Peter had in front of him a huge selection
of pastry. As the correspondent of the most important magazine in the business,
he had the advantage of being able to go to any bakery in the city and being
treated like royalty there. The owners would normally go out of their way in
order to please him, showing him their latest innovations.
They often tried too hard, combining too many
flavors in one single piece of confectionery or trying to make a fantastic
setting for the dessert when the flavor was not really the best part of it. And
Peter always had the last word. He had eaten it all, everywhere, and his palate
was respected by every single person except, of course, the people who he had
damaged with his articles.
He had being the cause of closure of more than
one bakery, cupcake store and tearoom. With his writing, he really crushed the
lives and aspirations of many people, all of whom only had the simple dream of
baking the best desserts possible. It seemed like a simple dream, an easy one
if you will, but it wasn’t because the competition was tough and everything had
already being done. Nothing was good enough and every single idea had to be
checked thoroughly in order to know if it was really original or just another
copy.
However, Peter was just another man. He only
had this kind of power in a small community, where they all knew who he was.
For many of his friends and people that knew him, Peter was just a big guy
obsessed with desserts and he had been that guy since high school. However,
people respected him because he had turned his love of sweets into a career and
that wasn’t something just anyone could do.
So you would think he should have been a happy
person, doing what he had always wanted which was eating and writing about it.
Well, Peter certainly wasn’t what you could call “happy”. The first reason was
that he was overweight. He had always been and had been mocked tirelessly by
his fellow classmates back in school. He had been called all kinds of names and
had asked his parents to educate him at home because he couldn’t really take it
anymore. He felt trapped.
That was when he started learning more about
what he ate and his interest in food grew and in turned into a career. He
wasn’t just a fat guy who ate desserts for a living. He was also a man that
knew every single nuance of every ingredient that had ever been using in the
making of any sweet good. He could tell the ingredients of any dessert after
just one bite and that made him a huge star in the small world he had entered
in. But he was still mocked.
Of course, it was always the people that he
had attacked with his articles. They felt the best way to attack him was to
create rumors or to write pieces about him online. With the Internet, he often
saw videos appearing all over the places with pictures of him doing pig sounds
and things like that. People were never really creative when it came to
insulting. They always attacked the same spot and, to Peter’s chagrin, it
always worked. Because he was fat and he didn’t want to be.
But his job depended on him eating. He
couldn’t just stop eating and then go on with life as normal. That wasn’t an
option. Besides, he loved eating and the flavors and everything that had to do
with confectionery and sweets. He had never properly learned to do it himself
because he thought it would be counterproductive. In other words, baking
himself would not help his problem and would only fuel the hate that people
felt towards him
So one day, in secret, he decided to try
several ways to lose weight. The first attempts were somewhat light, relying on
a diverse set of pills and massages and kind of “magical” techniques to become
skinny. Of course, those didn’t work at all. He was hoping they did but none of
those products ever worked, except on the ad were the fat guy or lady always
becomes this weightlifter or something like that. So after one month, he moved
on to dieting.
That wasn’t as hard as he thought. He just
reduced his meals drastically, trying to eat healthier and less without really
pulling the plug on the desserts. He just couldn’t do that because most of them
he had to eat because it was his job. That sounds like an excuse but it
certainly wasn’t. His boss was very pleased with his work. After all, it was
the best food magazine in the country, so any absence or refusal to work would
be just devastating.
The diet thing kind of worked but it took time
and, like anyone in his position, Peter wanted to have instant results. He
wanted to be leaner and more beautiful in the blink of an eye but that wasn’t
possible. So he decided to go to a doctor and try to learn more about his body
in order to know how to solve the problem.
It was really confusing to have to go and eat
at least four different desserts in the morning and then having an appointment with
his doctor in the afternoon and complain about his weight. It was crazy but he
had no other way of doing things. The doctor told him that he was fat because
of the food. It wasn’t a hormonal thing. So he could lose the weight easily. He
gave him advice on dieting and sent him on his way.
Four months after that, people started noting
Peter had changed his posture and walked a bit differently. His waist seemed
less prominent, as well as his behind. Everyone looked at him; especially in
the bakery shops where they noticed his face had changed too. He had a bit more
color in his skin and seemed to be happier. Of course, his enemies took the
time to attack him for this changes too, saying that a person that wasn’t proud
of who they were, was always a danger for the rest because you could never
really trust them.
Those were real haters, never really setting
on one thing, always having an excuse to attack someone. But, strangely, Peter
lost any interest in them. His relationship with many friends had improved,
mainly because they noticed he really cared for his health and that he had
qualities they had never realized like a great sense of humor and a way of
giving very good advice. They had never realized that because they judged too
soon and Peter had paid for that.
But things were changing. Even his boss
noticed the small changes and decided to have a talk with Peter. He asked him
if he wanted to have some time for himself or if he needed someone to talk to.
The boss thought his weight loss was due to something bad but then Peter
explained and he understood. Incredibly, his boss cried and explained he had a
son who was having kind if the same problems, being bullied at school and all.
Peter promised to talk to him.
He realized soon that it wasn’t about being
skinny. That’s not why people pay attention to other people. It’s when they
notice you have the will to care about yourself that they make contact with
you. If you are a decent human being you don’t really care about someone’s
weight or their physical appearance or anything like that. But it certainly
makes you interested if someone is making the impossible to improve themselves,
in any way possible.
Peter did it with his body but many people try
to learn new things or create new stuff for others. He realized that’s what
people really were interested in and soon, although he didn’t loose all the
weight he had envisioned, he became happier with his own self. He would always
be more willing to help the bakers that were starting and just ate less because
he had more to do.
A couple of years after his decision to make
something different, he met a baker named Anna and they married and had two
girls who became the love of their father. And Anna was always there for him,
supporting Peter in new adventures like writing books about his passions, whether
they were sweets or fighting yourself.
Of course, haters were still around. But Peter
just lost his ability to care about them.
