How did I get here?

October 1, 2007
This morning's weight: 288 lbs

For the most part, I have struggled with my weight ALL of my life. Don't get me wrong...I wasn't a fat kid. I look back on my childhood and honestly, I was pretty normal for most of it. I ate what I wanted when I got hungry and perhaps I was a little pudgy at times, but certainly not fat enough that kids would tease me or anything. I remember being pretty active and happy. I didn't really start to verge into the overweight side of life until 5th or 6th grade. Around that time I noticed I was a size or two higher than the other girls. But that was that...it didn't really start to affect me negatively until junior high. By the time I was in 8th grade, it was definitely obvious. I was a size 14 and my peers were much, much smaller. By the time I went shopping for my 8th grade graduation dress (not a pleasant task by the way), I was definitely sporting much more pudge than I needed and completely miserable about it.

My first venture into weight loss came during the summer between 8th grade and high school. I think looking back at the pictures of my graduation, it just really hit me that I wanted to be someone other than who I was. I wanted to go to high school as the beautiful smart girl...not the smart, fat girl with a pretty face.

So that summer I dieted pretty hard. I don't remember too many specifics about my diet...just that it was pretty restrictive. Despite the fact that it was my first time dieting...or perhaps because of it? I had AMAZING willpower. I remember putting food on my plate and that was IT. I knew I would eat that and only that. And that's what I did. No candy, no snacks. It's odd how determined and possessed I really was. Obsessive maybe? I know that the exersize I did during that time was certainly obsessive. I would put on my walkman and ride my bike for 1.5 hours every day. I would weave in and around all the streets around my house...so that I could go miles and miles in that 1.5 hours without actually leaving the 1 mile radius of my house.

By the time I started school in the fall, I believe I had dropped at least 25 pounds or so. I remember all my peers doing a double take when they saw me. I got an unbelieveable amount of attention. So of course this encouraged me and I continued to diet through the new school year.

With classes and activities, I now had less time to devote to my bike riding. Although I still did it, I had considerably less time to do it. So to compensate, I remember that I started eating even less. I would basically go hungry during different times of the day. Anorexic much? Towards the end of this phase, I know my mother was about to give me the "I think you're anorexic" talk. She told me this much later of course. I was 130 pounds and a size 6. You could see my collar bones and the bones sticking out of my shoulders. I LOVED it.

Of course, most of us know that you can't maintain an extreme diet or lifestyle forever. So eventually the pendulum had to swing the other way. Sometime around my sophmore year, the pounds started to creep back up as I started to eat more and more and get busier with school. By the time I graduated high school, I was back up to a size 14/16. Grossly fat, NO, but overweight, YES. A far cry from the self-confident and happy size 6 freshman four years before. It was discouraging.

This, of course, would be the first major upset of many over the course of my life. As will become evident in this and later blogs, I am a champion yo-yo dieter. Although the problem is that as I have aged, I've become less of a champion and more of a has-been.

I'm going to stop at this point and say TO BE CONTINUED.......

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about that freshman 15....err, 30 pounds that found me in college. Oh that should be fun! I love a good story...don't you?