A look at the past

I went to therapy yesterday. I don't go on a regular basis... how I got there actually doesn't matter but it was my first time talking to this woman. She made me think about my childhood which I never talk about and it was very emotional for me. I think I have blocked out big chunks of time. But I haven't actually forgotten them, which would be fine. They are still there, probably affecting me in all kinds of ways, that I don't even know about because I refuse to think about that time. So I thought maybe I should blog about it and get it out.

So here it goes... My childhood (or at least the weight related part of it)

I wasn't a fat kid, not even a chubby one but I was told I was fat and I completely believed it. Both my parents (and they are super nice people I love a lot) told me that. My mom was always on a diet (she wasn't chubby either). Things were kind of OK till I was about 10 or 11. I think around then I believed so firmly that I was fat, I started behaving like a fat kid and actually started to gain weight. Or maybe it was just puberty. Who knows.

The first time I remember being really traumatized about it was at a party. My parents were hanging out with another family who had a daughter about my age. I was probably around 11. I had gained some weight since the last time the other family had seen me. And somebody made a comment about my weight. I think the other girl made it first but then all the adults piped in. They all agreed and kind of laughed. I remember just wanting to disappear. It was awful! 

I also remember conversations with my father, I was maybe 13. He told me that ``there are passengers for every train" but if I didn't lose weight I probably won't like the men that will want to be with me. At the time I was almost my current height of 5'7" and maybe 150 lb. I also remember my father hanging out with his male friends and making comments about my weight.

The message was pretty clear - if I am fat nobody will love me. And 150 was definitely fat.

The other thing I remember is being told I couldn't do certain things because I was too fat. At some point I wanted to take an aerobics class (it was the 80's, aerobics was very cool) and my mom told me I was too fat and I had to lose some weight first. That was still around 12 or 13.  I also remember every time my mom bought me new jeans, she would buy them a size too small - to motivate me to lose weight. I would have to stuff myself in them. I remember fashioning my own system of bringing the button and the whole together with paperclips when they were just too small to button even lying down. Then I always wore really big long shirts to cover my stomach and my not really buttoned pants.  I am probably exaggerating, I am sure she got me some pants that fit. But I definitely remember going to school with paperclips keeping my pants on. I was about 13 then and steadily gaining weight.

At about age 12 I went on my first hard core diet. My mom had just had a second child and was on a diet to lose the pregnancy weight. I remember I read a book with diets and for severely obese people the book recommended 300 cal/day so that is what I went on. My mom and I wrote down what we ate everyday and I stayed between 300 and 400 cal. I don't really remember how long this lasted but I remember losing weight very quickly and my mom praising me. And we were doing it together so I felt very connected to her. My mom didn't generally have much time for me and we didn't do that many things together so it was great to be doing this together. I think this probably cemented the idea that when I am losing weight I am lovable. Anyway, as you can imagine 300 cal is quite drastic for a growing kid. My period stopped. Then one day I thought I was going to pass out at school. My mom had told me that if I get dizzy I should eat something very sweet and that will make me feel better. So I bought something sweet and ate it and then I just kept on eating and that was the end of that diet. It probably lasted 2 months total. I lost weight, I don't remember how much, but I never got to whatever my ``idea weight" was at the time.

One of the things that I had come to believe at the time was that I was too fat for certain things and that my body was gross. There were some physical things, like my mom didn't let me start shaving my legs because I was too fat to wear skirts or shorts. I was going to be allowed to shave when I lost the weight. In general I think I believed that my weight was the only thing that mattered about my appearance and until I lost the weight paying any attention to how I dressed was just pointless. Or even bad because I was supposed to be kind of invisible. 

In elementary school I ran track. I wasn't particularly good (my mom had been a really good runner) but I got plenty of exercise. As the pounds started creeping on, I was basically discouraged to do anything active, until I lost the weight. I remember when I was 14 and I had just moved to a new school. I was hanging out with some other girls and we decided to get icecream or something like that. To get there the girls decided to cut through this park and there was a fence around the park. Just a short one, probably waist high. All the girls jumped over it but I didn't think I could so I just said that I have changed my mind and didn't want to go and left. I knew they knew I was just too fat to get over the fence. 

I also remember I started eating for comfort around 12 or so. I would come home from school and there was nobody home and I would eat. I mostly ate things I didn't think anybody will notice that they were gone.  Like sugar straight from the jar. I also remember breaking into some chocolates my parents were saving to give as a present. When it was finally discovered that most of the chocolate is missing I denied having anything to do with it.

