What started it all? Why did I gain weight? Why am I fat? Why can’t I get my shit together? Why did I stop caring? Why didn’t I stop myself from getting fat? Why did this happen to me? Why do I have such shitty genetics? Why aren’t I more athletic? Why am I not naturally thin? Why me? Why me? Why me?
These are all questions I have spent the last 12 years asking myself. Yes I may be able to pinpoint the moment something changed. And yes genetics have a small part in it. But overall it is MY own doing. I am the one who supressed my feelings and I am the one who chose to shove food in my mouth to deal with it. I am an emotional eater – I eat when I am depressed. I don’t eat junk food, I don’t eat sweets, I just eat mass quanities in one sitting. My weight gain was gradual at first, but I was still young and active and having fun, but somewhere along the way my weight spiraled upward & before I knew it I was 220lbs. And then I hit 240lbs. And then I reached my highest weight at 290lbs. So let me go back to the beginning.
For my entire high school career I ranged in weight from 120lbs. to 140lbs. Now I am 5’7, so that weight range worked for me. Of course I thought I was fat, which of course now, I realize, was ludacris. I was always jealous of my friends and always felt lesser than them. I was always the girl the guys wanted to be friends with, yep, I would get stuck in the “friend zone”. And of course I wanted to be that girl who waited to have sex with someone special, someone I loved. So while most girls around me were having sex in high school, I wasn’t. Sometimes I knew this was why guys would show interest in me, but then pursue one of my friends. It hurt. My 17th summer between Junior & Senior year that all changed. Me & my friends met these guys and one of them showed interest in me. We ended up spending the 4th of July together and we were “having fun” but that night he slept with my best friend. It was like something snapped in my head and I couldn’t take it anymore, and I decided right then & there, that I was going to have sex with him. So 2 nights later at a party I got really drunk, slutted it up and had sex with him. It was literally a “wham, bam, thank you mam” kind of thing. I don’t think it lasted more than 10 minutes & when it was over, he got up & and simply stated “thanks, hey, you’re not planning on sleeping in my bed right. Ok, I am going back to the party.” I may not have known what sex was suppose to be like, but I knew this wasn’t it. I don’t think I have ever felt so dirty in my entire life. I of course only shared this with my girlfriends and kept it from my mom. And no matter how much I tried to supress how I felt about it, it was still always there, resonating in me. Senior year is when I started teetering into the 130-140lb. range. Where in the previous years I never had a high self esteem, I felt even worse about myself now, internally blaming myself for how my first time went. I must have not been good enough, I didn’t know what I was doing, etc. Skip forward a couple of years… I am maybe at 160lbs. and definitely denying that something is wrong with me emotionally. I am in a seesaw relationship with a guy who I thought was the love of my life, a guy I had loved since the moment I met him in the 8th grade. We were sleeping together, he would spend the night, we would go on dates but we were never actually a couple. During this time, he managed to kiss one of my friends & sleep with another. Instead of getting angry or dealing with it, I just buried it, because I didn’t want to lose him. And it ate at me, or should I say I tried to eat it away. He then made out with and/or slept with my roommate/friend and that was the final straw. I knew it was over, I knew it had been over for awhile and I experienced my heart shattering into a million pieces. Feeling like the breath had been sucked out of me. After three days of excruciating pain, I vowed to never let anyone in, to never let anyone make me feel that pain again. I started shutting myself off from new people. The weight gain kept coming. The heavier I got I realized that guys weren’t interested in me, not even for one night. And I just kept eating and eating.
It took me 10 years to openly admit all of this out loud; to admit I had done this to myself; to admit that I had used my weight as a reason to not live my life. I realized that I was a person who ate to deal with my depression. So I had admitted the problem but I still couldn’t seem to change my patterns. Now the fat had become such a part of my everyday existence and I didn’t know how to shed it. And no, not literally shed it, but mentally….
