A long road back to being me

Oct 22, 2011

I didn't get to this weight overnight. How many times have you said or heard that line? If you're anything like me, probably too many to count. The truth is, I came into this world 53 years ago at a "normal" weight of 5 pounds 6 ounces. As a 4 year old, I was actually underweight. My worried parents even took me to my pediatrician to see if I was okay. I was. I just wasn't hungry all the time. As a child and then a pre-teen, I still maintained a "normal" weight, it was my childhood that was anything but normal.

As a child, starting around the age of 4 or 5, and ending sometime around my 14th year, I was sexually molested and terrorized by a family member. It wasn't until my 13 year old brain figured out how much my abuser HATED fat women that I came to the conclusion that if I was fat ... perhaps he'd stop. The overeating and binge eating began with that realization. I'd hide in the basement of our home and eat loaves of bread, cartons of ice cream, bags of candy bars, literally anything I could get my hands on ... all in an effort to pack on the pounds.

I suppose in a normal (there's that word again) family the parental units would notice and investigate why their previously healthy child was suddenly turning into a tub of lard. But my parents were too locked in their own dysfunctional marriage to notice any of us kids, much less our emerging issues. As a result, the abuse continued and so did the eating, until suddenly one day my abuser looked at me with utter disgust and pronounced me "fat and ugly" ... and he walked away without touching me. He never touched me again. And while some people may think, okay why not stop the overeating? All I could think was that as long as he was in my life, I would be in danger if I lost my protective layer of fat.

Around the time I turned 16 my mother suddenly noticed how big I'd gotten. Afraid I'd end up some fat, lonely spinster, she dragged me kicking and screaming to a local diet doctor who promptly agreed with her and put me on a liquid diet. The stuff was orange in color, sticky in texture, and sweet in such a sickening way that I gagged every time I took a sip. Since my mother had decreed "no solid food" until I lost at least 50 pounds, I was stuck with the orange enemy. At least until I figured out how to use babysitting money to sneak to the corner store where I could buy Reece's Peanut Butter Cups and virtually inhale them before I got home. When 4 months later I hadn't lost more than a few pounds, my mother decided she was wasting money on me and the liquid diet, and she announced she didn't care how big I got. She was wiping her hands of my fat. I was safe behind my wall once more.

You and I both know that old habits die hard. Eating for me was an act of self-preservation and protection. It became more than a habit, it became my wall of defense. As such, I was terrified to stop, and even more terrified to let anyone over that wall. That included boys who might have taken notice of a budding young woman.

The pattern of using my weight as a wall against being hurt was well in place by the time I was an adult. Oh sure, there were a few times I decided to diet and indeed, I dropped a bit of weight. The age of Phen-Phen was upon us, and I like countless thousands of others, jumped on the diet pill bandwagon determined to shed the pounds. But the minute people started to notice, and comment, back it all came, and more came with it. From time to time there were people in my life who saw beyond the wall, who looked past the fat, and truly got to know and care for the me inside. Some of those people are still in my life today. In fact, two of my dearest friends knew me at my heaviest, and not once did the weight seem to matter to them. They neither judged me, nor did they try to change me.

A couple of years before I met my husband I'd decided to let down my guard just a bit. Part of that "letting down" meant addressing my wall. I'd gone on the Atkins Diet a few years before and had lost 75 pounds. As proud of that weight loss as I was, I was also so sick of meat and protein and so terribly missed carbs that I'd regained about 40 of the 75 and felt awful. So when I once again decided to diet, it was Weight Watchers that I turned to. That initial weigh in was embarrassing as hell, but I told myself that even a small success would make it all worthwhile. And I did lose weight with WW. As long as I followed the program religiously and didn't deviate one bit, I did okay. I lost about 45 pounds on WW, and was feeling pretty darned good about that. I'd even joined a gym and was actually looking forward to working out 5 to 6 days a week.

It was during this period that I met my husband (on line) and in time, fell head over heels in love. Here was a man who seemed to like me for me. He liked that I was smart, he liked that I was independent, he liked that I was confident. Never mind that that last one was pretty much an act. He liked me. Eventually, he even loved me. No one was more surprised than me that someone (a man) could love me ... all of me ... even after I'd told him about my childhood and the abuse. You know that high you get when you're in love? It's intoxicating, isn't it? It just makes the whole world seem nicer. It even made eating easier, or rather, eating healthier.

