Let me give you a bit of history about myself. I'm 38 years old and for as long as I can remember, I've been fat. Without realizing it, I've let that fact define me. Anything good about me was always diminished in my mind by my weight. If someone said something nice to or about me, my inner voice would instantly reply, "Yeah, but I'm fat!" I don't think I ever felt accepted or truly loved by anyone besides my mother until I had my children. Let me immediately follow that up by saying that I have been loved and accepted by many people close to me all of my life, it's just that I couldn't or wouldn't believe it. I'll get in to that more in a future post.
I'm just like everyone else in that the main thing I want is to be loved for who I am, warts and all. In that quest I made many, many mistakes and made a fool of myself a time or two. I was so desperate to be loved that I tried to be the person I thought others wanted me to be. I still cringe when I think back to some of those times. Even though I wanted to be loved for me, inside I was positive I wasn't good enough, so I pretended to be someone I wasn't. I lost a lot of good friends over the years because of that. I stopped being myself, so how could anyone love me for me??? Stupid, stupid, stupid!! Hey, I never said I was smart!
So, how did I deal with this emotional pain? I ate it all away. I'm not here to make excuses. I will be the first one to admit that I got to my rock bottom place one bite at a time. Well, maybe two or three bites at a time, but you get my point. Food was and is my drug of choice. I am an emotional eater. When I hear people say that they are too upset to eat I am incredulous. Too upset to eat? Is that really possible? I ate when I was sad. I ate when I was happy. I ate when I was lonely and I ate when I was angry. You name an emotion and I promise you, I've eaten my way through it. More than once. Who am I kidding? More than a few hundred times.
Like any other addiction, it doesn't make sense to "non addicts". Logically it doesn't make sense to me, either. "I'm depressed because I'm fat, so let's go get a pizza." That pizza would be pure heaven and I would be flying high until a few minutes after the last bite. Then I'd realize how much food I just ate, how it was just going to make me fatter and Wham! I come crashing down. As I said, food is a drug for me. A lot of people don't understand just how difficult this can be.
There is no "going cold turkey" for my addiction. I still have to eat. I woke up every single day of my life promising myself that this would be the day I finally got control of myself. Sometimes I could follow through, but most days I didn't. Heck, there were days I would be "off the wagon" before breakfast because let me tell you a little secret. Food that's really bad for you usually tastes delicious. I know there are healthy versions of everything and for the past year, that's what I've eaten. But don't let anyone kid you, they are never as good as the real thing.
But I digress. So I've always identified myself as fat. I was the fat daughter and sister. The fat friend, the fat wife and the fat mom. As I progressed through each of these stages, so did my weight. I went from being fat to being huge, and ended up being like that morbidly obese person you see on TV. I turned in to a freak show. Really. I did.
I've had back problems since I was 12 years old. I missed most of my last two years of high school because of it and eventually I had surgery. It helped my back but it didn't fix anything. And the weight that kept piling on didn't help at all. Flash forward to 2005. I thought I was just having a few bad days with my back which was quite normal. I went to bed to rest which usually helps. It didn't this time. Within a few days I was in the worst pain of my life- and I had natural childbirth twice! (no drugs? What the hell was I thinking?)
To make matters worse, I obviously couldn't work so we were down to 1 income. Neither my husband at the time, nor I had health insurance and I couldn't afford the doctor's bills, let alone the medication I would need to help me. I suffered in bed for weeks. The weeks became months and before I knew it, several years had gone by with me being bed ridden.
So what does an already fat girl whose now in excruciating pain and stuck in bed do? She eats and eats and eats and eats. You see where this is going. So that's the highlights of how I got to where I was last year. I had eaten myself into oblivion in every sense of the word because I obliterated the girl I used to be.
I've spent the past 20 or so months trying to heal myself inside and out. The one thing I know for sure is that if I don't fix what's wrong with me inside, I'll never be happy with what's on the outside. Part of this journey was having gastric bypass last September. It has been a great tool in helping me to lose weight, but unfortunately it's not a cure all. I still have a daily struggle to stay on track, eat healthy and exercise. So far I've lost 190 lbs.
I've decided to start this blog to share my struggles and explore in more detail how and why I got to this point. If anyone else can get something from my story, that's fantastic. But for once in my life, I'm doing this for me. I've hidden who I am in shame for so long and I'm tired of living that way. So I'm peeling back the layers one pound at a time. I'm not sure what I'm going to find or who I'm going to be when I finish my journey and I'm okay with that. But I'm going to enjoy the ride!
So here go a few extra layers. Earlier tonight I posted a current picture of myself on Facebook. That's a first for me. Here's the really hard part. I'm going to post one of my before pictures followed by a picture taken of me this morning. Believe me when I tell you that this is not easy for me.
This was me on August 21, 2010 just 10 days before surgery. It may be hard to believe, but I had already lost over 30 lbs at this point.
This is me today, May 26, 2011 just a few days shy of being 9 months post-op.
