Approximately seventeen percent of American children and adolescents between the ages of two and nineteen -nearing thirteen million kids- are obese.  I am one of those kids. Struggling with weight gain has been a big trial in my life; for years, I had no idea why I was always overweight. At age five old I already began to hate the scale. I remember sitting on top of the crinkly white paper and hearing my doctor tell my dad that I am in the 90th percentile for weight which is probably due to all of the “McDonalds French fries you kids eat.” And yet even though I never ate McDonalds French fries, his words have been imprinted in my brain ever since. I thought he must be right because he is highly educated; that meant that being overweight was my fault. Ever since I have been extremely conscious of my weight. Trying new diets and methods always hoping I would drop into a new percentile.  The longer nothing worked, the more I became frustrated and fed up.  I began to convince myself that being overweight was permanent and that there was nothing I could do. So I did nothing for a while until my weight spiraled out control. And this didn’t make me any happier. Being a teenager is hard enough but being an overweight teen ads is an entirely different kind of insecurity. You can’t cover it with concealer, or dye it a new color. It is the first thing people see when you walk in the door and it is the first thing you notice when you face yourself in the mirror. After years of skipping check ups because I feared being weighed so much, when I was 15 I was made to face a new doctor and a new scale. I was told again that I was still overweight. How could I be overweight since I was five years old? This threw me into whole new pool of frustration and sadness. I felt defeated. I had tried everything I was told to do in the past yet nothing worked then, so what else was there to do? I was sent to nutritionist after nutritionist and doctor after doctor, but nothing was working.  It was then that my dad was fed up, too, and decided to take me to Dr. Robert Lustig in San Francisco. Within seconds of my appointment, I was diagnosed with insulin resistance, and although that was one of the most upsetting days, it also was one of the best days of my life. For the first time, I wasn’t the one being blamed for being “fat.” For years I blamed myself for being overweight, because I knew of no other cause than myself. But after I saw Dr. Lustig I not only learned that being insulin resistant was causing excessive weight gain, but also a solution and a path to follow that would better my health. But if it was so obvious to him, how come it was never diagnosed with this earlier? This is a question with an answer I still do not know, but what I do know is that if I can help one person who is struggling with the same issues as I am, I will be forever happy. I hope I can not only answer your questions, but lend a shoulder to lean on through the S.O.S. community page. A safe space to ask questions, vent, and find support. This website is near and dear to my heart and a way to help those like me who have been stuck in a maze with no guidance to the end.