Pretty much everyone in my family is overweight. It is incredible. We are even born overweight, I get the impression. I mean, just a few months ago, my sister had a baby. Little Jeff is already ripe for a diet. Don’t worry; we are not some cult that puts babies on diets. Just saying. He is a big boy. Somewhat like the Michelin guy, you know, the tire guy. It always seemed to me that when we take Christmas pictures, we set the camera a few feet further away than other families. And I don’t mind it really. We are all happy, we love each other and holidays at our place are always a feast. I love it.

And for a long, long time, I was the black sheep in the family, so to say. In a family of Costellos, I was the Abbott. I was also the figure of fun at most of our family gatherings. My mom would always laugh at how thin I was. My dad always told me that a man is not a man unless he is at least 200 pounds. And I took it all without even dreaming of getting offended. To tell you the truth, I was a bit happy that I was on the lean side. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with my family, or other people who are overweight, but the modern stigma of obesity does rub on you, at least a bit.

In fact, over the years, I have become quite vane and until I reached 40, I was quite a good-looking guy. And then, all of a sudden, pounds started piling up. No matter what I did or how much I exercised, it seemed that every bit of food finds his way to my stomach or the love handles. Now, I don’t know if my feeling depressed a lot of time came because of this, or was it vice-versa. In any case, I soon started feeling really down a lot. Suddenly I became the Steve Buscemi among the Costellos. Out of a sudden, I started taking naps more than a few times a day. I got really depressed about everything, my work, my family, everything.

It was on the following Thanksgiving that my family held sort of an intervention, only not that formal or anything. Namely, some of my cousins and my sister told me it was about time I did something about that. We got to talking and it turned out that I was mainly depressed because I was getting heavier. They had a huge laugh out of it and that is what got me out of the rut. One of my cousins also recommended I try with this stuff called Slimberry, a supplement that you take with your meals.

I did and I never looked back. First of all, I felt the energy coming back. I didn’t need any naps anymore and I felt alive with new-found energy. In a month I lost about 5 pounds. Over the course of the next few months, I managed to lose another 10. It was amazing. Slimberry did all of that. At the next Thanksgiving, I was back to being Abbott and I loved it.