When I was maybe 15 I made my next serious dieting attempt. I was probably about 160-170. I lived away from my mom for a few months, it was the summer, I spent a lot of time playing active games with other kids (remember when teenagers actually used to play outside, not just hang out at the mall or talk on the phone?) and then I noticed I was losing weight. So I started trying to lose weight. And I was somewhat successful. I remember when my mom saw me next I was wearing one of those 2-seizes too small pants she had bought be and they actually fit. I remember her asking me how much I weighed and being proud of me. I felt like she liked me. 

I think part of it is that my biological father and my mom divorced when I was little and she really hated him at that point and I looked just like him. Which I was often told. I think maybe that is why I so rarely thought she liked me.

Anyway, by the time I was maybe 16 my mom had actually figured out that weighing 130lbs is not the meaning of life. She stayed fairly skinny for the rest of her life and she still continued to diet, but at some point she clearly stopped believing that any day that you spent overweight is a day lost from your life (this was something she told me when I was about 11 and I remember counting how many days I have shortened my life by by being overweight). I even remember her telling me at some point that a person with a smile on their face is much more attractive then at unhappy skinny person. I think she believed that much of the time.

Unfortunately 16 years of messages that I was fat and that was about the worst thing one can be have left a really deep mark. I think for the last 16 years I have been in recovery. And I have made a lot of progress.

Throughout college I believe I was in the 190's. I didn't really exercise beyond being a college student without a car which implies a certain amount of walking. I hated my body. I wore huge (and I mean huge --XXL men's) T-shirts. I never tried clothes on in the store. I knew a place where you could by T-shirts for $5. I always went there and bought the biggest size available. And I wore my roommate's hand me down pants. The interesting part is that I didn't think my roommate was grossly obese and I thought I was and yet I was wearing her pants.  Throughout college I lived with the thought I should lose weight but I don't remember making any sustained effort in that direction. 

My last year of college I met and fell in love with what I thought was the most amazing woman ever. We will call her X. She was much older than me. And one thing about her was that she was very active and totally not into dieting. One of the few people left without a food problem. She had been an athlete her whole life and at 35 she was swimming 2 hours almost every day, competed on a Master's team, biked. She was just amazing. And she just ate normal food. Well she was vegetarian but she never thought about how many calories were in her food. And she never ate to make herself feel better. She just had the most normal relationship with food I have ever seen. And she had a great body. So I fell in love. Hard. That relationship is beyond the scope of this (way too long) post. But she taught me some things and was probably the key person to help me unlearn some of the stuff I had learned as a child.

I started going to the school gym and became vegetarian (and still am). We did a lot of active stuff together. Mostly hiking. She was in way better shape than me but I think she liked the company. I don't think my weight changed much, just my activity level.

Then the year after I graduated I had some majorly stressful events and, well I think I was basically suicidal and just stopped eating. I had never done that before in my life. I lost a lot of weight. Maybe 25-30 lb. I think I was down to around 170. But I didn't care about the weight, I just wanted to die. Eventually I recovered and so did my weight. I was back to the 190's. A few years later, I was probably about 25, I jointed WW and lost 25 or so pounds again. I was almost at my top "healthy weight" range but never made it there. About that time though, and I am not sure why, I started to reject some of the ``you are too fat for this" messages I so firmly believed. Maybe because I had gone with X on several pretty hard core backpacking trips and although I struggled I loved every minute of it. And I was there with the fit people and I was keeping up. I remember the first time I actually went to the store, tried on clothes and bought sizes that actually fit me, about size 16 pants and L T-shirts. I still like wearing men's T-shirts. I also started going to ballroom classes. Dancing had always been my passion but I never did it because I was too fat. 

Somehow I regained the weight I lost with WW and was back in the 190's. At least when I regain I just go back to the 190's and don't gain any extra weight. 

Then, at age 29, another major even happened and I stopped eating again. I was down to 165lb in no time and just like the first time, that didn't make me happy because the goal was to die. But again I recovered and started my first running period.

After I started eating again, I discovered running. I love running. For the past 10 years I have been pretty much exercising on some sort of regular basis. It hasn't been perfect but I have definitely become a person who at least notices if I don't work out for a week. It is not always in the gym and sometimes I just walk to run errands but my early college days of no exercise are pretty much over, I think. But running and racing means exercising at a whole new level. I was running 4-5 times a week and really pushing myself. After less than a year of running, 8 months to be exact, I ran my first marathon. But I got injured and maybe just burned out and I stopped running and the weight crept on again. I haven't regained it all back and I want to stop gaining and I want to run but that is for the future. This post was just supposed to look at the past because with all the progress I have made, those first 16 years are still there and I definitely still believe that fat=unlovable and that is probably not a good thing to believe.

Well, it is now out there. I actually do feel better. I don't expect anyone will ever read this but it still feels better that if I had just written this on a piece of paper.