A message to my boyfriend about my weight issues

Thought this would be worth putting here.

Tue, Feb 26, 2019 5:47 PM

Hey babe,

I have a lot to talk about and I wanted to send an email where I could carefully consider my words. You have some experience with my on/off dieting but you don't know the extent of my problems with my weight and food relationship.  I just wanted to make these issues known and communicate to you the importance of me doing something about them.

I've been overweight all my life. I struggle with it in a way that I wouldn't expect you to understand.  I won't go into every little detail but I'll just say I think I have an undiagnosed binge eating disorder. I don't know how to fix it without therapy. Maybe if I have health insurance someday that would make it affordable, I will take advantage.  But so far I've just read self-help books and for a long time leaned on Weight Watchers. I've seriously considered surgical solutions (which I think would just be a band-aid).  I even tried Over-eaters Anonymous for a while. I know how to lose weight and how I should eat.  I just struggle with making myself do it. I truly feel addicted. My weight has gone up and down since I was about 12 years old. If I'm not actively trying to lose weight or eat healthy with a plan, I gain and gain.

Anyway, lately I've just been consumed with negative thoughts about my body and my weight and my out-of-control feelings around food.  I'm mad about how I'm gaining back all the weight I fought so hard to lose in 2015-ish.  It makes me feel really scared because I don't want to end up a different looking person than who you met. That just feels wrong to me. It's not fair to you.  I know everyone has their own standards of attractiveness. I don't think it's shallow.  I used to think it was - that a significant other should love you no matter how you look, but I've changed my attitude on that. And besides, my weight affects our relationship (or will affect it eventually) in other ways.  My snoring, for example.  For those reasons and for many, many others, it's just become really important to me to get serious about getting healthy.

I read a book that gave me some strategies to deal with the binge eating and I'm going to combine it with calorie tracking.  I'm going to treat it with the seriousness of having very serious food allergies. There will just be some foods I can't let myself eat anymore.  And there will be situations where I can't enjoy it like the binge-eating me would like. We're going to have to eat out a lot less and go out drinking a lot less.  We can still cook together but it will have to be healthy stuff. I'll still go out for important occasions and just try to inconspicuously not partake of food/drink or do it in very small amounts.

I know this will suck for you.  Eating out is fun.  Drinking is fun.  I'm sorry to have to do this. But it won't be fun for me to have gained 40 pounds by this time next year.  It won't be fun to feel depressed and start having physical/health issues.

The stuff we have planned this weekend - I still want to go.  I will just eat healthy beforehand and when there maybe eat/drink a few carefully thought-out things that will still fit into my calorie allowance.

Ugh.  I hope all of this make at least some sense.  I wanted to be honest.  I want to ask for your help. I love you and I hope all this isn't too much for you.

-Your (now low-fat) cupcake

the story of my life on a diet - part 2

So I guess I started "dieting" around age 11-12ish.  I remember my usual meal: chicken breast, white rice with spray "butter" and salad (with full fat ranch dressing of all things.)  I'm not sure where I got my ideas of what constitutes healthy eating.

Sad memory: when I was junior high age, during a dieting phase, I finally succumbed to the call of a bag of peanut m&m's.  I ate about half it and felt so remorseful that I threw the rest of it away in the trash.  I guess it kept calling me because I decided to spray it with roach spray (yeah, food addicts aren't above digging food out of the trash).  I remember crying a lot and really hating myself that day.

I think I was about 15ish when I was finally successful.  I read Oprah's story and followed the plan in her book "Make the Connection".  I had decided I'd had enough of my shitty life, of hating myself and feeling out of control. I counted fat grams, I ate lots of turkey-sandwich-and-pretzel lunches.  Every morning, I used my mom's stepper and invented my own step workout routines set to music on mix tapes I made myself (one of the songs I remember is "Come Out and Play" by the Offspring - heh)  I lost somewhere around 70 pounds.  I was so proud of myself.  The 2.5 pounds came off every week like clockwork.  I had a tremendous amount of motivation.  It was almost like I was on autopilot.  I eventually even took up jogging 5 miles a day.  I remember waking up at like, 4:30 in the morning to get my exercise in.

Eventually though, it became tough to maintain eating less than 20 grams of fat a day, and then I went and broke my foot (in a mosh pit, see a few paragraphs below).  I stopped exercising and slowly went back to my old habits.  Of course, the weight crept back up.

Since then my life's been a series of on and off dieting, though to my credit, I have usually done it "the healthy way".  I've never starved myself.  The worst was probably Suzanne Somer's low-carb plan.  I've gone vegetarian for a while.  Vegan for a while.  I joined a boot-camp program.  I did the "Abs Diet" (which I still like and refer to).  Between these attempts, my biggest food problem is bingeing. Something emotional will trigger me and I eat with the desperation of a wild beast - any food that is "bad" is stuffed down my throat to the point of wanting to vomit.  Sometimes I did vomit, not because I wanted to, but because physically my body couldn't handle the massive amounts of food I ingested.

I also did a lot of eating in secret.  Once I was able to drive I often got drive-thru fast food and ate it mindlessly in my car.  I remember having daily habits of stopping at Jack-in-the-Box after school.
Those were days that I felt utterly out of control and disgusted with myself.  I read self-help books.  I tried to get to the root of my problems.  I went to therapy.  And I'd keep having my ups and downs.

I've tried praying away my demons many times, which brings me to becoming a very religious person as a teenager.  At the same time, I enjoyed being "alternative" - I had body piercings, colored hair, I participated in mosh pits.... I was a punk for Jesus.  It was all pretty ridiculous, but I guess it gave me some semblance of "cool", enough to not hate 100% of myself.

