A Round Tuit
Two hundred and fifty one pounds.
251. Two-five-one. Dos ciento cinquenta uno. That's how much I weighed when I started this.
It's freeing to write this, though I admit to more than a little embarrassment at the figure. I was 251 pounds. Me, the perpetually skinny girl with big boobs, the mesomorphic athlete who could eat anything, and gain or lose weight in direct proportion to ingestion, me who always wanted to be a little thinner, but who knew inside that I was right where I should be.
I spent most of my adult life hovering around 140 lbs, and then, once I became a hard-core bodybuilder/corporate office drone, I skipped around 165, depending on how much cardio I was doing, whether I was lifting for strength, shape, or size, and how far into a relationship I was. I could always drop 10 over a weekend, or, later, a week, without doing much other than switching from cereal to fruit, skipping the mashed potatoes and parking my car at the back of the lot, rather than in my reserved space. I had total control of my body, and it worked as the well-tuned machine I had created.
Then a whole bunch of things happened that only my True Love knows about completely, and I changed. I lost confidence, I lost stability, I lost desire, and in their place, I gained weight. Even when I played grinding, grueling tennis 5 days a week and pumped my lungs full of searing air in a martial arts dojang 3 days more, I couldn't get that nasty bulge to disappear from my abdomen, and my heart-shaped bottom started looking more like a box of Valentine's Chocolates-and all their contents.
Oh, I could still pull it off if/when I wanted to, but now it involved diet plans and gym memberships, and little reminders that I couldn't eat peanut butter & banana sandwiches with chocolate chips anymore, or that 'dessert' would have to be something that other people had while I sat, smug and unsatisfied, with the fruit cup, carefully pushing my plate away before my fork could pierce the pastry shell that harbored it. But that was okay. I wasn't 21 anymore, I wasn't the hot bod from college, and frankly, I was glad to let that girl go. I was a woman now, and women presented differently from girls. I was no longer a junior-I was a Misses. And while I cringed when I read '12' or (gasp!) even '14' on the insides of my clothes, I knew I still looked passable in shorts and tennis whites, and, if necessary, I could slither into a swim suit-a one piecer, mind you, but still, my body fit inside something spandex, and I didn't have to wear a t-shirt over my suit, and my cover-up was still for the trip from my room to the water, and not a substitute for my actual 'bathing costume.'
Then I got pregnant, and, unrelated to that, I got incredibly unhappy, and suddenly food became simultaneously my comfort and my enemy. I gained 60 pounds during my pregnancy, shuttling all the way up to a size 22 pant. I measured my "waist" just a few days before I delivered, and I clocked in a whopping 48 inches. But there was a 9-pound baby in there, and I'd been assured by my midwife, my then-husband, and everyone around me that the weight would just 'fall off' me after I delivered, especially since I was breastfeeding.
Wrong.
I did drop 35 pounds more or less on my son's birth day and in the weeks succeeding it, but, at last when I stepped on the scale one month after his birth, the scale read 216 and I knew I would have to diet the rest off. No problem, I thought. I have to keep my calories a little bit higher since I'm nursing, but I can do it. I've always done it. I'm me. Professional dieter. Skinny gal with the Big Boobs. Hot Bod Mac. I'd do it, and with style.
The temperature hovered near 100 the whole, long summer, and my son found comfort only in walks or in attaching his toothless mouth to my breast. I took him for walks, sliding him into my Over the Shoulder Baby Holder (actual name), our clothes immediately sticky and wet from the weather and the contact. I carried an umbrella to shade us from the sun, and I plucked out a path around the grid-blocks of our northside Chicago neighborhood. I walked 3 miles a day, sometimes more if I could manage it, or if I couldn't get my son to nap indoors. We lived in a dive of a carriage house without central air, and the drone of the window unit kept both of us awake and shivering inside the confines of a room darkened by the quilts on the windows to keep the blistering rays off our skin. I walked, and I sweated and I nursed until my nipples bled, and still, the scale remained stubbornly at 216.
