Ghosts of the Past
As documented in my previous entries about my weight history, I’ve always struggled with my weight. I don’t think I actively started dieting until I was in my teens, but I always had big dreams of losing the weight no matter what age I was.
I find the older I get, the more my reasons for wanting to lose weight have changed.
When I was younger, it was for the obvious reason. I wanted to look better. Plain and simple, no doubt about it.
It started to shift as I slowly approached my late 20’s. I remember being put on high blood pressure medicine when I was 27 years old and being horrified. Blood pressure medicine was for OLD people! I was still young and vibrant damn it! Never mind that I couldn’t walk my dog to the end of my block without my lower back seizing up and me having to sit down and rest.
Young and vibrant in my mind, but my body was rapidly becoming that of a senior citizen.
In doing some research I recall reading somewhere that reducing your weight by a mere 10% could help lower your blood pressure. I think that was when I started to slowly make better decisions.
After dropping about 100 lbs I no longer had to take the BP meds. That was a great bonus, as was being able to walk great distances with no pain. But let’s face it, I looked amazing compared to my highest weight. It mostly all came down to looks.
As the years have gone by and I have yo-yoed back and forth in my weight, my looks have usually been a trigger to start the process all over again. I’ll see a picture someone took without my knowledge and be horrified at how I look.
This time it wasn’t about looks. Don’t get me wrong, that will be a wonderful side benefit! However, as I approach my late 40’s at an alarmingly fast rate, my health is more of a concern than anything else.
I’m tired of having no energy. I’m tired of being winded walking a short distance. I’m tired of my joints constantly aching. I’m tired of worrying about my health. And I’m tired of being tired.
I know that my everyday aches and pains would be greatly reduced if I lighten the load on my body. Carrying around this much weight was still painful in my younger years, but it is nothing compared to what I’m feeling 20+ years later.
My blood pressure is high again and I don’t want to be put on meds. My cholesterol was quite high on my last blood test and I don’t want to be put on a statin. My ankles now swell in the evening from sitting all day at work…that never happened when I was active and slimmer.
I know it sounds completely stupid to say this, but I don’t like taking up more space than I used to. Granted it isn’t as much as I did when I was at my heaviest, but it is I feel it for sure. The pandemic has really prevented me from seeing how bad it is as I can’t go to a restaurant and sit in a booth to see how bad the table cuts into my gut. And I haven’t been on a plane in over a year so I don’t know if I need an extender for the seat belt, but chances are probably pretty good that I do.
I remember one of my proudest NSV (non scale victories) was when I could buckle the seat belt on a plane with no assistance. It was always so embarrassing to have to ring the flight attendant and ask for one. At one point I was so large that I didn’t even have to ask, once I was seated a well meaning FA approached me and silently handed one to me with a smile. While I was grateful not to have to ask, I was mortified that she just eyeballed me and was like: “Yeah, that fatty needs an extender, I’m going to save her the trouble of asking and just bring her one.” I’m sure she was really nice but she really could not have won in the scenario I concocted in my head that day.
A couple of days ago at work, I had to crawl under my desk to plug in my new Bluetooth speaker and it was a pretty tight fit. Like, I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to get back out. Not cool.
So yeah, while I will take any cosmetic benefits from the weight loss, I am much more looking forward to the health related ones.
For Part One of this story please click here.
At age 26 years old, I married the love of my life in a fun ceremony in Las Vegas. I was also the highest weight I had ever been at that point in my life.
I was over 300 pounds at that point but I don’t think by too much. My mother in law had to make my dress for me because at that time getting a wedding dress for my size was just way too expensive and they all looked like crap anyway.
You would think that seeing the way that I looked in those wedding photos would be enough for me to try and turn it around, but you would be wrong. For the first time in my life I was happy and in love in a healthy relationship and I didn’t care what I looked like. My husband didn’t seem to care so why should I? I continued to eat whatever I wanted and put on weight.
I can’t tell you what my weight actually topped out at because our scale broke and I was in no hurry to fix it. Why they heck would I want to see that growing number? I was happy right?
If I had to guess, I would say I was probably 350 at my highest. The pictures may look bigger but I’m also only 5’4″. To be honest it could have been a higher weight but for some reason 350 feels right. We will never know on the weight, but I can tell you that I wore as size 4-5X.
I’m honestly not sure when I got the first motivation to start losing weight again. However, I can say that according to old journal in 2004 I started making better decisions and over the course of three years, I lost about 50 lbs. That sounds about right as I got married in 2000.
From that journal, I then lost 60 to 80 pounds doing Atkins/low carb. It was pretty quick but I can’t say how quick because I suck at journaling (you will learn this if you stay tuned).
Same purple dress as above only 80 lbs lighter.
After that it was a pretty big yo yo fest of losing and gaining weight, but I am happy to say that I was always trying rather than not.
I feel like I got into the best shape of my life (other than when I had an eating disorder) when I was training to run my first half marathon in 2010. I had gotten into doing a bunch of 5k races and even a couple of 10ks but when I heard that they were going to have a 1/2 marathon in Vegas, I knew I wanted to do it.
