March 10, 2015
March 15.
That's my surgery date.
I'll be honest it freaks me out a lot. I LOVE food. Absolutely love it. I love that it makes me feel better when I'm feeling fat, ugly, sad, lonely, anxious, angry, happy, or bored. I love the way it smells. I love that full feeling I get from food.
I'm not going in blind. I have cut all the carbs out of my diet since the day I got on the scale and saw my highest weight. I have started walking... not much of an exercise routine unless you are morbidly obese... I am morbidly obese. I've also started to deal with the emotional aspect of my eating disorder. It's funny writing that because people don't see obesity as an eating disorder. Anorexia, sure... put those poor souls in a rehab program... Obesity, tell those fatties to back away from the table. The general public is cruel and that's probably why obesity is one of the biggest killers.
But back to me.... I can't blame any particular family member or event from my past for my problems. I was a healthy happy kid. I do have some small triggers that have stood out to me in my reflective journey. I'm sharing those now in hopes that others may identify. I don't want to harm anyone by placing blame, I simply want to be honest and address my problem.
My pattern of self abuse via junk food started at a rather early age. My maternal grandmother had a host of her own anxiety/depression issues and she felt like she could reinforce our affection with sweet treats and salty snacks. Whatever we (my brother and I) wanted she would buy it. My mother limited the amount of sugar we ate. It could have been because we couldn't afford all the prepackaged goodies on teacher's salaries or that she just didn't want us to have it; regardless, I do remember her trying to help us avoid it. Grannie, on the other hand, took advantage of the fact we couldn't get it from Mama and provided it in excess. She meant well. I'm sure after growing up the youngest of nine during the depression she didn't have the means to have those things as a child. Little Debbie and King Size Snickers bars was full on grandma spoilage and she took pride in it. I don't think badly of her for that. I just don't think it helped my emotional coping skills, or my pants size.
In the fifth grade I weighed 110 pounds. That's not super heavy for a girl that age, but it's more on the heavy side, especially in 1992. We were the last kids that probably remember playing outside. We got our first game system in 1987. Computers and satellite tv came shortly after that. So now I had all the junk food that I could get and all the TV and video games that a girl could want. As a class project we made posters called "All about Me" ... these posters included our physical statistics. The teacher put us against a wall and measured our heights. She then put us on a scale and measured our weights. We wrote both down on the poster which was promptly colored and laminated and placed in the window for all to see. It wasn't a big deal. I mean, it wasn't a big deal until the boys noticed my weight. They also noticed my best friend's weight which was four pounds lighter than me. Instantly we became the butt of many jokes. We got nicknames too. Hers was Kix 106 and mine was big (1)10 tires. We had boobs and bellies and we were surrounded by skinny prepubescent boys. We were targets. We handled it as a team though. We shook it off and made the boys feel immature and small, like true women do.... We were sisters and we could handle it together, always. I was good with my size. But, through it all the food waited in the background. All I needed was emotional trauma to really rocket my weight problem.
The next year, in August 1993, my best friend was killed in a car accident along with her little brother. I don't know if that is directly responsible for any of my eating problems, but I have watched enough Oprah to realize that it didn't help. My sixth grade year is a blur. I coped with other friends and with Grannie's king size candy bars. I made it through that year without a therapist and by today's standards that's quite an accomplishment.
The sixth grade melted into the seventh grade. I was involved in extra curricular activites. I wasn't particular atheletic but I did make cheerleader in the seventh grade. I remember that year I squeezed into a size 13 cheerleader uniform. I was the biggest girl on the squad, but at least I was on the squad.
I stayed active during my teenage years. I wasn't super overweight but I remember feeling like I was. I had terrible self esteem. This trickled into all of my romantic relationships as a teenager. That didn't help the eating at all. I remember a summer where I drank apple cider vinegar mixed about half and half with sunny delight. A friend suggested it as a weight loss tactic. I drank only that and ate a few saltine crackers at bedtime. That was it. I now realize it was borderline anorexia seeing as we didn't eat anything else. Thing is I was a terrible anorexic... I loved food way too much to go without it.
Enter the binge and purge lifestyle. I don't know that many teenage girls haven't tried to throw up a meal. I tried a couple of times but turns out I'm not very good at that either. Laxatives were suggested by a friend because they weren't the same as throwing up but I never could get into that either. I tried dexatrim, metabolife, and the glorious yellow jacket pills that you used to get from the truck stops.... those didn't really work either.
