My Weight Victory

I often joke that I have lost well over 450 pounds, and people look at me in shock.

I say, “Yeah, over 150 pounds was me, the rest was the ex.”

It wasn’t until I lost more than 200 pounds that I realized, in my excitement, that I had lost a whole person. Now mind you, this did not happen overnight. A lot of weight had built up over time since I was 16. Sixteen was when I became officially overweight. My mom used to tell me I was just big boned, not to worry about it, that I was beautiful inside. You know, the usual. To me, I was an overweight teenager and an out-of-shape cheerleader. I was, and still am, very aware of every flaw on my body.

My story is not unique. Both my parents were overweight and self conscious about it. My mother even went so far as to have bypass surgery and, in the end, such drastic measures to lose weight took her life. My father was an ex-Marine, so physical fitness had been a big deal in his life at one time. I would look at my mom and be so embarrassed, swearing I would never be like her. About 12 years later, I looked in the mirror and saw my mother looking back at me.

I avoided being in photos. I don’t even have pictures of the old me to show how my body has changed. Over the years, I had seen the weight piling on, but was powerless do anything about it. Steak and potatoes were the normal fare in our house. When I did try to introduce healthy foods, I was usually the only one to eat them. Luckily, as my children grew, I found that they loved fruits and some vegetables.  It was not until after my husband and I separated that I took a hard look at my life, myself, and what I had become.

I will be honest. The weight came off in stages.  I would hit a plateau when suddenly pounds fell off, but then the weight loss would stop. At one point, I changed my diet. I found that I was leaving food on the plate because I was full. I made sure I had soup once a day and I tried to walk as much as I could.

At the time of my divorce, I weighed around 325 pounds and I was a size 28. I was a big girl. I was also a miserable woman. I had eaten years of my life away because I could not express my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes this was due to my own inability to communicate and sometimes this was due to the circumstances in my life. I had to come to terms with the fact that I had eaten to cope with my depression instead of searching for the freedom to speak.

I have always been a spiritual person and I finally realized that I had to find peace within myself if I was going to control my body’s responses to food. I actually learned to listen to my body, to eat when I was hungry and to eat what I wanted.  I was never on a diet per se. I simply changed how I lived and how I thought. I believe the biggest change was how I thought about myself and how I looked at life.

I had been extremely hard on myself in high school. I was and still am an over achiever.  Now I understand that some people simply cannot lose the weight. My mother was one of them. Although her medical condition prevented her from losing weight, she still could have made healthier food choices. A person can always make healthier choices. I have chosen to be healthy because I have two children I want be around for. I want to be here and be healthy when my kids graduate.
I don’t believe in being too thin, either. I believe in being healthy. I know that eating all foods in moderation may not make a person thin, but will make a person healthy in the mind and in the body. I discovered that my weight loss had to begin in my mind. I had to lose the self-hatred and the self prophesying obstacles I had set up to ensure failure. Now I have no excuses.

I recently moved to New York. Believe me, Manhattan does a body good!

I eat all the time and I am still losing weight. I love the city and the city seems to love me. I am where I belong. When my soul and my mind are happy, the body follows suit.

The last time I slipped into a new size, tears fell because I was wearing a size I had never expected to see on me. I had never even been this size in high school. I remembered when my ex-husband told me to get rid of a pair of size 12 shorts that I had kept since high school because I would never fit into them again. He was right. I never will fit into those shorts again. I am now a size 6-8.  I still look at the larger sizes, though, and I still gripe about my inner thighs and love handles or my belly. Then I remember that the underwear now covers my little goddess belly and nothing spills out. 

This journey has been spiritual and emotional, as well as physical. Without the balance, I don’t think I could have achieved this transformation. I still have areas to work on, to be sure, but I have managed to come this far. I wanted to share my story so you know you can, too. It is all about being healthy, not about fat or thin, not about finding the diet that might work. The body has its own diet. It is about knowing that inside you are beautiful and sometimes it just takes the body awhile to catch up.