Getting to know me - the 411

As I start this blog, I am fat. Oh my god, just saying that is obscene. “I” am not fat. “I” am light and beauty, albeit surrounded by fat, enough fat to qualify as officially obese. I’m the gal that sits on the couch and eats while watching the Biggest Loser. I’m the gal that diets for a solid week to drop the five pounds I can manage to put back on in only two days. I’ve got wardrobes in three sizes - less fat, fat and disgusting. I’m presently at the high end of my fat wardrobe.

I’m 55 years old and although I’ve experienced normal weight, I have been fat most of my life. I kid you not, my earliest memory, from when I was only 2 years old, is of my grandmother’s breadbox. Another blast from the past I remember quite clearly is getting weighed in kindergarten. Another girl, who was easily a foot taller and five pounds heavier than me, made a point of walking up to me and declaring, “I am the fattest kid in the kindergarten class.” Just like it was yesterday, I recall responding with an air of defiance, “Well, I’m the second fattest!” I was a 70 pound kindergartner. In third grade I wore sweaters even on warm days to cover how the sleeves of my dresses pinched my beefy arms. In 6th grade, back in the Kennedy fitness days, back when during fitness tests all the girls stood in a circle around you to provide a “privacy screen” (ha!), I recall the humiliation of struggling but not managing even one single sit-up. I never hopped a fence or played on the monkey bars.

Finally, in eighth grade, saying she was not going to watch a fat daughter graduate, my mother took me to a pill pushing “diet doctor” who gave me an envelope of pills that allowed me to drop over 30 pounds in about three months. I didn’t stay on those pills long but I ultimately ended up staying within “normal” weight ranges until I started having children in my 20’s. With each child my weight increased. Three kids, three twenty pound weight increases.

I am 5’ 4 1/2”. My all time heaviest weight was 218 pounds. About five years ago I went on the South Beach Diet and dropped 36 pounds in just a few months. Nice accomplishment, but still 18 pounds too heavy to qualify for health insurance!

I know what healthy eating is and I know how important exercise is. Even so, over the past few years, my weight has adjusted back up nearly 20 pounds. I say “adjusted up” because the creep up has involved the loss and gain of probably a hundred pounds. Diet, lose 5 to 7 pounds, binge and regain 6 to 8. Every fat person knows the story.

Now I have both obesity and age to contend with. Bending is a challenge because my belly gets in the way. Nonexistent muscle tone and joint stiffness sometimes make the simple act of standing up a slow and incremental process. I suffer from chronic back pain and bad knees require care in movement and restrict some activity. I’m the only sibling of five that does not (yet) have diabetes. Unable to say no, I join my husband in drinking far too much wine and eating too much too late in the evening until I am downright uncomfortable. Ok, I admit it, sometimes my stomach actually hurts.

But enough of all that. You get the picture. This blog will focus on how in the heck I managed to end up in this shape and how, despite a lifetime of obesity, I become fit, active and trim.