Little fat girl . . . BIG fat girl!

I’m not sure where to start with this so I’ll go back as far as I can recall. I started gaining noticeable amounts of weight when I was about eight years old, which I believe has something to do with a profound loss, which I still feel every day, that I experienced around that time – but that’s a story for another day. At ten years old I weighed 113 lbs, while all of my class mates were closer to 65 to 75 lbs. For the rest of my life, I will always remember my weight at ten years old because that was the first time I remember being embarrassed and ashamed of my weight. I was hesitant to step on the scale because I knew the nurse would announce my weight aloud as she’d done for those before me, and it would be loud enough for everyone else waiting to hear. When she said “113 pounds”, it might as well have been 1,000; I wanted to die. I knew that at the very least the boy who was directly behind me had heard and I prayed he’d keep his mouth shut. Of course, he didn’t! 16 years later, I still clearly remember the boy who was standing behind me, the way he wouldn’t make eye contact with me as I stepped off of the scale, and the way I felt when I overheard him repeat my weight to anyone who would listen. Ten years old, just a little girl . . . that was the first time I distinctly remember feeling ashamed and judged for the way I looked. In many ways, since that day my life has been a series of events which my weight was either responsible for, or which I found a way to blame my weight for. I’m sick of my weight holding me back from my dreams, and more importantly I’m sick of having it as an excuse not to do the things I dream of doing.

200lbs . . . that’s goal #1, get below 200 lbs. Since I was 15 I’ve rarely been below 200. At eighteen I spent a couple of weeks at about 185 after starting a new active job and Slimfast, at 23 I got all the way down to 163 from 204 after 9 weeks of the “Six week body makeover” (which in my opinion does work, if you can refrain from eating “real” food for the rest of your life :p), but I quickly gained all of that weight back and then some. In the last 10 years I’ve been on many different diets, some much more ridiculous that others, from liquid diets, to weight watchers. I will say that of all of them, weight watchers was the most helpful to me, but I got sick of all the adding – much like I do with calorie counting! Dieting is difficult, because I hate math, I’m much fonder of words as I’m sure you can tell from my babbling. My highest recorded weight was 222 lbs. , although I’m quite certain my highest actual weight was higher. I am 5’4 and as of last Friday, 5/29/09, my weight was 213 lbs after a 5 lb., 2 week weight loss.

I hesitated to start this blog, for the same reason I often hesitate to lose weight. I do not want to give people a reason to look at me. In the last year, I’ve somehow become aware of a dieting pattern I have; as soon as someone tells me I look good, I begin to backtrack and gain the weight back. Since I was very young, I never wanted anyone to look at me – though I’ve never figured out exactly why. I’m perhaps too comfortable with my invisibility. If I lose the weight, I may start to expect people to see me and be disappointed if they don’t, but if I stay fat I can stay invisible and have no expectations to be disappointed in. Likewise, if I put myself out there in this blog and discover that no one cares, I may only end up disappointing myself. But oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained, right? If no one else cares at least I’ll have something in writing to keep me accountable. If by some miracle someone is actually reading this, and more importantly if you’ve actually stayed to read this entire thing (or even skim it), I want to say, “Thank you.” So, now I just need to answer one question for myself: Who am I (when I’m thin)? That’s just it; I don’t know, I’ve never been “thin”. I’ve never met myself as a “thin” person, I don’t know who she is so, for now I’ll call her . . . “The ‘other’ white me”.