It's Time

"Eat less and work out."  If I ever mention my struggle with my weight, that's generally the response I get.  It sounds so simple, so straightforward, but for me, it's really not.  Food is comforting, its something I can rely on to taste good.  And working out?  I wear flats or flip flops perpetually because I have trouble breathing when I bend down to tie my shoes.  The idea of walking for any distance let alone trying to run is daunting.  The majority of my friends are thin, weight is not something they've ever struggled with.  A number of them even enjoy exercising, running a mile is nothing for them.  For most of them, my struggle with weight is probably quite perplexing.  But for me, it's something I've been dealing with my whole life.  In elementary school and middle school, I was the "loser", the one everyone else liked to make fun of and tease because I was weird and a different size.  I just didn't quite fit in at school or the church my family attended.  But while I loved food even then, I was constantly active with a required PE class and playing volleyball and basketball.  But when my family moved and my mom started homeschooling me, I became less active and the weight started piling on.

My lowest weight as a teenager/young adult was in my sophomore year of high school when I weighed 160 lbs.  By the time I graduated I had gained over 40 lbs. College was a nightmare for me.  From morning to till evening there was an all you could eat buffet in the cafeteria and most of it was about as unhealthy as you could possibly get.  Despite the fact that at that point I could be considered more curvy than anything, I felt fat and I wasn't comfortable working out in the gym which was usually filled with with toned and trim football and volleyball players.  My boyfriend wasn't much for working out and didn't generally want go with me so my exercise consisted of walking around the relatively small campus which wasn't much exercise at all.  I broke up with him in my second semester of college.  Despite the fact I knew it was the right thing to do, it was an incredibly difficult decision.  What made it even worse is that afterward I found that I had been so caught up in the relationship with trying to make things work out, that I hadn't really made any friends and I was completely on my own.  I quickly became depressed and food became my comfort.

I left college the following semester and returned home where I started to work at getting myself under control.  But my new job required a lot of travel and thus a lot of eating out.  Trying to eat healthy was hard and with still struggling with my depression, I wasn't always inclined to make healthy choices.  The news that my family was moving followed by my grandfather's death the following spring left me reeling and drowning in a sea of despair.  Communication is something I struggle with.  I'm not good at expressing myself vocally so any emotions or struggles I have I tend to hold in or try to cope with on my own until I explode.  Unfortunately, that generally means my family has the misfortune of having to deal with me when that happens.  Fearing rejection also hampers my communication a lot.  I don't willingly share how I'm feeling or what I'm struggling with.  Even the idea scares me and I'm always terrified that if I share whatever the issue is with my close friends they'll get sick of me and not want to have anything to do with me anymore or they'll start treating me differently.  In the case of my parents, I'm scared of disappointing them.  I feel like I'm a fairly messed up person as it is and I want to make them proud.  I don't want them to feel like they have to constantly worry about me and what I'm going to do with my life.  While on the one hand I realize exactly how unreasonable that all is, its something I've never been able to overcome.  So between my struggle with communicating and my fear of rejection, I found that I couldn't simply couldn't tell anyone exactly how devastated I was.  So I binged, and I hated myself for it so I ate some more.  It was a vicious destructive cycle that worsened my depression and tore me apart.  I was sickened by myself and contemplated suicide but simply couldn't do it.  So the cycle continued.

When I returned to college that fall, now at UNM, my mom finally convinced me that I was struggling with depression and that I needed to see a doctor.  After having me take several tests, the doctor concluded that she had never seen anyone with such a high level of depression.  I was given a prescription and told that it would also help if I worked to lose some weight.  The medication didn't seem to do much good and I eventually stopped taking it.  Eating healthy didn't seem to be an option at the time.  Food was my anchor, something that I felt I needed to hold the pieces of my life together.  I needed to lose weight but I couldn't stop eating, so I took the only other option there seemed to be:  I started forcing myself to throw up after binge eating.  I had read books, seen movies where girls had eating disorders and always wondered what could make someone turn to something like that.  Now I knew.  It wasn't something I did all the time, I simply couldn't, but I didn't want to stop either, not even when I kept gaining weight.  I convinced myself it was making at least some difference.

I kept gaining weight, finally reaching my highest at around 330 lbs.  At that point I decided I needed to start making some effort to lose weight.  I started trying to eat a little bit healthier, tried to get out and walk some more.  I was still binge eating and purging, but not quite as drastically.  And that leads me to today.  I weigh 317.2 lbs.  I just quit a job that worsened my depression and left me again struggling with binge eating on a more regular basis and so struggling with bulimia again.  Going to work at a more professional job meant that I needed more business-like clothing.  Having difficulty finding clothes that fit and cleaning my room and finding boxes with the size 10 clothes I used to be able to fit into made me realize that I need to make a change.  Not a half-hearted one where I try to eat healthy a few meals each week and exercise every once in a while, but an actual change.  The binge eating has to stop, the purging has to stop, everything.  Depression is something I'm probably going to struggle with for the rest of my life, but I need to stop letting it become an excuse to not do anything.  I hate who I am, I hate my body.  I'm finally ready for a change.

I know a lot of this is going to take sheer willpower.  I don't have a big family with brothers and sisters I can ask to exercise with me.  It means that I'm probably going to have to find a gym to start working out at and if people stare or make fun, I'm going to have to deal with that.  I'm a strong person, I know I am, I can handle it.  It's time that I stop caring what other people think of me.  It's time I stop hiding who I am because I'm afraid people will judge me or not like me.  It's time I stop focusing on wanting to be thin and pretty and start focusing on being healthy, getting to a healthy weight.  It's time I stop saying, "Tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow."  It's time I realize that I'm not worthless, that I'm worth fighting for.  I'm determined this time.  I'm going to take this one day at a time.  I'm not going to be perfect, I'm going to slip up, but that's okay as long as I get right back on track.  It's going to take time.  I didn't gain it all in a day and I'm not going to lose it all in a day.  I would love it if I was below 250 lbs by the end of this year and that's my goal.  I plan on succeeding.  It's time for me make a stand.  It's time for a change.