And then I lost my job. In losing my job, I lost a part of me. I'd never in my life lost a job before. Oh I'd left jobs alright, but I'd never been the one asked to leave. It didn't matter that I was being replaced by my married bosses illicit girlfriend, I felt like a complete and utter failure. And I fell into the very dark, very ugly hole of depression. For much of the next 6 months I went through the motions of living, but felt lost and empty inside. My then-boyfriend (an airline pilot, who was gone a lot) loved that I was home all the time, available whenever he had days off, but I hated every single minute of it. To console myself, I began to eat again. Food was the one thing I had complete control over. And boy howdy did I take control of it. Or so I thought. In reality, food had control of me.

Those 45 pounds I'd lost at Weight Watchers slowly began to creep back on. Even though not working meant I had all the free time in the world, I made excuses to avoid going to the gym. Pretty soon, I stopped going altogether and canceled my membership. Why waste the money? My days seemed to blend into one another, peppered now and then with a day here or there where I woke up feeling hopeful and positive and resisted the urge to overeat. But the next day would be lonely and depressing, and I'd be back in front of the fridge, looking for consolation among the shelves.

In March of the following year I found a reason for a new focus; we were getting married at the end of that year, and I had a wedding to plan. Since wedding = wedding gown, I also needed to lose some weight. Back to dieting I went, with a vengeance. Most of the time I was simply too busy to overeat, and the weight just came off. When I did eat, I tried to keep it healthy and in moderation, and by the time of our wedding that December, I slipped into my close-fitting gown with just a little help from Spanx. Okay, maybe more than "just a little".

For the next several months I maintained control of my eating. I cooked us healthy meals, I shopped for healthy snacks. We even took evening walks when my airline pilot husband was home and there wasn't triple digit heat outside. But the stress of a new marriage, my growing loneliness and binging when he was gone, the new responsibilities of step-motherhood (he had 4 kids from 3 previous marriages) and dealing with his malicious and unreasonably angry 3rd ex-wife started to wear on me.

The following summer something inside me snapped, and I felt utterly broken. Having major anxiety attacks just added to the hell I was going through. I just wanted it all to stop. One night when I'd decided I'd had enough, I calmly swallowed every pill I could find in the house, and I walked out the back door and into our pool. I just wanted to float off into sleep and never wake up. Within minutes my husband found the empty pill bottles and after searching the house, found me in the pool. I woke up the following day in a local hospital. My weary husband on one side of me, a staff Psychiatrist on the other. In order to be released from the hospital I had a choice; see a therapist on my own or commit myself to a Psychiatric unit for two weeks. I chose the "on my own" route, and my husband took me home the following day. Therapy consisted mostly of the counselor asking how my day was, what I planned to do the next day, and did I have any thoughts of harming myself or anyone else. Apparently I had all the "right" answers, and after a few short months of weekly visits, I was deemed "healthy and safe" and that as they say, was that. 

Only it wasn't. I hadn't really dealt with my issues, so I hadn't resolved any of them. All I knew for sure is that I'd scared the hell out of my husband, and myself and I needed to make some changes. I bought a couple of self-help books and a couple of cookbooks that are designed for healthy eating, and I told myself that I could do it myself. The first thing I did was to "de-fat" the house. I cleared out the snack cupboard and the fridge and started buying more fruit and veggies, more leaner cuts of meat. I banned white bread from the house and replaced it with fiber and whole wheat. Sugary juices were out, sugar free was in. If the packaging said "Fat Free" ... it came home with me. I'd always been an "all or nothing" kind of person, and this new me was no different. The only trouble was, I apparently hadn't thought about the other people in the house. My husband hated wheat bread and wheat pasta, his then 5 year old daughter liked sugary drinks and snacks and got them at her mother's house, so why not at ours? And his teenage son who spent summers with us couldn't possibly drink Skim milk, what was I thinking??