Frustrated, I turned to my new friends, Ben and Jerry. My husband helped out with takeout every night, and, eventually, we moved to the suburbs where walking became tougher and the cooler autumn drove me indoors. I walked around the house, my son still attached at the breast, my body still clinging to its baby fat, my mood dropping with the day's lengths. By the time my boy turned 1, I had slithered back up to 225. Disgusted, and unable to wear anything other than my husband's sweat pants, I gave my son over to his father for an hour, bit down my humiliation, went to the women's clothing store, bought their smallest size jeans and took them home, crying all the way.
Over the next year, I would drop a few pounds, then pulled it back in, a life raft of comfort around the chaos in my home. By the time I returned to work full time, 2 years after the birth, I was wearing women's sizes in everything. The morning I drove to the office for the first time, the scale tipped at 233. I was crushed, but still determined. Being at the office would help. I could eat salads at lunch, instead of mac&cheese or chicken nuggets. I'd be walking around the building, I could go to the gym at lunch, my son would wean and I'd return to normal.
It never happened. It took another 2 years and another 3 gym memberships to realize that whatever ability I had to drop weight in my youth was gone, and whatever motivators I'd used to get skinny in the past had abandoned me. I tried being the Big & Beautiful woman, I tried to embrace my fatness as a sign of prosperity and pride, but that's not me, and it left me empty. Even now, I envy any woman who is comfortable in her skin, no matter her size. That is not me. Whatever baggage I carry, including my extra pounds, I am not completley myself unless I am well inside the Misses range and far down below 200 pounds. This is me, and I have accepted it.
I figured that I could not have any success with weight loss as long as I carried full-time work and childcare responsibilities. I resigned myself to several more years of fatness, and I tried not to think too hard about my increased risks for breast cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure. I ignored the tingling in my fingertips, I covered my low back pain with ibuprofen, and whenever it came time to visit my doctor, I would write out my weight on a slip of paper and hope against luck that they would simply write it down and not ask me to step on that scale. Sometimes it worked, and I took the victory, however fleeting and unreal, and vowed that next time, I would step on, and I would not be afraid.
Never happened.
Then this past June I got hit with some weird disease, where whenever I ate fat, I would double up in pain, the cramps far worse than any labor contraction. I grew to fear eating and ingested only what would keep me from fainting. Hunger gnawed at me constantly, but it was a manageable pain-nothing like the gremlins that sawtoothed my innards whenever I ate. The doctor diagnosed gall stones, but there were none. Eventually, with nothing but a zero-fat diet and time, the condition went away and has not returned.
In the interim, I lost 14 pounds. I wasn't down a size in clothes (my current state was a Women's 20, and had been for the last 2 years), but things fit better and I noticed that I had a little bit more energy. I decided to give Weight Watchers a try. Why not? I'd had success with them once before, and while I found the meetings tedious and dull, the program made sense and was easily adaptable to a lifelong pursuit of thinness and health.
Well, I always seemed to 'forget' the meeting on Thursday night that I'd chosen to attend. I wasn't losing any more, but I wasn't gaining the 14 back, and so all I figure was a good old dose of willpower and some exercise and I'd be set. At month's end, I was up 5 pounds, bringing my total 'loss' to 9, and I still had my PMS 3 to pick up. Clearly, I couldn't do this alone. My then-housemate and cook told me she didn't believe in diets, and while she served us grilled lean meats and steamed vegetables, I wasn't getting the support I needed, and I knew I had to go back to WW.
Then Howard, my old college boyfriend, called me out of the clear blue sky. I'll hope to get into all that history some other time, and probably in some other forum, but for now, suffice to say that he'd had tremendous success with his weight loss, most recently through Weight Watchers. We had dinner together a couple of times, and then he suggested that we do WW together-as buddies. He outlined the premise and suggested a meeting equidistant from our respective homes and said it was okay if I didn't want to do it, but he'd like to do this together and was I interested? Was I? Again, no time to detail this, but at the time, I could not have received a better offer.
