Body Issues

Many of my readers know me only through the internet. So let me give you a little bit of background about me and my body.

I am 5'9". I have been this tall since I was about 14. This made me hugely taller than pretty much every boy in middle school. I felt like an Amazon for most of my teenage years.

I was also born with a congential heart defect that went untreated for all of my teen years. A side effect of this was that I was very thin. I think I was referred to guidance at least once a year because everyone was positive I had an eating disorder. The year I got my driver's license I weighed about 125 lbs.

Because of the same heart problem, I was also never really able to exercise. I had no endurance. When we would do the mile run in school, I think my fastest time ever was about 13 minutes. I could not even run 1/4 mile without being totally out of breath. Of course, my gym teachers always just assumed I was lazy. Quite honestly, I assumed the same thing about myself.

So, once I had my heart surgery, I gained weight. Really, I was probably at a healthy weight for the first time in my life. I even started going to the gym. I was in pretty good shape for about a year.

Then I started law school, and adopted the bad habits of a law student and drank like a law student and gained a lot of weight. I think I gained about 25 lbs. Then I lost it when I finally re-joined the gym and was too poor to ever go out. Then I got a job working nights, and eating out pretty much every night with no time to exercise. So I gained it back plus ten.

Then I got pregnant and gained another 50 lbs. I lost some of that post-partum but not all of it. Then I got pregnant again and this time only gained about 35 lbs, but it still put me far far over the 200 lb mark.

After I had my daughter I was absolutely determined to lose the weight. I really started dieting. Breastfeeding helped - I burned like 500 calories a day sitting on my ass watching e/r. When she was about 8 months old, a new gym opened close to our house and we joined that - they offered free daycare as part of the family membership so it was perfect for me.

I made it back below 200, down to 180, then hit a plateau. Frustrated, I enrolled in a special weight loss program through the gym where I met with a nutrionist once a week and a personal trainer twice a week. The other ladies in my group were so jealous because I was a nursing mom and got 300 extra calories a day. Bwwaaaa haaaaa haaaaaaa!!!!

My trainer was so mean (in a good personal trainer should be mean sort of way) and during the course of the 12 weeks I lost another 20 lbs. Not only that, but I was in the best shape of my life. I didn't have the money to continue with the personal trainer, though, so when the program ended I didn't keep that momentum. We continued to go to the gym but only sporadically and slowly the fast food started creeping back in to my diet.

So over the past two years, I've pretty much held steady between 155-160 lbs. I've been able to hold that weight because I got rid of an entire closet full of plus sized clothes - when my pants start getting a little tight, I know I need to be better because there is nothing else to wear.

Most people who know me tell me how I great I look, but I secretly think this is because they knew me when I weighed 50 lbs more. I see myself naked and I know that I have a roll here and there that I did not use to have. I know that I used to have muscle definition here and there that I do not have any longer.

Lately I have been pretty uncommitted to eating any sort of healthy food and unwilling to go exercise. The scale has been slowly drifting upward again. I pretend not to notice this, but apparently my children don't believe in pretending not to notice things...

This week as I was making my son dinner he proclaimed that I was getting fat. I told him it wasn't a nice thing to say and it wasn't funny. He told me he wasn't being funny, he was just noticing my pants didn't fit so good like they used to. After a long talk about things that may be true but just not polite to say anyhow, I went into my bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror and had to admit he was right.

The truth is, it isn't even about how much I actually weigh. It's about knowing I can do better. It's about knowing I'm not taking care of myself. It's about knowing that it is a miracle of modern medicine that I can even do a brisk walk on the treadmill. If I'd been born even 50 years earlier, I'd have been dead by age 25. My health is something very precious to me because I lived the first 20 years of my life without it.

This is what's been on my mind this week. I talked with Erik about it and he's been feeling the need to work on the extra padding he's acquired on his tummy over the course of our marriage. So... here's the deal. 15 pounds by October 31st. If I can do it, I get to go to New York City with my sister in December for a weekend. If he can do it, he gets a weekend in Atlantic City. We can both win. We're holding each other to it.

I'll post updates on our progress.