I know how stupid it sounds, but yes lifting pieces of lead and iron, aka lifting weights, changed my life.
I was never the biggest kid growing up. In fact,  at one point in my life  my doctor was threatening to stick a feeding tube in me for a few months so I could get fed extra calories and fats while I slept.  This wasn't because I had an eating disorder or anything like that, I just have a disease, Cystic Fibrosis,  which makes it hard for me to keep weight on because I cannot properly digest all of my food and therefore I do not get all of the nutrients from the foods I eat (I talk more about Cystic Fibrosis in my introduceyourself post here: http://bit.ly/2rAVpuI). The reason that being skinny is so bad for people with Cystic Fibrosis is because it has been shown that the people with CF who have the best lung function are the heaviest. That's important because the main reason people with CF die so young is because of their constantly declining lung function. Now back to how lifting weights changed my life.

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**<center> Me at the end of my freshman year of high school, before I started lifting (I am in the yellow and blue striped shirt) </center>**

So like I have already said I was always a pretty skinny kid. Around the end of my sophomore year of high school, I was 15, I decided I wanted to put on some size. I was tired of being smaller than all of my friends and being scared to stand up for myself against people that were bigger than me.  So around April of 2013 I got my first gym membership and started working out consistently 4 times a week. My starting weight was 120 pounds at 6 ' tall.  For the first few months I really didn't know what I was doing. My workouts consisted of exercises I saw other people doing and ones that I read in a book about weight training that I had bought. Even though my workouts were very basic and unstructured I still managed to put on about 10 pounds  in 4 months boosting me to 130 pounds by my 16th birthday. 

After that, I took a 2 month hiatus from lifting when soccer season started in September, but as soon as my season was over I was back in the gym. This time however, instead of working out at a commercial gym, I was working out in my school's gym where the strength coach wrote workouts for all the athletes to do. This is when I real fell in love with lifting, or in meathead terms "caught the iron bug". I would read article after article and watch hours of youtube videos about lifting everyday after school because I had become so obsessed and wanted to learn everything I could. This was when I started to really see my physique get better. By the end of the year I weighed 160 pounds, a whole 30 pound increase from the year before!!

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**<center>Me at 160 pounds</center>**

By this point I was getting lots of compliments from my friends and random people about how good my body looked. While these compliments certainly helped my self esteem,  a different aspect of working out was the reason I was able to gain so much more confidence in myself.  Working out gave me a sense of accomplishment. I just felt really good about myself after I finished a grueling workout and I pushed my self to my limits. This was how working out changed my life. It showed me I was capable of pushing myself and that I could work hard for what I wanted because after all, a good body is one of the few things in this world that can only be earned, not bought. This boosted my confidence to all new levels and made me challenge myself in other aspects of my life. I was always one of the kids that would be somewhat shy when you first met them, but once I was comfortable with someone my personality would really show. But working out changed that. My self esteem grew so much because of it and I was able to make more friends that I developed deep bonds with just because I was more confident in myself and less shy. 

Working out has helped me so much over the past few years. Whenever I have a bad day I know I can just go to the gym and let all my frustrations out. It has also helped me become more confident in myself which has helped me in my social life and overall in my personal development on my journey of becoming the strongest version of myself. Who knows, maybe if I would have never started working out I wouldn't have had the confidence to start a Steemit account where I write about my life because I would be too scared of other people judging me. I know many people are scared to start their own personal fitness journey because it is a very daunting thing. There is so much to learn about working out and you think the other people at the gym will judge you. That is why I want to be here for anybody in that situation, the ones who want to take the first step in their journey but maybe don't know exactly what to do to start. If anybody ever has any questions just leave me a comment and I will be happy to answer them and if it's a common enough problem I could even make a whole post about it. If you have been telling yourself for years that you want to get in shape or maybe put on a few pounds of muscle remember this, the hardest step of your journey is always the first one. Once you commit yourself to working out you will be much happier in all aspects of your life and I want to be here for anybody that needs any direction. 

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**<center>My current physique after 4 years of working out, 180 pounds</center>**

Thank you for reading my posts and I can't wait to help out anybody I can achieve their dream body and change their life for the better!!