That first Saturday, I tipped the scales at Weight Watchers Lombard 244.8 pounds. Crushed and humiliated, I sat down next to Howard, freezing under an air conditioning vent, and listened as the leader cheered and laughed 40 dieters through the next 30 minutes. That was July 22, 2006. My last day as the old Amy. My last day as a Fat Person. Howard and I had a long talk outside the meeting room after it adjourned. We hugged good-bye, and as I drove away, I vowed that this would be the last time. This is the last weight loss. This is the last time I'll be a fat person. I'll always be a recovering fat person, but I'm okay with that. I'll be a recovering fat person in a shrinking body, and then, someday not too long from now, I'll be a recovering fat person in a thin body, and then my journey really begins. I can't wait. I am inspired, I am motivated, and I am successful. Thank you, Howard, every day of my life and every pound off my body, and every ounce of happiness we share, for coming back into my life and for suggesting we buddy it up. I will be forever grateful.
Since that first meeting, I've lost 34.6 pounds on WW, and 43.25 pounds overall. I haven't declared a goal weight yet, and I'm still not really sure what that will be. I have hit a few milestones already, including a big one this week, when I dropped out of the BMI obese category and into it's overweight designation. Never in my life have I been so happy as to declare that I am overweight.
This morning I weighed in at 207.75 pounds. Today, Howard will be taking the once-monthly shots of me to show my progress, something I hope eventually to publish out here. I am careful to dress similarly each time, so the progress pictures mean something and the results they show make sense. For the first time since I began, I'm actually looking forward to having a camera point at me. That's a big deal for me: a big, honkin, awesome deal.
I'll catch you up on the rest of the journey, and then catalog things real (blog) time as I go. I'm happy to share, and I'm glad you're on the road with me. Come, friends, and let's away to the land of Thin, Healthy Happiness.
-A the S(hrinking Woman)
251. Two-five-one. Dos ciento cinquenta uno. That's how much I weighed when I started this.
It's freeing to write this, though I admit to more than a little embarrassment at the figure. I was 251 pounds. Me, the perpetually skinny girl with big boobs, the mesomorphic athlete who could eat anything, and gain or lose weight in direct proportion to ingestion, me who always wanted to be a little thinner, but who knew inside that I was right where I should be.
I spent most of my adult life hovering around 140 lbs, and then, once I became a hard-core bodybuilder/corporate office drone, I skipped around 165, depending on how much cardio I was doing, whether I was lifting for strength, shape, or size, and how far into a relationship I was. I could always drop 10 over a weekend, or, later, a week, without doing much other than switching from cereal to fruit, skipping the mashed potatoes and parking my car at the back of the lot, rather than in my reserved space. I had total control of my body, and it worked as the well-tuned machine I had created.
Then a whole bunch of things happened that only my True Love knows about completely, and I changed. I lost confidence, I lost stability, I lost desire, and in their place, I gained weight. Even when I played grinding, grueling tennis 5 days a week and pumped my lungs full of searing air in a martial arts dojang 3 days more, I couldn't get that nasty bulge to disappear from my abdomen, and my heart-shaped bottom started looking more like a box of Valentine's Chocolates-and all their contents.
Oh, I could still pull it off if/when I wanted to, but now it involved diet plans and gym memberships, and little reminders that I couldn't eat peanut butter & banana sandwiches with chocolate chips anymore, or that 'dessert' would have to be something that other people had while I sat, smug and unsatisfied, with the fruit cup, carefully pushing my plate away before my fork could pierce the pastry shell that harbored it. But that was okay. I wasn't 21 anymore, I wasn't the hot bod from college, and frankly, I was glad to let that girl go. I was a woman now, and women presented differently from girls. I was no longer a junior-I was a Misses. And while I cringed when I read '12' or (gasp!) even '14' on the insides of my clothes, I knew I still looked passable in shorts and tennis whites, and, if necessary, I could slither into a swim suit-a one piecer, mind you, but still, my body fit inside something spandex, and I didn't have to wear a t-shirt over my suit, and my cover-up was still for the trip from my room to the water, and not a substitute for my actual 'bathing costume.'