This continued into college, 5 hours from home, where I was so lonely that I dropped out my first semester and went to community college.  Bouts of depression followed me.  Eventually I came to a point where I tried to accept my fatness.  In art school (I went back to my university after a couple of years), I painted a whole series of pin-up girls that were not just curvy, but FAT.  I even painted myself naked as a pin-up (the important bits were covered.)  I was trying to do my part to change the system that made me hate myself so much.  I think it was a necessary part of my journey because after that, I was able to be nicer to myself.  I stopped calling myself mean names, usually involving large animals like whales and cows.

I guess as I've gotten older, the health aspect looms larger and larger though.  H and I went through a time in our marriage where he was very angry that I didn't care whether I lived for very long.  I was basically killing myself slowly and expected him to be okay with it.  He didn't think it was fair to him.  And he's right.  It wasn't.

I estimate that I've had by now, maybe 50 times in my life where I've told myself, "Okay, this time it's for real.  I'm going to lose weight for good.  Enough is enough."  Sometimes it lasts a day, sometimes a few months.  I am scared to make any more declarations like that.  I feel strong right now, like I really can make it all the way to my goal weight.  But I have a nagging feeling - what if some big life change happens and I turn to food again?  That's what I'm struggling with right now - what if.  This is my current background on my phone.  It makes me feel a little better.  A little more in control.



I still do a lot of readings on food addiction.  I haven't binged in a while.  I know I will never be "cured", though.  It's kind of depressing, but I have to keep reminding myself that there is no finish line.  That I will probably - no, I WILL - keep falling but as long as I keep getting back up, I'll be good.  

the story of my life on a diet - part 1

The Early Years

I've been overweight my entire life.  When I was a baby, my mom called me her lechuga (lettuce) because I was "fresh and round" like a head of lettuce.  I weighed 10 pounds as a baby; I'm told the nurses were in disbelief upon learning that I was not, in fact, a 6-month-old. Obesity runs in my family from my mom's side; my mom, my sister and all of my aunts are overweight or have been at some point.  I grew up being constantly tormented by my then-thin sister.  I don't remember being made fun of that much at school but maybe I've just blocked those memories out.

Random weight and food related memories of my childhood:

-Being about 7 and my parents sitting me down and having a serious talk about my weight.  They went out and bought me a scale that night.  I don't remember what came of it but I do remember not having any kind of plan and feeling very scared.  They probably told me I was gonna die or something.  They're dramatic like that.

-Going to Mexico all the time as a kid during school breaks was so fun.  My aunt owned a little convenience store and of course I loved hanging out with my cousins, but that store was a big reason I loved visiting her.  My favorites were Pizzerolas (pizza flavored tortilla chips), Poffets (cheese-flavored popcorn), cajeta (a caramel-type spread) on bolillos (a chewy white bread roll), the sodas, the candy... all for free.  I was in fat-kid heaven.  Elsewhere in Mexico - street tacos, tamales, Mexican hot chocolate (way better than American) and of course, like typical grandmothers, mine were always insisting that I eat, eat, eat.  Who was I to argue?

-I used to love to come home from school and eat a couple of frozen mini cheeseburgers, pizza rolls or mini pizzas (like, the Totino's Party Pizza kind, which, to this day, I still eat when I feel like trashing my "diet".)

-I started cooking from a young age (maybe 10?) and I remember often making cupcakes and other treats for parties at school.  Of course, my mom cooked too, and I would happily eat everything she cooked.

-When I was 9, we moved into a house that was next door to an Exxon station.  I was constantly waddling over to buy Blue Bell ice cream (another present-day problem food), Cheetos and Snickers bars.  I bet if you checked their records, you'd see a huge jump in business once we came around.

Looking back, I don't understand why mom let me eat the way I did.  Recently, H (the husband) wanted to ask her but I couldn't.  I figured her feelings would be hurt.  I can only assume she was trying to make me happy.  Maybe she felt it was too mean to deprive me of the foods I loved.  Maybe in my tween years she felt she needed to make up for the stress her marital problems put on my sister and me.  I dunno.  I do know my mom loves me and tried her best.

I should mention here that I went through a few instances of sexual abuse as a kid.  I'm assuming that it was from this point that I went from enjoying food to abusing it.  It was strange though how I sort of blocked out those memories until I was an adult.  I believe on a subconscious level I was fattening myself as a method of protecting myself.  I often felt unloved.  But food loved me back, at least temporarily.  It numbed the bad feelings.  It brought me instant gratification.  To this day I have a huge problem identifying and talking about my feelings.  So many times H will ask me what I'm feeling and I truthfully cannot put a label on it.  I feel kind of broken in that respect.

I was a very introverted, quiet, kinda weird but generally well-behaved kid.  I didn't have very many friends.  I did, however, get good grades in school.  I loved to read (probably to escape) and to draw.  In some ways my childhood was typical.  In some ways it wasn't - being a 1st-generation American to Mexican-born parents was something that shaped who I am.  Though I grew up speaking Spanish, there was still a language barrier sometimes.  I love my mom very much, but I wish I had grown up closer to her.  A lot of my familial relationships were like this.  I think this is why I felt so lonely as a kid.  I would have been closer to my sister, but we apparently hated each other back then.

Yeah, loneliness.  I think this was one of the main contributors to my food problem.  In some ways I'm still lonely, but I am so thankful for my husband.

Well, next time I'll talk about where the dieting starts.