The main reason was of course: Vegas! But the second best reason was that it was all flat. They basically ran us down the strip, around downtown and then back up the strip.
I was very nervous about how I would fare during such a long “run”. You see, I wasn’t a runner, I did all my races at a very fast walk. So I trained. I still would never call myself a runner, but I was averaging a half run/half fast walk in all my training times.
I finished the marathon within my goal time and was quite pleased with myself.
We also renewed our vows that year for our ten year anniversary and I was quite pleased to have photos that didn’t make me cringe as much.
I would complete three more Vegas half marathons but I’m sad to say that I never trained nearly as hard for any of the others as I did for that first one. Once the initial fear of the unknown was over, I realized that I could have basically walked the whole thing and been fine. At that point, the laziness kicked in and I put in the bare minimum. I’m still glad I did them, because even the bare minimum of training is better than nothing at all.
Over the next few years there was more yo yo dieting and flirting with fitness but the end result was gaining weight back.
In 2017, I decided to start a youtube channel to hold myself accountable. I had seen similar channels and watched them for motivation, and thought…Why the heck not?
It really worked for me for awhile as shed almost 40 lbs and was feeling good again. Working out and eating right is a winning combination for me (go figure).
I’m not sure when it went awry that time. Part of it was that I got so into making over the top videos (green screens with fun backgrounds) that were a pain in the ass to edit and so it just lost all of the fun aspect it had before. So I slacked off, on both the videos and the diet and exercise.
That brings us up to current.
I’m back on my channel and I’ve started this new blog to get myself back in check. Here’s to much needed success in 2021!
I can’t say I remember a time when I wasn’t on a weight loss journey of some sort.
There isn’t a lot of my childhood that I remember, but I DO remember not being happy about how I looked.
My mother often told people that when I was first born she was worried that I wouldn’t be able to open my eyes because my cheeks were so very chubby. She also expressed concern about how I could possibly be able to start to walk with those pudgy legs.
I don’t remember ever feeling “normal sized” and it certainly didn’t last for very long.
I don’t know my genetics on my fathers side beyond my grandmother and aunt and neither of them were very big. My father wasn’t either until he got married and “settled down”. He probably gained the weight as a matter of no longer being active and eating out of boredom. I remember him also quitting smoking early in my childhood and that he put on some serious pounds after that. There was always tons of candy around the house to help him quit and I delighting in that fact.
So I was a round child and it just got worse after my father left for the first time when I was ten. My mother tried to make up for the fact that he wasn’t a part of the family anymore by rewarding us with food.
He came back for a spell and then left again for the final time when I was 12. That was when junk and fast food moved from being a reward to being a necessity when my mother had to start working two jobs to support us and try and keep the house.
Late evening happy meals from McDonald’s were not unusual as it was just easier and most times cheaper for my mom to snag them on her way home from work, than to have to cook when she got home.
Our cupboards were stocked with chips, crackers, white bread and all other things starchy.
A favorite snack of mine was pretzel sticks covered in melted butter or wrapped in American cheese. Because my mom worked two jobs, there wasn’t really anyone around to police mine or my brothers eating choices. My grandparents lived right next door, so we were allowed to stay in our house by ourselves knowing that we could call one of them if we had any problems.
I remained a “big girl” throughout high school.
After being told there weren’t even enough credits to earn to graduate with my class no matter what I did, I dropped out my senior year and started night school.
Somewhere around here I got into therapy and though it took me a couple of years it started to do me a world of good.
Around this time period I decided that being fat was no longer for me. Money wasn’t quite as desperate (though it went in ebbs and flows) at the time. I got an exercise bike for a gift and bought a portable stair stepper with my own money. I even got a small resistance band weight station at a garage sale.
Yours truly began to watch every single calorie that went into my mouth, never going above 1200-1500 calories a day and everything was low fat. In addition, since I didn’t work more than 15 hours a week, I started working out at least twice a day – sometimes three times.
Looking back it was horribly obsessive compulsive behavior that was just setting myself up for an inevitable eating disorder.
But boy did it work! The weight came off and I felt fantastic! For the first time that I could remember, I was wearing the latest fashions and they looked good!
I started to get a lot more attention from the opposite sex and even got a steady boyfriend for a few months until he cheated on me and I dumped his loser ass.
After that I sort of went on a use ’em and lose ’em tour de force for awhile and had a lot of fun.
Eventually the weight started to creep back up a little bit at a time. I decided for emotional reasons that I didn’t connect at the time that as long as what I ate didn’t “stay” in my body, I couldn’t gain weight from it!
Hello bulimia!
I’m not going to sing the praises of that particular period of my life. Mostly because I don’t like the idea of speaking positively about eating disorders. I might write about this chapter in my journey in another entry because it did have a major effect on my life.
Having said that, the full on bulimia lasted at least two years and consisted of throwing up everything I ate and also taking laxatives at night to get whatever else I missed out of my body.
The binging on the other hand…
At age 25 I met my current husband and fell in love. I met him while on vacation and long story short, I ended up moving across the country to live with him. A year later, we married.