Then I got pregnant, and, unrelated to that, I got incredibly unhappy, and suddenly food became simultaneously my comfort and my enemy. I gained 60 pounds during my pregnancy, shuttling all the way up to a size 22 pant. I measured my "waist" just a few days before I delivered, and I clocked in a whopping 48 inches. But there was a 9-pound baby in there, and I'd been assured by my midwife, my then-husband, and everyone around me that the weight would just 'fall off' me after I delivered, especially since I was breastfeeding.
Wrong.
I did drop 35 pounds more or less on my son's birth day and in the weeks succeeding it, but, at last when I stepped on the scale one month after his birth, the scale read 216 and I knew I would have to diet the rest off. No problem, I thought. I have to keep my calories a little bit higher since I'm nursing, but I can do it. I've always done it. I'm me. Professional dieter. Skinny gal with the Big Boobs. Hot Bod Mac. I'd do it, and with style.
The temperature hovered near 100 the whole, long summer, and my son found comfort only in walks or in attaching his toothless mouth to my breast. I took him for walks, sliding him into my Over the Shoulder Baby Holder (actual name), our clothes immediately sticky and wet from the weather and the contact. I carried an umbrella to shade us from the sun, and I plucked out a path around the grid-blocks of our northside Chicago neighborhood. I walked 3 miles a day, sometimes more if I could manage it, or if I couldn't get my son to nap indoors. We lived in a dive of a carriage house without central air, and the drone of the window unit kept both of us awake and shivering inside the confines of a room darkened by the quilts on the windows to keep the blistering rays off our skin. I walked, and I sweated and I nursed until my nipples bled, and still, the scale remained stubbornly at 216.
Frustrated, I turned to my new friends, Ben and Jerry. My husband helped out with takeout every night, and, eventually, we moved to the suburbs where walking became tougher and the cooler autumn drove me indoors. I walked around the house, my son still attached at the breast, my body still clinging to its baby fat, my mood dropping with the day's lengths. By the time my boy turned 1, I had slithered back up to 225. Disgusted, and unable to wear anything other than my husband's sweat pants, I gave my son over to his father for an hour, bit down my humiliation, went to the women's clothing store, bought their smallest size jeans and took them home, crying all the way.
Over the next year, I would drop a few pounds, then pulled it back in, a life raft of comfort around the chaos in my home. By the time I returned to work full time, 2 years after the birth, I was wearing women's sizes in everything. The morning I drove to the office for the first time, the scale tipped at 233. I was crushed, but still determined. Being at the office would help. I could eat salads at lunch, instead of mac&cheese or chicken nuggets. I'd be walking around the building, I could go to the gym at lunch, my son would wean and I'd return to normal.
It never happened. It took another 2 years and another 3 gym memberships to realize that whatever ability I had to drop weight in my youth was gone, and whatever motivators I'd used to get skinny in the past had abandoned me. I tried being the Big & Beautiful woman, I tried to embrace my fatness as a sign of prosperity and pride, but that's not me, and it left me empty. Even now, I envy any woman who is comfortable in her skin, no matter her size. That is not me. Whatever baggage I carry, including my extra pounds, I am not completley myself unless I am well inside the Misses range and far down below 200 pounds. This is me, and I have accepted it.
I figured that I could not have any success with weight loss as long as I carried full-time work and childcare responsibilities. I resigned myself to several more years of fatness, and I tried not to think too hard about my increased risks for breast cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure. I ignored the tingling in my fingertips, I covered my low back pain with ibuprofen, and whenever it came time to visit my doctor, I would write out my weight on a slip of paper and hope against luck that they would simply write it down and not ask me to step on that scale. Sometimes it worked, and I took the victory, however fleeting and unreal, and vowed that next time, I would step on, and I would not be afraid.
