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.  

progress :)

This past Saturday was a weigh-in week for me.  (I only weigh every other week since the scale can drive me crazy.)  I'm happy to report that I lost 4.6 pounds over the last couple of weeks - woohoo!  I am so close to the 50 pound milestone I can almost taste it - I've lost 47.8 pounds!

Here is a picture of my progress.  The first one was taken about 2 months before I started Weight Watchers, so I weighed about 313, maybe a little less.



Sometimes I feel like I look very different and sometimes I feel like you can barely tell.  I haven't had anyone make a comment yet like, "Whoa, have you lost weight??".  Only a co-worker who I had told the previous day that I had started Weight Watchers, so that doesn't really count to me.  Well, what is important is that I've had lots of great non-looks-related changes happen: I apparently snore much less at night, my excessive sweating has lessened, and I feel more comfortable bending over.  One of the signs that I needed to go back to Weight Watchers was that I was having a hard time tying my shoes - I felt so humiliated and gross.

I had gone to a new doctor about a week or two after getting back on track and I remember being disgusted with myself after listing the things that were wrong with me, probably all of which were related to my weight: back problems, frequent headaches, mood problems, carpel tunnel pain, and more that I don't even want to get into.  The whole reason I was there was to get back on birth control pills, but I couldn't because I had high blood pressure.

I'm happy that I'm doing much better and that I am still feeling motivated.  My usual pattern is to lose about 30 pounds and then go back to my old ways.  I am realizing and am trying to constantly remind myself that I am the one in control here.  I choose what I make of my life.