CONFESSIONS OF A FAT GIRL

I am fat. According to my BMI, I’m even obese. My little fitness coach on Wii fit agrees. Every time I take the body test, the virtual me balloons up and its squeaky voice declares, “That’s obese.” I wasn’t always fat. But I’ve always struggled with my weight.

Tired of being chubby, at fourteen I worked with my mom to develop a diet. She purchased sugar-free kool-aid, I stopped taking my evening snack, and started exercising to the Jane Fonda workout every evening after dinner. This was the easiest time I ever had losing weight. Within a few months, my clothes were much looser, I’d lost a significant amount of weight and finally started to feel good about myself. It seems it is always the first time losing weight that is the easiest, it’s the third time or the tenth time that it gets from difficult to balancing on the verge of impossible.

If it works, you keep doing it to a greater degree, right? So as I moved to high school and through tenth grade, I restricted my calories even more and took up jogging. A couple of traumatic events occurred in my life around ninth and tenth grade that I’m sure played a part in my eating and exercise habits as well. It’s the same old story—like my grades, my weight was something I could control when everything else in my life was out of control. By the time I got to my junior year, I ate a ½ cup of cereal with a ¼ cup of milk for breakfast and one serving of whatever my mom cooked for dinner. I skipped lunch. The rest of the time, I sustained myself on sugar-free kool-aid and jolly ranchers. On top of that, I jogged a half an hour then immediately walked a half an hour nearly every day. And when it was nice outside, I might throw in a bike ride or an extra walk.

Looking back, I realize I probably had an eating disorder. Not only did I burn every calorie I ate but I was obsessed with my weight. I avoided offers of food by telling myself that the offerer just wanted to get me fat again. I felt horrible when I had to miss a day of exercise. I enjoyed the fact that I could suck in my stomach, touch my thumbs together at the front of my waist and just about touch my pinkies together at my back. I used my eating and exercise habits as a wall to protect myself from what was falling apart around me and from anyone else who might try to get in. I was never diagnosed or even suspected of having an eating disorder. I never got sickly skinny; I got down to 110 pounds at my lowest which is in the healthy range for my height. And I ate; I didn’t eat much but I did eat, once in awhile even splurging to let myself pig out at a buffet.

When I went to college, I gained the typical freshman fifteen and slowly gained weight from all of the choices offered in food service, exercising less and partying more until the end of my junior year of college when I got up to around 145 pounds. My senior year, I lived in an apartment, spent a lot of time driving back and forth to my fiancé’s, and going for walks with him in the town he was living in the evenings. By my wedding the following September, I was down to approximately 135 pounds. When my husband and I decided to try to get pregnant, I concentrated on eating healthy and exercising reasonably in an effort to aide conception (which didn’t really work because it took 5 months anyway). At the time I got pregnant, I was in the best shape I’d been in at @130 pounds. The several years from when I began dating my husband until I got pregnant with my daughter were the only times I ever had healthy, functional relationships with food and exercise. Other than basically trying to choose and cook healthier foods and trying to exercise when I could, I didn’t obsess over calories or exercise. I didn’t really think about it much at all.

After my daughter was born, I was able to count calories and lose my baby-weight to get down to 145 pounds. I still had a relatively healthy relationship with food and exercise as I thought about it but didn’t obsess. And I was satisfied with that weight; it allowed me to eat pretty well, not exercise like a fanatic and wear size 12 jeans. I got huge when I was pregnant with my son @3 years later and was only able to get down to @160 pounds after he was born. This is when the battle at the fat end of the spectrum really began. I gained and lost and gained and lost until I reached my high weight of 181 pounds about a year ago. Sadly, this was about what I weighed the morning before I gave birth to my son. After being off of high blood pressure medication for a couple of years and then put back on it, I decided I really needed to do something. So I joined Weight Watchers. After 9 months, I’d lost a whopping ten pounds. Weight Watchers is a great program—if you’ve never tried to lose weight before and if you need guidance on how to eat. I’ve known since I was 14 what foods I should eat and how to prepare them in order to lose weight. The problem was doing what I knew I should be and getting it to work. So I quit Weight Watchers. I was so sick of counting points that I tried to just mentally keep track of my calories and try to eat the best I could. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for me as I gained back half of the weight I’d lost in the ensuing 6 months.

Early this past June, I went for my annual checkup and was assigned lab work which I didn’t get around to getting drawn until @3 weeks later. The results were a worsening cholesterol reading of 227 total so my doctor put me on a statin to try to lower my cholesterol. The high cholesterol really took me by surprise because one thing I’ve always been good at is eating low fat and low cholesterol foods. So here I am, 35 years old, and I have 2 of the 3 big heart disease risk factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol & Type 2 diabetes). I have strong genes for heart disease. My father has coronary artery disease and my maternal grandmother died of a heart attack at the young age of 62. So now what am I going to do? I’ve got lots to do. I don’t want to die. So now I’m back to counting calories, fat grams and all that crap with the FitDay computer program.

Counting calories scares me because in the past, after doing it awhile I started to trick myself into believing if you don’t count the calories, the calories don’t count. In the past I’d skip a day of counting calories and load up which basically defeated my entire purpose. The most valuable thing I did learn from Weight Watchers is not eating enough can actually make you gain weight—this goes against every sensibility in me, seems totally counter-intuitive and counterproductive but after giving it thought, makes sense. This was probably why after high school I started to gain weight by only eating 1500 calories daily. My body had gotten so used to working on much lower provisions it just packed it away for later. To me, eating, exercise and weight have always been all or nothing endeavors. I either eat too much or not enough. I either exercise relentlessly or skip it. I’m either on a diet or totally off.

In the past week or so of being on my statin, avoiding alcoholic beverages so as not to protect myself from heart disease just to give myself liver disease, I’ve realized something new. Marriage makes me fat. I’m happily married and, therefore, comfortable. My husband and I enjoy eating and drinking together and my body doesn’t hamper our marital relations. He loves me “just the way I am.” Okay, well that was great when I wanted to lose weight for cosmetic reasons but now that my health is involved, it’s a totally different story. So now when my husband asks, incredulously, “You can’t have ANY alcohol,” and when I ask what he wants for dinner and he answers, “Juicy burgers or real brats—not those turkey ones”, I wonder, is he TRYING to kill me? My husband complains his gut has dropped and the scale reads higher than he’d like but he still looks like he’s a normal weight and he doesn’t go to the doctor to find out his stats so he goes on in denial and oblivion. But I can’t.

The choice sometimes seems to be to eat and drink myself to death or suffer through life, bored and depressed because I can no longer consume the things I enjoy. I know the balance is in there somewhere and maybe now that twenty years have come and gone, I will finally find it. And so the infinite journey continues. I may die fat, I may die skinny or I may die somewhere in between; however, this I know: I will die trying.