Never happened.
Then this past June I got hit with some weird disease, where whenever I ate fat, I would double up in pain, the cramps far worse than any labor contraction. I grew to fear eating and ingested only what would keep me from fainting. Hunger gnawed at me constantly, but it was a manageable pain-nothing like the gremlins that sawtoothed my innards whenever I ate. The doctor diagnosed gall stones, but there were none. Eventually, with nothing but a zero-fat diet and time, the condition went away and has not returned.
In the interim, I lost 14 pounds. I wasn't down a size in clothes (my current state was a Women's 20, and had been for the last 2 years), but things fit better and I noticed that I had a little bit more energy. I decided to give Weight Watchers a try. Why not? I'd had success with them once before, and while I found the meetings tedious and dull, the program made sense and was easily adaptable to a lifelong pursuit of thinness and health.
Well, I always seemed to 'forget' the meeting on Thursday night that I'd chosen to attend. I wasn't losing any more, but I wasn't gaining the 14 back, and so all I figure was a good old dose of willpower and some exercise and I'd be set. At month's end, I was up 5 pounds, bringing my total 'loss' to 9, and I still had my PMS 3 to pick up. Clearly, I couldn't do this alone. My then-housemate and cook told me she didn't believe in diets, and while she served us grilled lean meats and steamed vegetables, I wasn't getting the support I needed, and I knew I had to go back to WW.
Then Howard, my old college boyfriend, called me out of the clear blue sky. I'll hope to get into all that history some other time, and probably in some other forum, but for now, suffice to say that he'd had tremendous success with his weight loss, most recently through Weight Watchers. We had dinner together a couple of times, and then he suggested that we do WW together-as buddies. He outlined the premise and suggested a meeting equidistant from our respective homes and said it was okay if I didn't want to do it, but he'd like to do this together and was I interested? Was I? Again, no time to detail this, but at the time, I could not have received a better offer.
That first Saturday, I tipped the scales at Weight Watchers Lombard 244.8 pounds. Crushed and humiliated, I sat down next to Howard, freezing under an air conditioning vent, and listened as the leader cheered and laughed 40 dieters through the next 30 minutes. That was July 22, 2006. My last day as the old Amy. My last day as a Fat Person. Howard and I had a long talk outside the meeting room after it adjourned. We hugged good-bye, and as I drove away, I vowed that this would be the last time. This is the last weight loss. This is the last time I'll be a fat person. I'll always be a recovering fat person, but I'm okay with that. I'll be a recovering fat person in a shrinking body, and then, someday not too long from now, I'll be a recovering fat person in a thin body, and then my journey really begins. I can't wait. I am inspired, I am motivated, and I am successful. Thank you, Howard, every day of my life and every pound off my body, and every ounce of happiness we share, for coming back into my life and for suggesting we buddy it up. I will be forever grateful.
Since that first meeting, I've lost 34.6 pounds on WW, and 43.25 pounds overall. I haven't declared a goal weight yet, and I'm still not really sure what that will be. I have hit a few milestones already, including a big one this week, when I dropped out of the BMI obese category and into it's overweight designation. Never in my life have I been so happy as to declare that I am overweight.
This morning I weighed in at 207.75 pounds. Today, Howard will be taking the once-monthly shots of me to show my progress, something I hope eventually to publish out here. I am careful to dress similarly each time, so the progress pictures mean something and the results they show make sense. For the first time since I began, I'm actually looking forward to having a camera point at me. That's a big deal for me: a big, honkin, awesome deal.
I'll catch you up on the rest of the journey, and then catalog things real (blog) time as I go. I'm happy to share, and I'm glad you're on the road with me. Come, friends, and let's away to the land of Thin, Healthy Happiness.
-A the S(hrinking Woman)
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 8:53 AM
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