When I was a little girl I was "normal". Normal as far as body shape and weight, anyway. I was an extremely active little girl and while I loved food I had the metabolism and activity level to support a large appetite. I remember at a young age my parents commenting on how much I ate... I remember my dad being concerned that my portions were too large. I remember feeling ashamed that they had noted this about me, but after-all... I wasn't fat (not like that one kid in school!!!) so, who cares?!
When I became a teenager and puberty hit I started to put on weight. I was horrified and distressed that I no longer looked like my friends. I remember seeing pictures of myself at a recent horse show that I had competed in and sitting on my bed and bawling. I was so scared of what I was becoming. I lived in a rural town where everyone knew everyone else and I had already heard some whispers of my increasing size and the pointed looks from other kids at school where embarrassing. I was embarrassing. My mom found me crying on my bed that day and I was put on my first diet. I was 12. We embarked on a low calorie / low fat diet and my fear and frustration only increased when I just continued to get bigger and bigger. Fatter and fatter. Two years later my dad died from complications of type 1 diabetes. I was 14, a freshman in high school and my world was shattered. My relationship with my dad the last several years of his life was not good. He was sick and was not himself. I ate my way through the pain before and after his death. There was crash dieting here and there... but food had become my companion. It was the one thing in my life that I was able to totally depend on. It was my comfort. It was my friend. It made me feel good in a time when everything, including my growing waist line, made me feel bad. My mom was there.. but she was grieving the loss of my dad and the loss of our way of life with him gone. The whispers were louder now... and sometimes they weren't whispers at all. I discovered one day that if I threw up right after I ate then it was like I hadn't eaten it. It was like it hadn't happened. I could have my food and not get any bigger!! Maybe even lose some of this weight. So, that's what I did. And sure enough, I lost weight. For the first time in years I was actually somewhat happy with how I looked. I was curvy, but for a teenager who was suddenly finding herself interested in boys I was aware that I was curvy in a good way. Still, I was the biggest girl amongst my friends and I desired to be thinner. There came a point where my throat started to hurt when I was throwing up... it hurt bad! And then I saw something on TV where a girl my age died from complications of bulimia. It scared me into stopping. When I stopped purging, though, there was only binging and my weight soared. By the time I graduated high school I was a size 18 and weighed 280lbs. Without the purging dieting didn't work. I mean DID NOT work. I often felt like I could just look at food and gain weight. I was still very active... I was still training and showing horses. I had competed in and won a couple of beauty pageants and traveled the rodeo circuits as a princess and then queen representing my hometown. Everywhere I went I had to endure comments about my weight, though. Especially at the rodeo's. Cowboys can be crude. I will leave it at that.
After high school I got brave enough to try online dating. I was well aware of what my options were in the small town I lived it... after all, I had grown up with most of them!! And I wanted a larger pool to fish from. So, I met a guy from a nearby city. I fell in love (or thought I did) and my insecurities about my weight surfaced at a whole new level. Intimacy is hard when you really don't know what you are doing. Its a lot harder when you are ashamed of how you look and feel to the one you are being intimate with. Still, he moved to my town and we moved in together. I continued crash dieting. It didn't work. He left me when my weight took me to 320lbs and I was a size 24. The relationship lasted less than 6 months. I moved away from my hometown and found myself in "the big city". It was liberating to be away from a place where I had experienced so much pain and uncertainty.
I got a job... I started paying my own bills. I was living with a guy I knew wouldn't care if I was the size of a house and I allowed myself to be complacent. For the first time I refused to monitor my weight because I was convinced that I was destined to be fat. Nothing I did worked to lose the weight. It didn't help that I was not longer active. But my old friend food had never let me down It had continued to be my constant. And honestly, I was just so tired of fighting it. What was the point?? My weight climbed some more. It wasn't long before I was 350lbs and a size 28. I got a terrible cold when I was 22 in the winter of 2001. I went to see a doctor so I could get some antibiotics. It was the first time in my adult life that I had seen a doctor. Despite my size I was extremely healthy and had no reason to do so. The doc came in and took my temperature. Confirmed I was sick and wrote me a prescription for the antibiotics. And then he asked me the question that no one else had ever thought to ask: "Have you ever had your thyroid checked?" I didn't even know what a thyroid was!!! I told him no and so he wrote up orders for blood work as well. The results came back and my thyroid levels were well out of the normal range. After taking my history the doctor explained that I probably had been suffering from hypothyroidism for years. Suddenly EVERYTHING made sense. No wonder I could diet and never lose anything! No wonder I always felt so tired and run-down. No wonder I had been battling depression and anxiety. All those years of struggle... and all I had to do was take a little pill every day??
(to be continued....)
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