For a long time, if you asked I would have told you I’d been chubby all my life. It started with something someone very dear to me said when I was in 1st grade. I’d been doing a little be of child modeling for a few months and at a convention, my mother, upset by how small other girls there were, told me I was fat. I’m sure it had more to do with herself than me. A practically single mother of four, she wasn’t as thin as she’d been growing up and, compared to some of the other mothers, I can imagine from personal experience how she might have felt. And in one moment, one off-handed, unintentional comment became a bullet to my self-image. From that moment, it was what I believed. For about eighteen years. I felt fat, I felt ugly, and when I looked in the mirror, standing next to my big sister, I felt huge in comparison. I look back now and can see in reality that at that time in my life I was far from fat. The fact is that I didn’t really start packing on the pounds until middle school.
I started developing a curve far earlier than other girls my age, and, in my mind, that curve meant only one thing - that clearly I was fat. While it ate away at my self-confidence, I imitated what I saw and that, ultimately, is what led me to where I am. I ate what my family ate in the quantity they ate it for a very long time. But having crippled self-confidence and no friends to speak of, holing yourself up indoors means that you don’t burn the calories that your outgoing, active siblings do. So while they might have only eaten until being satisfied, I would eat until I was stuffed. I didn’t know anything different. Unless someone tells you how to eat and shows you portions, healthy foods, and how to be active, even by yourself, then you never know.
By high school, though, I was well aware of how overweight I was. Yes, I was probably thinner in reality than I was in my mind’s eye, but there was no denying that I was, in fact, fat. And while elementary and seen me eating more than I needed, middle school health class revealed the secrets of only eating what you need. And my sister, who thought herself fat, though she wasn’t, was most likely my first introduction to dieting. Where once she had been a confident, healthy, athletic woman, I can tell now that she was falling apart inside. I don’t know where that change came from, I don’t know who said or did what that pushed her to the point I’d been at for years, but she broke. And that led to her dangerously unhealthy dieting and eating habits. Habits that I picked up.
By the time I was in tenth grade, my eating was working in complete reverse. Because ultimately, weight loss comes down to calories in vs. calories out. That’s what we’re told. No one ever things to mention that eventually, this pattern fails when your body reaches a point where it thinks that you’re starving. And then it stops losing. Eventually, I made a few good friends in school, something I’d never really had before. I began to enjoy my day to day life some. And one girl I met online, my soul sister, so to speak, began to rebuild my crippled confidence. Whether she knows she did or not.
In November of 2004, we moved to Alaska. For a year or so, I still wobbled between the scared, ashamed, broken girl I was and the woman that I believe I might finally become. I was out of high school, working to pay for college classes I had no real interest in pursuing at that time and, due to the location of a certain job compared to my house, walking somewhere between a mile and a half to two miles a day. Five days a week, rain, snow, or shine.
About that time, my mother began sharing her struggle to lose weight with me. I don’t know if she started at that point or if she just started feeling like I was old enough, or overweight enough, to understand. But it peaked my interest. And so I put the same work-ethic I used at my job into expanding my knowledge and really grasping an understanding of what it takes to get and stay healthy. I to a college weight lifting class. I lost about twenty pounds during the span of that 16-week course. And I kept it off for about six months. It came back, eventually. But since then, I’ve gotten married and managed to repeat the process. And then slid back. Once more. But I try really hard not to beat myself up about it. And usually, I succeed. The fact is, even if I haven’t managed to lose all the weight I’d need to, that I’d like to, or managed to keep it off, I have learned a great deal about myself along the way. And that, after all, has to count for something.