Here's the story about me, and food, and my weight. I grew up in a family who loved food. Every occasion, every get-together was celebrated with good food and lots of it. My dad raised beef cattle (still does), so we were a meat-and-potatoes farm family. Bread and butter were ubiquitous on our table. We had a big garden every summer, so it wasn't like vegetables were nonexistent. My grandma and mom canned green beans and wax beans till we were sick of looking at them. We also grew broccoli & cauliflower, onions, carrots, new potatoes, sweet corn, rhubarb, and sometimes pumpkins or squash. So it wasn't that our nutrition was horrible; it was probably the amounts of food we consumed (and how they were cooked) that eventually became a problem.
I was lucky enough to stay relatively thin throughout high school. My younger brother and sister both became chubby in childhood, but I somehow managed to avoid that. We all played some sports, so I don't really know what the difference was. By my junior year of high school, you could see that I was starting to accumulate some flabbiness in my stomach, upper arms, and thighs. I was still "skinny;" I was pretty enough, athletic enough to be a cheerleader, but you could tell I was lazy because I had no muscle tone. I remember looking at girls who were obsessed with their weight and thinking they were silly, or hearing about a girl in my school who had an eating disorder and wouldn't eat anything but salad. I felt pity for them, even a kind of horror. Who would want to live their life like that, I wondered? Why make yourself so miserable?
As I went through college, I became a yo-yo dieter. I wanted to be thin and look good, but I never wanted to put forth the effort of exercising and denying myself whatever I wanted to eat. I flattered myself that I looked good no matter what I weighed, when I was actually 20-30 pounds heavier than I should have been. I always compared myself to my peers. It was demoralizing to always be the slightly chubby girl in a world of skinny ones. I wanted to be like them, but not enough to make the necessary changes. Besides, I had a boyfriend who loved me and thought I was hot, so why bother? (He's my husband now, incidentally, and he still thinks I'm hot. I'm pretty lucky, because I weigh quite a bit more than I did in college, and he still finds me attractive. But I digress.)
Once in college I secretly joined Weight Watchers, but I was ashamed to have any of my friends find out, because everyone still told me how pretty I was and how I didn't need to lose weight. (I actually did need to lose about 25 pounds.) I went to a couple meetings, but was embarrassed to be there, so I quit going. Instead I did the normal carefree college thing, ordering pizza with my girlfriends whenever we wanted, dining on fatty fast food, "treating myself" on a regular basis. There was no concept of self-denial or moderation, except when I felt ultra-fat and decided to go on a crash diet to lose a few pounds.
During my sophomore year, I embarked on a real diet where I got up a half-hour early every morning to do Tae-Bo in my room, then switched to eating salads for dinner instead of cafeteria chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes with cheese sauce. After a month or so, I had lost a few pounds - I have no idea how many because I didn't own a scale (I wasn't smart enough to track my progress). In fact, I only noticed my weight loss because I tried on a cute burgundy suit that I had gotten too fat for (it had a tailored jacket and matching pencil skirt), and it fit again. I was elated. This diet thing had actually worked! But soon I gave up my healthy habits. Having achieved a little bit of weight loss, I felt free from the torture of dieting and exercise, free to go back to my old ways. It wasn't long before I put the weight back on.
No comments:
Post a Comment