FertilehealthyAiming for success, not perfection…

If you’ve read the last four posts, you’ll know that I’ve come to a very interesting place in my journey.  Let me tell you, it couldn’t have come at a better time.  I believe that there are no coincidences, so I’ll just be grateful and make the most of the knowledge I now have.

Recent events have made me much more interested in my weight.  I was not a fat child or teenager.  Tall and big-boned, yes, but not fat or even overweight.

So how did I get from normal to super-morbidly obese?  And in a relatively short period of time, at that?

Sure, I’ve always loved food.  I was not one of those kids whose mother fretted about my not eating anything.  I ate!  And yes, I did turn to food for comfort on occasion.

I wasn’t a sporty, or even a very active child.  You were more likely to find me with a book than swinging in the trees or on the sports field.  But I walked or cycled to school and everywhere else from about the age of 12, round about the time my appetite exploded.  So the weight stayed stable.

At university I was also always on foot, but that didn’t prevent me from gaining the obligatory 10 pounds most first years have to contend with.

The next weight gain occurred when I went to France to work as a nanny.  After three years of institutional food, the fluffy baguettes, French cheeses and daily snack time won me over in no time and I gained about 15 pounds.  This time you could see the difference, but I still looked fairly normal, as you can see in the picture.

Shortly after returning from France, I drifted into the hotel industry.  The hours were irregular, the food was provided and the booze flowed generously.  Yet, I was still walking a lot, since I didn’t have a car and my weight remained stable.  I hadn’t lost the 25 extra pounds I’d put on since leaving home, but I was still firm and my stomach was as flat as a board.

The women in my family tend to carry extra weight on their hips and thighs.  I was no different.

Around the time of my 25th birthday, I married my first husband and got a car.  One day I was lying in bed and noticed that my stomach was lying next to me.  WTF!  A guest at the hotel asked me when I was due.

Something weird was happening.  I was getting a belly.  I gained a whopping 90 pounds in the space of one year!

It seems crazy to say that I didn’t really notice at the time, but there was so much going on at the time.  My marriage was a disaster (very chaotic) and we had just moved from the country to the city, where I was trying to find work and get settled.  I was battling depression.  Strangely enough, we were eating “healthier” than I’d been when I was single and I was definitely drinking less.  Yet, the weight piled on.

From there on, the weight increased steadily for another ten years (through my divorce and the acquisition of a binge-eating habit),  until 2008 when I started changing my eating habits and managed to lose some weight.

Slowly.  Think continental-drift-speed.  Unless I was doing something drastic, like a cleanse or a juice feast, in which case I managed to lose weight and keep it off.

This lack of pace seriously messed with my head and made me rather inconsistent in my motivation.  I believed in my methods, but I knew that something was amiss in my body and took out my frustration on myself, time and time again, thwarting my best efforts.

I got that I needed to heal my body first before weight loss became a reality.  I knew I was on the right track, and I had many improvements, but it was not enough.

Then I met Vilma and Jackie and the true picture of my weight loss, but more importantly my weight gain, emerged.  Even before she tested me, Vilma told me that my weight distribution looks hormonal.  I started waffling about my thyroid, but she said that it’s most likely the pituitary gland.  She was right, the test showed that my pituitary was hardly working at all.

A few weeks later Craig and I were watching a Mary-Ann Shearer DVD and she talked about alcohol and how it affects the pituitary.  She said that a lot of young women don’t realize that their drinking can bring on a sudden weight gain around the waist when they reach their mid-twenties.  Holy Batman, that was me!

Add to that the fact that I had stopped exercising round about that time and you can see why my whole endocrine system just fell apart.  Exercise goes a long way towards keeping things balanced in the body – in fact it affects 18 different hormones.

Yes, I ate too much and I ate badly, but that alone would have resulted in my ass, hips and thighs going, well, pear-shaped.  Instead I became a luscious apple with a belly that qualified for its own zip code.

You have no idea what these revelations mean to me emotionally and mentally.  There were times when I couldn’t face living in this body for one more day.  I didn’t want to be me anymore.  If I couldn’t get better I wanted to die.

Now I know that I can get better and my life feels meaningful again.  I have hope.

Of course, I’m not expecting the weight to just fall of me.  I will still have to do the work – eat well, exercise and (mostly) avoid the things that negatively affect the hormonal system, like alcohol, caffeine, refined sugar and flour, heated fats, and vinegar.

Bring it on.