I finally got comfortable with myself around 17. I had a boyfriend that made me happy and I was involved in some extracurricular stuff that kept me busy and kept my mind off my weight problems. I found self confidence.
Then I got pregnant. (maybe a little too much confidence?) Try being pregnant and married your senior year and see if you don't resort to eating your emotions. (disclaimer: please don't try that at all, i was just making a point. don't have sex and don't get pregnant when you are a teenager.... thanks.) Anyway, my new husband and I moved away from our parents and we both finished high school. He worked after school and we brought home around $150 per week.
I learned quickly that poverty makes you fat. It's true what they say on the news. We ate fast things and canned things and quick things and processed things and boy did I pack on the pounds. I gained 80 pounds during my pregnancy. When it was all said and done I had a beautiful baby boy and 60 pounds to lose.
I did ok for a while after that. I maintained around 190 and for my 5'7 frame that's a good size. It's still plus sized but pretty much my dream size now. I got into college and coasted for about a year juggling a new baby and life out of high school.
I was accepted to nursing school a year later. Ask a nurse what happens in nursing school and they'll tell you really quick that you get fat. We ate all the time. After clinicals, before clinicals, between labs, after classes. Nurses LOVE to eat and food is always around to be had. Throw in my second unplanned pregnancy in three years and voila fat Heather emerges once again.
Nursing school ended and my marriage deteriorated rather quickly. But for the first time in my life I didn't cover my problems with food. Separation and divorce combined with being thrown in to being the sole provider for two little boys was the best diet I had ever had. I worked 50 - 60 hours a week and the Atkins craze was at full swing. I did really well. I lost over 100 pounds and at my lowest i saw 140 on the scale. That was skinnier than I had been since I was 13.
I maintained around 150 for a while. I met my (best) husband during that time and during the happy dating process the pounds began to slowly come back. We ate out a lot. He lived two hours from me and so that equalled a lot of time on the road and at fast food restaurants. I was happy and I felt loved and beautiful and confident and so I let my diet slip to the back burner. When we married I was 185 lbs. Six months after we married I found out I was pregnant.
We moved to Alabama (I ate). I lost touch with a lot of friends (i ate some more). I started a new job (eat, eat eat). I stopped smoking because I was pregnant (eat everything in sight). I rapidly found the 2oos on the scale again. I believe i weighed in at 243 after I had my daughter.
After I went back to work I worked nights, and it's extremely hard to diet and exercise when you are working weird hours. I didn't gain much during that time but I developed some nasty habits. I started smoking again and the junk food got out of control. My weight crept up and up and I maintained around 250 for a few years.
In 2010 I fell and broke nearly every bone in my foot and fractured a ligament. I was off work and stuck in a wheelchair for 8 weeks after surgery (mainly because i was too heavy to carry my weight on crutches). For the first time in my life I saw 300 pounds. In that period of time the hospital that I worked at faced financial hardship and my job was one of the first ones to go. Here I was, the heaviest that I had ever been and no job to go back to. Hello, crippling anxiety, where have you been?
300 was always a big deal for me. It's the number people use to describe really really big people and in my head I didn't feel really really big. I decided to deal with that number by ignoring it completely. After I got back on my feet I did lose back down into the 280-290 range, but I couldn't make myself successful at dieting and my foot had a lot of post op pain so it was really hard to exercise.
I never went back to work. I decided to stay at home with my kids. That was 5 years ago. I have slowly packed on around 5-10 pounds per year since then. At the end of 2015 I was the heaviest I had ever been. The day I stepped on the scales and decided that I had to do something to save my life I weighed 334.4 pounds.
It's a bad vicious cycle, but the truth is once you let it get out of control it's almost impossible to get that control back on your own. I always think about alcoholics and drug addicts. No one ever really expects them to quit without help. Surgery is my help. I'm addicted to food and surgery is going to help me conquer that addiction.
It freaks me out. I'm scared and excited. I have a goal to work toward though and I have already found that I recognize when I'm stress eating and I will stop myself. The pre op diet is a serious mind trip. Already it has helped me face emotions and confront my "head hunger" straight on. The reason I'm boring you with this is that I realize that my past is a big important part of my future. I have to look back at the triggers that made me as big as I am. I have to recognize these triggers so I will be able to avoid them or at least see them coming in the future. If you have read this far then maybe you understand and have triggers of your own. We're all fighting our own battles. Mine just likes Hostess Cupcakes and Krispy Kremes.
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