The Back Story

I wasn't always fat.  Actually as a little girl I was on the small size and this is right and proper as I'm only 4'11 and 3/4 inches.  I prefer to think of myself as a larger than life person but the reality is a I'm a pint sized height with a petite frame.  As a kid though, I grew up in a neighborhood of boys and was a notorious tomboy.  I was busy and busy meant small.  In high school, I played tennis like it was a death match and was a cheerleader so again, busy and busy meant small.  In college, I wasn't quite as busy but I lived off campus and walking to class kept the beer and grease pounds at bay and I graduated weighing a respectable 105 pounds.

At that point in my life, I never even thought about my weight, what I ate or the impact it might ultimately have on my health.  What 22 year old does?  Pizza, wine, beer, steak, whole boxes of macaroni and cheese (not the powdered stuff, the serious fat maker that involves squeezing cheese out of a little metallic bag), chips, dip, cookies, you name it.  I ate it. I was still small by any standard, at least for a while, and as my weight climb to 118 and then finally hit 128 on the day I got married, I still made no real connection between what went into my mouth and how it was effecting my body.  I'm not stupid.  I just didn't want to consider that lack of discipline, poor choices and no exercise (all of that stopped after college) were packing the pounds on me at a ridiculously fast rate of speed.  It was just simplier to pretend that the fat fairy had come in the middle of the night and left me a present.

What was I thinking?  Twenty three pounds in six years?  If my teeth had fallen out that fast I would have spent a bloody fortune with the dentist.  If my eyesight had declined by the same percentage, you best believe I'd have been wearing glasses and looking around for a service pet to guide me down the chip aisle.  But it wasn't any of these life impacting areas.  It was just my weight.  Insert, "but what can you do shrug" here.

By the time I got married, for the first time in my life, I was concious of my body; concious of the size I wore.  I was newly uncomfortable in a bathing suit but there's a difference between being concious and being aware.  Concious is some vague cloud of understanding much like Plato's forms where if you look at the thing directly it fades into the background.  Its more of a sideways glance that is passing at best.  A whisper in a crowded room.  Maybe you hear it.  Maybe not.  You just have a vague sense of unease that you're missing something important.  Awareness is a keener sense of understanding.  It has a warning in it.  A call to action.  An undeniability that something has changed and changed in away that like Toyland, once you've past some unseen border, you can't go back to the way things were.

I became AWARE of my weight for the first time after the birth of my oldest daughter.  With a topped out number of 152, it finally became abundantly clear that I was FAT.  Not Chubby.  Full on Fat.  Something had to be done!

So, I joined Weight Watchers, took up dog walking and submitted to the occasional session on an ancient stationary bike.  I measured and counted religiously and I lost weight.  Not back down to my healthy youthful 105 or even my still okay, but not really 118.  Nope, I dropped down to 128.  Got smug. Decided I'd kicked Fat's ass.  Stopped measuring, stopped counting and stopped paying attention.  The weight came back and I turned my head to keep from seeing.