How Have I Tried To Lose You? Let Me Count the Ways…

I grew up living with my grandmother who was, as the stereotypical grandmother should be, an excellent cook. This woman could make cookies that filled your mouth with pure bliss and absolute comfort…all the things a child needs! I was destined from the beginning to be a chunk…

I can’t remember the exact moment the idea that I was fat came in to my mind, but somehow I was always aware that I wasn’t exactly cheerleader material. No, I would have to settle for Girl Scouts. Which worked out better for me anyways. Ya, know…cookies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of expendable income back then and the hand-me-down Brownie uniform that my mother bought for me at a yard sale was a little too snug, so I had to wear a t-shirt with my merit badge sash…

I think I was 8 years old the summer I went to visit my mother and found her stash of diet pills in the kitchen cupboard. I assumed these were just magic pills that would make me suddenly pretty and skinny like the cute little princesses from school that I envied so much. Lucky for me, the pills were just a cheap herbal supplement without much potency at all, so I was never harmed from the few that I tried.

However, I was sure my days were numbered when my brother found them in my jewelry box and told our mom. Surprisingly though, she sat me down, concerned but not upset—instead it seemed she sympathized with my desire to be one of the skinny girls… She’d known that feeling all of her life too. I seemed I had inherited this battle.

This began my first attempt at a diet. My mother was no nutritional genius, so with her advice, I basically ate all the same junk as usual that summer, but the low-fat versions. And let me tell you, low-fat food in the early 90’s was no where near even the caliber that it is today, so this still wasn’t pleasant. But I don’t remember it working much.

The next year, I think I took my first stab at the Slimfast diet. Again, in my young naiveté, I assumed, not that these plans would make you lose weight because you were so freaking hungry, but because there was something magical about these shakes. And again it didn’t work…

A few years later when I was around 12 years old, my mom had some weight loss success on the fen-phen diet. She even let me try a few of the little orange appetite suppressant pills which she assumed to be safer than the 2nd pill that increased energy. But we all know how that drug will go down in history… And ironically, it was the appetite suppressant that was banned in the U.S. not long after my experimentation with it.

I got lucky when puberty hit and naturally slimmed down some, though I still seemed so much bigger than all of my petite friends, so I continued my weight loss efforts. Some of the girls in my middle school saw it as a blatant sin to be seen eating lunch, so I started skipping meals on a frequent basis. Anorexia and Bulimia had become major topics for cheesy, made-for-TV movies, so my friends and I quickly caught onto the idea of starving ourselves and binging and purging. I wonder if the producers of those movies ever realized that rather than keeping young girls from developing eating disorders, they were teaching us how?

When I was in the 7th grade, I started abusing laxatives to keep from gaining weight when I could no longer stand to starve myself. I never became emaciated, but I did later develop some other medical issues which could definitely be related to my unhealthy practices. The cycles of gaining weight and then starving to lose the weight continued on into my early adulthood.

Once I hit college, things really went haywire. First I gained the Freshman 15. Then I think there must be another incident called the Sophomore 30, because by the time I was 19, I had gone from weighting about 140 pounds in high school to almost 190 pounds. I enjoyed all of the eating and freedom that came with adulthood so much that I didn’t even realize how big my butt had become…

But once I realized the difference in my mirror, I began to struggle yet again with a whole array of diets. Atkins was popular around this time, followed by Carb Addicts, the Lemon Juice Detox, the MonoDiet (a horrible diet where as the name suggests you only get to eat one type of food per day, the first day of which consisted of eating 15 oranges... Ick.), and the South Beach Diet. I even went to a few Weight Watcher’s meetings and joined a gym.

Then finally one day, a light clicked on. I realized that there was no quick fix and that if I wanted to lose weight it would take a long time and a lot of work…

But I decided it was worth it.