Weight, Food, and Me - Part II

I didn't worry too much about my weight when I got engaged to my now-husband.  He loved me, found me attractive, and I wasn't really that fat.  As in college, I could've stood to lose about 25 pounds, but I really wasn't obese, and I felt I still looked good, so I didn't bother.  Plus we planned our wedding in about five months, following the tragic death of my fiance's dad, so weight loss was the last thing on my mind.  I had enough emotional trauma going on.  (At the time of our wedding, I probably weighed about 150 pounds, at 5'6".  I still didn't own a scale or weigh myself regularly.) 

Hubby and I were pseudo-concerned with our weight when we first got married.  We would go through phases where we'd exercise together for hours, riding bikes around town, rollerblading, and jogging.  But our eating habits were still terrible.  We overindulged regularly, partly as a celebration of finally being independent married adults who could do whatever we wanted, and partly to assuage the grief we still felt over the loss of his dad (and residual grief from his brother's death two years prior to that).  I just wanted him to be happy, and having fun was one of the ways we could do that.  We either went out to dinner & a movie or rented movies and stayed in, ordering huge pizzas, buffalo wings and regular pop (and ate it all.)  Still didn't own a scale.  We both tried a crash diet once, but hubby actually passed out from too little nourishment - he's an all-or-nothing kind of guy, much like my own diet philosophy.  He hit his head when he fell and was confused and disoriented for a brief time afterwards.  He couldn't remember what day it was, and I was so scared.  I fixed him a big plate of ham and eggs, and made him sit down till he felt better.  That was the last time we crash-dieted. 

I really started having to be aware of my weight when I became pregnant with our first child, a daughter.  I remember the scale reading 158.5 at my first prenatal appointment with her.  I gained about 40 pounds that pregnancy, topping out at 201 the day before I delivered.  Afterwards I devoted myself to exercise - we had bought a treadmill - and managed to lose almost all the baby weight (I got down to 160) before getting pregnant with my second baby, our first son.  The next couple of years, however, would put a bigger strain on us than I ever realized, and our weight/health concerns (once again) took a backseat to everything else.  Not that they had been super-important before...