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Jessica, Becoming Me
Thread Starter
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Fields of Glass
Posts: 567
S/C/G: 260 / 199 / 150
Height: 5' 6" | MG: 185
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A (Re-) Introduction
Be warned, the story that follows is long.
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 took 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.
At a low point, I allowed myself to marry a man who I knew didn’t love me. My yo-yo with weight continued. In 2010, we PCS’d from Alaska to North Carolina and for the first time in my life, I found myself completely alone, no friends and no family aside from the tumultuous relationship with my husband. By our third anniversary, I discovered that he was having an illicit relationship. Not online as he had in the past. He had spent the summer driving back and forth between NC and VA for work and was seeing a woman who resided in the VA area. I had spent months asking him what was going on, months knowing something was wrong and he had spent months convincing me that I was being paranoid.
He quite literally made me feel like I was going crazy. It caused me to fall apart. It was a rough time and I knew I needed help. I spent weeks trying to get him to go with me, for moral support, to see someone about my suicidal depression and he kept saying he would and never doing so. Eventually, I was strong enough to make that first step by myself. Our marriage seemed to slowly recover.
Fast forward to January of 2014. At this point, all the stress, the medications of my depression, the anxiety, everything had caused me to reach 270 lbs. He’d recently been medically retired. We were supposed to be starting over in Washington. He was going to let me visit with my father while he looked for a job out toward the Idaho border. I spent a week crying at night, telling him that I couldn’t shake the feeling that if he didn’t stay with me at my father’s, we’d never see each other again. Despite his reassurances, that is exactly what happened. For two months, he ignored me and then, when he finally answered me, he said he’d never ask for a divorce but he didn’t want to live with me again.
The weight, normally, might have caused me to cling harder, to be even more terrified of being alone. In that moment however, I found myself stronger. I cried myself to sleep over him one last time, took my rings off and told him, quite calmly, that is was illogical for us to stay married.
That was back in mid-March. It is now the beginning of July. I filed my paperwork and now the waiting for him to sign begins. I’ve taken the time to focus on myself. I’ve found a supplement that has been able to replace both my thyroid and depression medications - and help me far more than they ever did. And as of this morning, I am down to 233.4 lbs. My measurements are also the same today that they were in 2009 when I was roughly 12 pounds lighter... an accomplishment in itself.
I don’t regret my mistakes. I firmly belief that everything happens for a reason. My marriage had to happen for a reason. Six years ago, I was so terrified of being alone that I allowed myself to lower my standards and marry someone who wasn’t worthy of my kindness and sincerity. Today, I am strong enough to endure it. I do not want to be alone forever, but I no longer feel like there is a rush to find someone. And when I do find that someone, I am strong enough to wait until the time is right.
Sure there are good days and bad days but that’s life. And life isn’t about to get me down.
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