I started looking at my shopping list as "them" and "me", a process made much more challenging by the fact that I liked and wanted to eat some of "their" food, way more than I wanted to like or eat "mine". I should have known that this plan had failure written all over it from the start. Not only is it expensive to shop this way, it's frustrating to cook two separate meals every evening. Pretty soon I was making excuses for nibbling at their pizza, or taking just a bite of their pasta. And soon after that, my clothes were once again uncomfortably tight.

Enter Jenny Craig. If actress Kirstie Alley could do it ... why not me? I joined in March of that year and by July was experiencing substantial enough weight loss success that I was proud of myself once more. My husband was noticing, friends were noticing, and I was loving the feeling of being in control of my eating at last. But as anyone who's done one of those expensive "food included" diet plans can tell you, those pre-packaged meals get pretty boring after a few months. There's only so much you can do to improve upon their taste without sabotaging your diet. By the following January I had come to HATE Jenny Craig and every single one of her products. Well, except for her oh-so-delish lemon cake. Even my sweets loving stepdaughter loved that lemon cake.

I'd had some weight loss success with Jenny's program, so I figured if I just counted calories, fat and sugar grams I could replicate the program without buying the JC food that now tasted all the same. As I watched the scale go up and down over the next several months, I started to read about other weight loss options. I even looked into Gastric Banding and attended an info session put on by a local WLS doctor. But after talking it over with my husband, and reading some of the "after" stories on line, I concluded it wasn't for me. I was still convinced I could "do it on my own". And I was still deceiving myself.

I'm a person who eats when I'm lonely, when I'm depressed, when I'm sad. I use food as a reward and a comforter. Food is my "go to" solution to every problem. Even when food IS the problem.

The following summer I was once again under a great deal of stress, and once again feeling unable to deal with it in a reasonable and productive way. My husband and I had started marriage counseling early that year, but that had given way to me being in individual therapy to try to deal with and resolve the issues from my childhood abuse that continued to plague my life. I believed therapy could help, but it was outrageously painful in ways I'd not anticipated. My therapist used a process called EMDR to work on what she'd diagnosed was a classic case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I knew going in that this process would dredge up a lot of old memories and old fears, and I believed I was strong enough to handle that. I should have known better.  

There were days when my husband was gone that I'd barely get out of bed, but I'd rationalize it by reminding myself that at least I wasn't eating and crying all day. I'd lose a couple of pounds, then gain 4 back. I was the proverbial diet yo-yo with no end in sight. Once again disgusted with my life in general, unable to sleep through the night without nightmares brought about as a result of the EMDR, and feeling like a total burden to my husband, I started to think about how wonderful it would be to just not have to deal with any of it. One evening that June I hatched a plan to get my husband and the 2 visiting stepchildren out of the house. My plan was that once they were out of the house, I'd step into the shower and put my 380 (gun) to my temple and pull the trigger. Hey, at least in the shower it would be easier to clean up, I reasoned. Yes, I know, there is absolutely nothing reasonable about taking ones life.

My husband was smarter than I'd given him credit for. He knew something was wrong, and he had a pretty good idea what I intended to do about it. He called me out on my suicide plan and I bolted from the house, gun in hand. My husband managed to yell to his son to call 911, then he ran out of the house after me. About the time I heard the sirens, my husband convinced me to give up my gun. Later that evening, when the officers had left and I'd spoken with my therapist, I began to calm down and decided I had to find a way through the mess I'd allowed my life to become.

In the days and weeks that followed, my therapy continued and even intensified. Thanks to a truly gifted and kind therapist, I came to see suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and I realized that while the stresses in my life seemed to be overwhelming, in fact, they were temporary. I could and would overcome them, one day and one step at a time.

Today, my past is truly and forever in my past, a book on the shelf. It's part of who I am, but it doesn't define me and it certainly doesn't control me. Thanks to therapy and one hell of a lot of hard work, I have tools that help me deal with stress and difficult times. Thanks to my own hard work, I have a stronger marriage, a better outlook on life, and a better sense of who I am and who I can become. Thanks to all that's happened to me up to this point, the good, the bad and the ugly, I now respect, value and love myself. And I'm ready to show myself the love I have always deserved.

Weight loss surgery is my gift to my self.  It's time for that wall of protection to be torn down and never re-built. It's time for me to let in the light and the love and the good things that I know are out there waiting for me.

It's been a long road back to being me ... but I'm finally here.

0 Comments