Nobody Taught Me Anything

CHARGHE — Issue #003

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THIS WEEK’S CLIMB

Here’s the thing nobody told me growing up: sport was managing my body and I had absolutely no idea.

I wasn’t fit because I was disciplined. I wasn’t lean because I ate well. I was in shape because I played basketball six to eight hours a day and my body just burned through everything. I could eat whatever I wanted, drink whatever I wanted, and the game took care of the rest.

Then college ended. The game ended.

And I had zero tools for what to do next. Not one. Because nobody ever taught me anything about any of it.

Growing up, food wasn’t something I had any say over. My grandfather ate first — that was just the order of things in our house. My grandmother had passed away and my mom’s cooking wasn’t quite up to her standard yet. My grandfather knew it. Some nights he’d rather pour himself a bowl of cereal in beer with ice than eat what was on the stove.

The kids got the leftovers of food the man of the house had already turned down.

We were an Asian household. Rice. Whatever went with rice. Not pizza, not burgers, not any of the food that seemed to be everywhere outside the house. That stuff existed somewhere else. Not at our table.

I was the youngest of five kids, ten years behind the oldest. While I was in elementary school my siblings were already in middle and high school — totally different buildings, different worlds, nothing to do with mine. They weren’t mean about it. They were just gone into their own lives by the time I was old enough to notice.

I was surrounded by brothers and sisters and basically alone. Nobody close enough to follow or copy or learn from. Just me and whatever was in the environment.

And what was in the environment didn’t include anything about food, or fitness, or taking care of a body.

”I was the chubby kid. The fat one. In Cantonese they called it fei chai. Fat boy. I heard it enough growing up that it just became part of how I saw myself.”

People would say — you’re still growing. You’ll stretch out. And I just held onto that. It was the only hope I had.

Junior year of high school it actually happened. Six inches in one summer. I went from the chubbiest kid in the group to six foot one, a hundred and seventy pounds. The fat just disappeared — stretched across a frame that had finally shown up.

I wasn’t philosophical about it. I didn’t make any promises to myself or have some big moment of realization. I was just ecstatic. Pure relief. The thing that had followed me around my whole childhood was gone and I got on with my life and never thought about it again.

That’s the part that matters later.

College was basketball all day every day. Unlimited dining hall food — and for a kid who grew up eating his grandfather’s leftovers, unlimited was wild. Pizza every day if I wanted. Burritos. Burgers and fries. All the stuff I’d barely touched growing up.

I ate the way everyone around me ate. Drank the way everyone around me drank. That was always just how I operated — watch what the people around you are doing and do that. The sport burned through all of it anyway. Nothing caught up with me.

Then I graduated. Got a job. Moved in with my girlfriend.

And the game was just — gone.

First real job. Nine to five. Office. Hour commute each way. The days suddenly had a completely different shape and I had no idea what to do with myself inside them. Work sucked. Coming home was the only good part of the day. My girlfriend managed a restaurant and every night she’d come home with food — her comped meal she hadn’t finished, other managers’ comped meals, the soup of the day that was getting poured out at closing. We’d eat, drink, play Mario Kart. Repeat.

”From my grandfather’s rejected dinner to my girlfriend’s unfinished shift meal — I had never once sat down to a meal I made for myself. The scraps just got a little fancier.”

I didn’t see any of that at the time. I was just eating dinner and playing Mario Kart.

The other thing working in my favor — if you want to call it that — was the style back then. Everything was baggy. Oversized basketball shorts, large shirts. That was just the look. I’d never owned clothes with an actual size. Everything was just large. So the weight gain was basically invisible, even to me. On a tall frame it distributes across your whole body instead of landing in one obvious place.

No single moment where you catch yourself in the mirror and go whoa.

It just slowly filled in.

170 became 180. 180 became 200. 200 became 220. 220 became 242.

Seventy-two pounds. No decisions made. Just defaults running on autopilot.

And somewhere underneath all those large shirts and all those restaurant leftovers — fei chai had quietly moved back in.

Here’s what I want you to understand about all of it.

Nobody taught me. That’s true. That’s not me making excuses — it’s just the honest accounting of what was and wasn’t in the environment. The tools weren’t there. The models weren’t there. The conversations weren’t there.

But I was thirty years old standing on a scale reading 242 and the absence of those lessons was still entirely my problem to solve. Nobody was coming to fix it. No growth spurt this time. No sport to burn it off invisibly. No baggy clothes big enough to hide from it forever.

It might not have been my fault that I never learned.

It was absolutely my responsibility to start.

The moment I wrote that number down — 242, in a notebook, on a page, in my own handwriting — it stopped being something that was just happening to me. It became something I could look at. Something I could push back against. Something real.

That’s the whole power of putting it on paper. You can’t unsee it. You can’t keep pretending it’s somewhere else. The number lives in your head as this vague, heavy thing you avoid. The second it’s written down it becomes just a number. And numbers can change.

Make it real by putting it down.

Month one I copied the workout from the magazine exactly. Month two I started scribbling in the margins — this exercise hurt my shoulder, that one I liked. Month three I wrote my own plan from scratch. A crumpled notebook. Pen. Checkboxes. That’s the arc: copy, tweak, own. But the reason Write matters — and I didn’t understand this until much later — is that it makes the change real. You can’t read your own handwriting in a workout journal and still think of yourself as someone who doesn’t work out. The page is the proof. The number you’ve been avoiding, written in your own hand, stops being a shadow and becomes a starting line. Even one line counts. Even a number. Even a declaration nobody else will ever read. Write it down and it exists. Until then, it’s just something happening to you.

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION

What’s the number, the habit, or the pattern you’ve been keeping in your head instead of putting on paper? What would change if you wrote it down today — not to fix it, just to finally see it?

You probably didn’t have every tool either. Most people don’t. Nobody sat you down and explained how any of this works — bodies, food, momentum, what happens when the thing that was managing you disappears.

That’s not the point anymore.

The point is you’re reading this. Which means somewhere, something shifted — or is starting to. And the single most useful thing you can do with that feeling is write it down before it fades back into the background noise.

One line. One number. One honest sentence.

That’s Receipt Zero. That’s where the climb starts.

See you next week.

— The kid who ate the scraps and eventually learned to cook

Know someone who could use a real reason to start? Forward this to them.