Arousing Fears

Yesterday I had some trouble sleeping in the evening. I got home from work by 3:15 a.m. and had to be up today at 9:30 a.m. so I could make it to the run through I was supposed to attend on time. My goal was to go to bed at 4 a.m., but I got horny again and was still wide awake so ended up tiring myself out with masturbation (again) until around 4:45 a.m. when I was finally tired enough to sleep.

The sad thing is that I didn't want to jack off again at first. I was just out of control horny and knew from experience that it wouldn't go down even if I wanted it to.

The first time I masturbated last night, what really got me rock hard was thinking about how I was hoping to look in the future, and what kind of doors that would open for me. I was on adam4adam looking at all the hot, exclusive sex parties in the Los Angeles area that I would be laughed out of now. Apparently it's a bit of an L.A. phenomenon, and I've even seen some of them billed as celebrity/athlete sex parties. Think the hottest guys in L.A. under one roof. I was imagining how hot it would be to be one of them.

The second time I masturbated, it was after doing some research about skin tightening. I've had this fear for years that no matter how hard I try, I will not be able to lose enough fat to look toned without plastic surgery.

My exercise backstory

Let me explain a bit about how I became the person I am today. When I was very little I was skinny and a picky eater. Apparently all I would eat reliably was cottage cheese. My parents were worried about how thin I was, and over several years trained me to always finish the food on my plate, regardless of whether I was hungry or not. However, they didn't provide me an incredibly healthy diet (I remember a lot of fast food in my youth) and as I got older, especially in my teens, I would sneak a lot of sweets and cookies without them knowing.

I was on swim teams in the winter and summer, and did no exercise in between. I was an average swimmer; usually got second or third place in most of my races, and very rarely placed first. I never made it to the higher levels of competition than the local meets. I was taunted by the other swimmers a lot because I was so different (I was a shy boy who went to a private school, so I didn't know my teammates as well as they knew each other) and was beaten up a lot. Needless to say, when an opportunity to work a job instead of swimming popped up, I took it with little hesitation.

I never really did much else than that. I was forced to play soccer one spring by my dad, who was the stereotypical "yelling father" on the sidelines. I was bad at the sport and was miserable being yelled at the whole time, so my parents never tried to make me do it again.

A turning point in my body image came when I was 13. I was made fun of by one of the swim team members for the rolls of fat around my gut when I sat down. I never really looked at myself as overweight or unattractive until this point. I never spoke to anyone about it, and I was really anxious about it. My release valve for anxiety at this point was overeating, and I honestly never put my weight and my eating habits together. I kept ballooning up over the next four and a half years, peaking at just over 200 lbs of fat before my 18th birthday.

I started losing weight fairly rapidly immediately after coming out. I did nothing to lose the weight, it just started coming off. I came out to myself around April 2000 when I was 200lbs, and by the following November when I came back from college for the first time, I was at 135. I put on no muscle, and my skin was still loose everywhere. I still thought I was fat even though none of my clothes fit anymore. But when I got home and went to a party with many of my former classmates, so many people had no idea who I was. And their new first opinions of me were much more favorable than they were in the past. That hurt me a lot, and it drove home the unfortunate bias towards attractiveness in all areas of life.

I've exercised on and off since then. The month before I met my boyfriend I was in the gym twice a day, cardio in the morning for 30-45 mins and lifting at night for an hour or two. It was really intense, and I toned up quite a bit. After we met, I stopped that intense regiment, and then stopped going at all for well over a year.

While I was unemployed this summer, I started working out again, and really cemented a nice workout routine at the local Y. I saw some slow progress, but after three months I decided I was hooked. I haven't had time to work out a lot this month because of my job, but that's why I'm starting this new plan when my contract ends.

While I'm in the best shape of my life, I'm still not toned the way I want to be. I think the only way for me to get toned, fortunately or unfortunately, will be to add a lot of muscle.

Here's the thing: I want to be hot. I'm sick of looking in the mirror and not liking what I see. Sure, I'm attractive enough, but I want to feel like my body is something nice to look at as well. With all this extra skin, I still feel fat. Lately I've been taking to grabbing a fistful of skin around my waist, legs and ass and stretching it taught to get some sort of idea of what I'll eventually look like.

I've felt like my weight problem is going to be a cross I'll have to bear for my entire life. But the thing I've been trying to wrap my head around is that it doesn't really matter all that much that I used to be fat. I don't look fat in clothes now. And while I'm not the hottest guy out there, what does it matter? Well, even though it matters to me, here's the deal: it's not like I can afford liposuction right now anyway. So I just need to keep moving forward with my fitness plan. Maybe my skin will firm up, maybe it won't. But it definitely won't if I do nothing, and I know my overall health level will improve the more I exercise and eat right. So I'll keep doing the right thing, and if I don't get the results I want after years and years of work, I feel like I deserve the surgery.

I know it's superficial, but is it too much to ask to look at myself in the mirror and like what I see? If so, it's something I'll have to work through over the years to come. However, in working backstage with many mostly naked actors, most of whom are much hotter than I am, I have to say that when analyzed closely, each one has some sort of body flaw. So one of the things I'm going to have to come to terms with is that I will never be 100% happy with how I look; there will always be something I want to improve. And I think that's what will keep me fit for years to come. I need to make this about the journey and not the destination.

All the best,

j