The Story of My Weight

The Story of My Weight

I have been overweight as long as I can remember. There is a home movie of me at 8 years old where I am floating in our pool and my mom is asking me questions about myself. How old am I? 8 years old. What grade am I in? 3rd grade. How much do I weigh? I smirk and answer “65 pounds.” My mom gives a friendly laugh, “No, Michelle, how much do you really weigh?” I give a few more false answers…75 lbs, 80…all the while my mom is telling me not to lie. Finally I giggle and roll my eyes “eighhhty-fivee.” This was the year I had started to be teased for my weight. 

In high school I got up to around 200lbs. I didn’t really weigh myself, so I am not sure. I am 5’7’’ and have a very long torso and short legs, so I wore it well. I was thick all over, but I didn’t have any rolls. I ran track and played soccer. I know that at some point I lost some weight, because I remember being excited to be wearing a size L t-shirt instead of an XL, and I even had one size M. 

I started dating the man I would eventually marry at the end of my Senior year. A year later, we moved in together and we both started packing on the pounds as I learned to cook. I was cooking meals for 4-6 people and we were eating it all, even though it was just the two of us and a cat. When we got engaged, I weighed 238lbs, and when we got married in August of 2008 I had lost some and weighed 221lbs. 

We started trying for a baby right as soon as we got married. However, we had problems. I was not dieting or exercising at this point, and eating out of the stress of trying to conceive. We finally got pregnant at the beginning of 2010, but I miscarried in March. Again, I turned to food. I was eating out of grief and stress. In the fall of 2010 I finally decided that I needed to get healthier in order to get pregnant, I weighed 245lbs at this point. I started running again, which I truly enjoy, and using the gym at my University. In October, I discovered that I was pregnant, and a week later we miscarried again. Although I knew better, in the back of my mind I wondered if the stress of my exercising had doomed the pregnancy, so I stopped working out and made my way back to 245 lbs. With a little help from my doctor, I was able to become pregnant two months later. This time I took it easy, just to be safe. I also not so shockingly turned to food to cope with the stress of being pregnant after two miscarriages. I gained 20lbs in the 1st trimester. Once the 1st trimester had passed, I felt a little better about the prognosis of the pregnancy, and my eating habits changed. I craved healthy foods and the thought of anything fried in grease turned my stomach. I gained no weight in the 2nd trimester, and gained 10lbs in the third trimester, all of it in the two weeks before I gave birth, mostly due to swelling. 

Our daughter was born in August of 2011, after a healthy pregnancy. No GD and average/low blood pressure, thankfully. After the same rough start that I think all nursing mothers have, we settled nicely into breastfeeding. Between the breastfeeding and me catching the worst cold of my life the day before I left the hospital, I managed to lose all of my baby weight by the time my daughter was two weeks old. In fact, I was 6lbs lower than my pre-pregnancy weight! However, I did not keep up with any sort of diet or exercise, and by the time December rolled around, I weighed 248 lbs. I have never liked my body, but I never really HATED my body until after I had my baby. I thought I was lucky in a way. I was already fat when I got pregnant, so I didn’t have to worry about “losing my figure” like average sized girls do. I cried tears of joy when I saw my first stretch mark, proof that a baby was finally growing big inside me. After the birth, though, my fat turned to flab and I had never felt more ugly. My wonderful husband tried to cheer me up, he has always told me that I am beautiful, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling. I felt like a bloated, sick version of myself. 

I decided to start losing weight in January. Yeah, yeah, everyone makes a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, and they usually drop the resolution by Easter. Actually, my resolution was to contact my family more, I actually think that if I had made “lose weight” my empty New Year’s resolution for the 10th year in a row, I might have been done with trying by now too. I didn’t count calories or start exercising, I just decided that I was going to eat better and eat less. 

Since I was still nursing I couldn’t drastically cut calories, but I just tried to be more mindful of what I put into my body. We went to the beach the day before Easter and I decided I needed to get serious about losing weight. I took the worst picture of my life, my belly roll stuck out farther than my boobs. And I couldn’t blame the baby for that, she was 7 months old at the time! I decided to count calories, but first I needed to weigh myself for the first time since January. I was just hoping that I had not gained too much weight, and was really hoping just to still be 248lbs. I was shocked when I weighed myself and had lost 13lbs! I am so big that I hadn’t noticed. Since then, I have lost more weight and at the time of my writing this I weigh 201.3 lbs, and I am close to being under 200 lbs for the first time in my adult life! I have lost almost 47 lbs in 8 months. 

Which brings me to this blog. I am determined to give my daughter the gift of a healthy relationship with food and I hope that this will be a tool in helping me to do that for her. I never want her to know what it feels like to be the fat kid, I want her to know what it feels like to be healthy.