10/16/10 My chubby history

My turn on this topic...

I was a chubby kid. I had a pot belly. No big deal. I wasn't obese by any stretch of the imagination. I was active, I danced, I played kickball and volleyball with kids in the neighborhood, I rode my bike all over the place.

My first memory of feeling fat was when I was about ten years old, and I went to Weight Watchers. It gets a little fuzzy here: my mom says I "asked" to go; I don't remember that at all. I'm inclined to believe that as we've had many an honest conversation about my weight and my feelings about my childhood weight. The bottom line is that I thought all that time that she had just taken me because I needed to go.

After this, I feel like my life was just an endless string of diets, dieticians, diet pills, etc. I stayed fairly fit in high school with poms and dance. I think my senior year I was about 130-140. Looking back at my prom picture, I was pretty smokin' (if I do say so myself!), but I remember feeling fat! I remember hating my stomach and my thighs. I hate that I didn't appreciate what I had at the time. My mom has also offered the possibility that maybe I spent too much time comparing myself to my friends. This seems logical to me as I, at my thinnest, was a size 10, and my friends were mostly 2s and 4s. Of course I felt bigger.

Once I was in college, the weight just piled on. I was up to 190 by the end of my senior year. This brought me to my first serious weight loss effort. I went to a doctor and was put on a shake diet. I lost thirty pounds and felt great. Then, I graduated, got a desk job, felt too tired after work to exercise, and gained sixty pounds. Yup, all the way up to 220 in about two years. This brings us to serious attempt number two. I signed up with a transformation coach online (I'm not going to name him, but I will say he is brilliant, knows his stuff, and he is still my number one resource for weight lifting and exercise in general. If you can hang with him, he will get you there no doubt.) and went all hardcore clean eating and exercising for a while and got down to 204. This I count as my lowest adult weight. I hung out here for a while, then I got laid off, depressed, yadda yadda yadda, back to 220. Got married, got complacent, got 275. The rest you know.

Like I mentioned earlier, my mom and I have talked a lot about my obesity. I went to a therapist who specialized in eating disorders for a while, and I came out of it putting all the blame on my mom. Later on, I came to believe that that just wasn't fair, so I decided to sort it out for myself. My mom is a tiny person. At 62, she's still a size 6, dresses nice, exercises, takes care of herself. She asked me once if there was something she did that made me so weight-obsessive. I honestly said that I did feel she pushed me on it a little too hard at times, but I refuse to lay all the blame on her. I could've chosen to behave differently, especially once I was out of the house and away from her constant watchful eye. I felt like she did comment enough on what I was or wasn't eating to give me a bit of a complex. I at least found myself rebelling by eating. And I believe that led to stifling other emotions with food.

I've thought a lot lately about doing some couch time again. I have even gone so far as to get some referrals through our emp/loyee assistance program. It's hard to say no to six free visits, right? Seems like the farther I get in my band journey, the more some demons like to rear their ugly heads. The past couple weeks, especially, I've been  medicating with food. I've got things fairly under control again, but it doesn't mean I couldn't do some work there. I know also that some things will never be easy, and the more I can do to shore up my defenses, the better. I will forever be a work in progress, and that's ok.