The therapist asks, Is there anything else we should know about?

No (except I’ve been gaining and losing weight for years, probably since I was eleven or twelve [when I became so anxious about food that I forgot how to swallow for a spell] and I know you’ll say that’s just part of growing which is true I guess, but I also should tell you that when I was in the sixth grade my dad decided to get really fit again—which is something he did sometimes—only this time in particular he really got into it, spent a year or more training to ride in a century—which is a 100 mile bike ride—and he did it, but what I should also probably tell you is that part of this was the thrill of having a son who was old enough to safely tag along to the gym, and so we woke up every morning at 5am and drove fifteen minutes to another town where we started on the treadmills and then hit the machines: four sets of lat pulls and chest presses each, alternating, then four sets on the pec deck, then over to the military press machine for four quick sets before heading to the leggier quadrant of the room for four sets each of quadricep extensions, hamstring curls, and leg presses—and after that it was down the stairs to the free weights section with all the mirrors and the big men who grunted and yelled and slapped each other’s backs—I should tell you I fell in love with that kind of camaraderie, too—and there, it was four sets of rows, a few sets of bicep curls, calf raises until crying cramps, then a water break before we trudged upstairs for abs and left for home where we’d each hop on the bathroom scale in turn (after our respective showers, because the scale’s body fat function spat out a lower number for some reason if you were a little bit damp), and finally eat a couple eggs before I went to school; this went on for nearly a year before he stopped and I began to work out on my own, doing pull-ups every night and keeping a notebook where I recorded my exercise—I was twelve at this point—and, see, my goal was to do twenty thousand pullups in a year, which meant doing at minimum about fifty-five a night, and every day I’d shower and hop on that scale just a little damp until by eighth grade it said something like seven or eight percent body fat, and by junior year of high school after I’d started lifting real weights and slapping men on the back in mirrored rooms, it would read something more like five or six percent body fat and the summer before college I started using creatine too, which is technically safe to use for a period of five years according to the google searching I did at the time, and I started to get bigger and bigger and then I was bigger than my dad and people started to say things about it and ask for my workout plan and my dad kind of stopped caring about fitness and I’d spend a few hours by myself at the gym every day and when I drove home I’d step out of the car and pinch the bottom right part of my abdomen and soon I couldn’t even get any skin between my fingers and the scale kind of stopped knowing what to say back to me when I stepped on it other than to tell me that I scared the grown men who found themselves in a mirror next to me, so much so that my dad decided he needed to get fit again and so he did and that’s when I started to really shrink), I say.