Hello! I am a new member here and thought I would introduce myself.

I have gone through nearly three decades of abuse of most every kind. I have been in years of emotionally abusive relationships that have left me confused, broken and packing on the pounds. When I am by myself I am able to drop weight, concentrate on me and life is good. I dropped 95lbs and was doing quite well.

I moved overseas to be with my boyfriend now husband. We have known eachother 14 years and he is wonderful. Long story but he had been living with his parents taking care of his terminally ill mother. He had been in an emotionally abusive relationship since childhood with his father unbeknownst to him. (Yes, emotional abusive is really that covert) When I moved in I was now involved in that abusive relationship from his father. Due to legalities and finances and my fil trying to sabotage us financially for us to move out we had to stay there almost 3 years. I grew increasingly depressed and after an incident I did not leave my DH's bedroom for more than an hour a day for almost two years. My DH became broken as well and depressed.

Anyway, we finally escaped just recently and now I have 60lbs to lose...again. I have lots of emotions - mainly anger over this. It was such a struggle to lose this before and it took so long. I feel this sick man robbed me of a lot of things.

Anyhoo - this is my story in brief. I am also looking for an exercise buddy and/or anyone that has gotten over such relationships and looking to heal their inner self as well.

Hi Welcome and thanks for sharing your story.

To deal with your anger are you doing therapy. I think it would help. You might only need a few sessions since you've sorted out your main problems by the sounds of it.

Apart from that don't forget that weightloss is mainly achieved through diet and it can be self-defeating to rely on exercise to make the fat fall. 80% diet, 20% exercise. I know this works because i've just lost all mine (most of it in the first three months) without any formal exercise. And the reason i chose to do it this way was because in the past i'd exercise a lot and eventually when i couldn't sustain it, it would all come back along with my bad eating habits.

Hi Pattience!
Yes, I am currently attending counselling with DH over our depression and the psychological effects of this event. It has been helping quite a lot. I am also considering working on writing a book to share my story with others in similar situations and to bring to light that the laws here make it very hard to get help in a situation such as that when you are immigrating. I agree diet has a lot to do with weight loss. If one doesn't eat right and work on any eating issues the weight will come back and then some!

During all of this my healthy eating habits went out the window. When we could cook/eat was controlled by my fil - there was often times we would not be able to use the kitchen period. (Breakfast didn't happen till 4pm most days) Longest was 36 hours not eating. So when we would eat we would eat tons because we didn't know when we were eating next or we would eat junk food easily storable in our bedroom. All that and no exercise has done bad things to my body lol

Learning to let go the past and live in the present is healing too. I hope you can learn that from therapy, maybe after you've written your book, which no doubt would also be healing. Good luck with your journeys.