LittleMissSunshine
My story... where to begin?
I suppose at the beginning of my weight issues since that's why we're all here.
Looking back through photo albums, I was a normal-sized kid throughout most of my childhood. All that changed when I was about 10 years old. If you were to flip through my class pictures from first grade on, you have to scan the rows of faces to find me all the way up to the fifth grade picture... then you can't miss me, I'm twice the size of the other kids. Clearly something had happened that precipitated such a drastic change. While I know some may have a story about a swift, blunt traumatic event that turned their world upside down in one fell swoop, mine is more about a gradual unraveling that snowballed into a perfect storm that would dictate the course my young life would take.
I won't bore you with details, but suffice it to say that a depressed, formerly alcoholic single mother who loses her one remaining parent and the sibling she was closest to in the space of 2 years and then inherits a house and has to work 2, sometimes 3 jobs in order to keep up with the expenses of maintaining it and all the bills and property taxes that come with home ownership isn't conducive to an emotionally healthy, well-adjusted childhood.
When my mother was around and awake (her untreated depression typically kept her in bed 24/7 on weekends), it was typically when she'd stop at home for about an hour between jobs to make--or bring--dinner. Not surprisingly, the guilt she felt from not only being a single parent, but also depriving me of her being present as much as she'd like to be, and as much as I needed her to be, drove her to give me anything I wanted... and I wanted McDonalds and pizza and potato chips and ice cream. Fast food was easier for her and gave her more time to spend with me, so it quickly became the norm.
There's more to it than that, but there's a pretty decent overview that'll give you an idea of why I've been battling my weight for 25 of my 35 years. After repeated attempts and failures at just about every weight loss method under the sun, I'm finally ready to consider WLS. The closest I came to being thin was during my college years... I got down to 190 as a result of living the rock and roll, on-the-road lifestyle. I was doing alright with maintaining, and then I met my husband. Falling in love is a really scary, vulnerable, emotionally stressful thing... I didn't expect that a side effect of it would be gaining all my weight back, and then some.
My husband has been phenomenal through all this, never so much as a complaint or a suggestion that I do X, Y or Z to try to lose weight... I can't wait to give him back the woman he fell in love with.
