My Story: Dealing With the Past

Thought I Was Fat When I Wasn't

I grew up in a home where I was made to feel fat. It wasn't fair, it was wrong for me to be made to feel this way, and I've come to terms with that as well as had an opportunity to verbalize that to one parent and get some sense of closure about it. It's still hard though to realize that my life could have been so different if I'd never gotten on that road at the age of 9 of obsessing about my weight, putting myself on starvation diets, and basically not nourishing my body the way it needed to be nourished during those important formative years. There is little I can do about it now except to stop living in the past and to move forward with a solution that actually works--WeightWatchers.

The photo at the left was taken at Christmas when I was 9 years old and had already started limiting my food intake. I found a diet book of my mother's (the Dr. Stillman diet that was a pre-cursor to Atkins) and started eating only protein while limiting all fruits, veggies, and carbs. Within the following year, I also discovered calorie counting and made up calorie counting charts with the help of another of my mother's books that gave calorie counts for everything I consumed.

It Continued Into My Teen Years

During my teen years, if I wasn't on a strict diet than I was regularly binging and then purging through starvation in order to counteract the binge. It was a horrible existence of deprivation and self-loathing. At age 14 after a combination of the all-protein diet and exercising at a women's gym called Venus de Milo, I was down to 117 lbs. but thought I was still fat. At 15 I was 125-130 lbs. and thought I was an absolute whale.

The photo at right was taken when I was 17 1/2 years old and a junior in high school. I had really gone into the all-protein diet hard core that year as well as a couple of other weird ones like the one where I only ate oranges and microwaved ground beef. I remember writing in my diary at that age and only being able to write about my weight and what I had eaten that day instead of writing about my feelings or boys or friends. I still have that diary but it is painful to read. One entry stands out in my mind because I was worried that by having a Sunkist frozen orange juice bar that particular day I wouldn't lose any weight that day. I weighed everyday back then (often 4-6 times a day).

Only a year later I inexplicably ballooned 30 lbs. in the last 3 months of my senior year from 165 lbs. to 195 lbs. without changing my eating habits. I felt awful about myself. It wasn't until recently that I realized the weight gain was probably due to endometriosis and the hormones and scar tissue associated with it. Back then, I just blamed myself for eating food like a regular person. I thought I should have been depriving myself more.

How Many Other Young Girls?

Here's the sad thing... the photo at left is what I looked like before I discovered dieting. I wasn't an obese child by any stretch of the imagination. But I was still an embarrassment to my parents when I danced, moved, or did anything in public that showed I was not willowy thin. I am still told I was a "chubby" child. I just don't see it.

How many other young girls are being told the same things now. How many will go down the road I've traveled, damaging their young bodies and destroying their futures while the responsible adults in their lives allow it to happen?

I am firmly convinced that my issues with hormonal imbalance are a direct result of the stress my body went through during those early years. I have no medical research to back it up, but no one can convince me that it didn't have an effect on my growing body. I would never wish this fate on any young girl that may be dealing with the same battle I faced.