Back in August of 2004, I got my degree in Psychology and went to this wonderful and expensive party. 38 people just became Psychologists that night, and in the next day morning, surviving the hangover, we had another thing in common. We all left the Graduation Students Statistics to join the Unemployed Statistics.

When I woke up that morning, what I saw in the mirror was a jobless obese loser. I had weight issues during all my life, and in College they didn’t get any better. I joined it, I was 18 years old and had 187 pounds. When I finished, I was 24 years old, and weighted 230 pounds.

I must say something before continuing. My psychology degree hadn’t prepared me to the overwhelming self-esteem issue I was facing. All I could see in the mirror that morning was garbage. Nowadays, I can’t say what was the worst: jobless or obese?

Here, in Brazil, we have job opportunities that are called something like “public concurrence”. It consists in written tests, where you compete scores with thousands of other people, and the ones who get the highest scores are hired to work for the Government. There, I saw the opportunity to solve at least one of my problems.

After failing in four of those tests, my self-esteem was completely crushed, and by that time, I believe my real problems started to show.

Self-esteem issues can develop and contaminate every aspect of one’s life, and that is exactly what happened to me. Once I wasn’t being able to get a job, my focus turned to my weight. Nowadays I’m sure that at that moment, I wasn’t seeing 230 pounds on the mirror anymore; it was like 500 pounds. Emotional states have hard influence in a person self-image, and every time I looked to myself, driven by that anguish, I saw a huge pregnant mother hippopotamus. That was when I became sick.

Back then, I had already tried every kind of diet available. From Weight Vigilantes to the Cabbage Soup, I tried all of them and I didn’t believe in any, considering that none showed to be effective. So, there was only one solution I believed. Mathematics.

Exactly; Mathematics is what I did. I started counting calories and making notes of them. I used the following principle: a person can’t get fatter if ingesting fewer calories than the body needs. I started with 1000 calories daily. One month later, I was eating 600 calories, and in another month, something like 300 to 400 calories. I also knew that, for losing weight, I had to fractionate the portions so my metabolism would always be working, so I kept the whole day eating pieces of nutritionally empty crackers, carefully weighted and measured so they wouldn’t have more than 10 to 15 calories.