt like everyone was judging me. It didn’t get better as I got older. In high school, as a junior, my gym teacher decided to make an example out of me in front of the whole class. He weighed me right there—205 pounds at 17—and mocked me about how fat I was. That humiliation just piled on, and it’s been a battle ever since. I stayed a bit overweight into adulthood, hitting my heaviest around 275 pounds back in 2005. That’s when I quit stepping on the scale altogether because I didn’t want to face it, but I probably packed on even more after that. Eventually, I got fed up and worked my way down to 200-215 pounds, and I held there for a long time. People would look at me and think I was just a bigger guy, maybe a little chubby, but I knew deep down I was still carrying too much. I could feel it in how I moved, how I felt about myself. I’ve been a Christian since I was a boy—my dad’s a preacher, and faith has always been part of who I am. But then, bam—February 21 hit me like a ton of bricks. I was in a head-on collision with an undocumented driver going 50 mph; she nearly killed me. My heart actually stopped on impact—I had a full-on cardiac arrest. My chest started filling up with blood, and it was a slow bleed that got worse over time. I ended up in the hospital for eight long days. At first, they tried draining it with a chest tube while I was wide awake (talk about painful), but that didn’t work. My right lung was filling up, so on day four, they had to do VATS surgery to fix it, and then I had drainage tubes in both lungs to keep things stable. It was scary, and recovering from all that was no joke—three of my ribs had to be plated, and they still hurt like hell sometimes.