On weight loss & recovery

(100th post! YAY!)

I am losing weight. And this is probably the best feeling that I have had in a long time. It is also one of the scariest things I deal with.

My entire life, I have been big. Always. I was an eleven pound baby. My father is 6'6" tall. I was never going to be small, or dainty, or slender. I am a big girl, and that is just how it is going to be.

The last time I tried to lose weight, I succeeded, and I loved it. However, the last time I tried to lose weight, I developed a pretty serious eating disorder. You would never be able to tell - I was still a fat girl, after all - but I had a problem. I think at my worst I was making myself throw up six times per day. This was while I was living at home, and not working, and could force myself to walk constantly as well. Weigh myself. Eat. Weigh myself. Vomit. Weigh myself. Walk. Eat. Vomit. Walk. Weigh myself. I lost seventy pounds in about eight months. And the reaction I got from people was great. I looked "so good," or "wow, you're really getting thinner!" Yes. Yes I was. I was also sick. I couldn't eat without feeling like everything was ready to bubble back out.

Going away to college forced me to stop my issues (I couldn't bring myself to vomit in a shared restroom, where forty other girls could walk in at any moment. I wanted to - but I couldn't).

Still, years later (that was in 2003), I will occasionally make myself throw up after a particularly large meal. I think that that will plague me for my entire life. I still love the feeling that I get after purging my body of all of the food it has taken in. Something about the emptiness and the control that I have over my body are somehow comforting.

I haven't made myself throw up since some time in July. This is certainly not the longest stretch I have ever gone, but it is one that I am proud of. I lost fifteen pounds one week in July, and didn't throw up at all during that week. I ate better, cut out soda, actually payed attention to serving sizes, grabbed apples instead of donuts. But then I went through a bit of stress, stopped caring, and went back to eating however I wanted.

I weighed myself about two weeks ago and discovered that I had gained back two of those pounds. Over the next week or so, I watched what I ate, and lost those two pounds. Plus two more. Since then, I have lost eight more pounds. I am about twenty-two pounds lighter than I was in early July. Twenty-two pounds. That's huge. That's the size of my one dog, or of my two cats combined. That is a lot of weight. And I am proud of it, and happy with my progress, and thrilled that I have not resorted to doing "bad things." I make smarter decisions. I eat fiber as a way to clean myself out. I don't drink soda (though I did splurge last week and have two cans of mountain dew - only to discover that I don't much like the stuff anymore). And in the last three days, I have added walking into the equation. Three days ago, I walked a mile. Yesterday, two miles. Today, two miles (and might do a third one this evening after dinner).

For the first time in my life, I am motivated. While I still don't think that I will ever be thin (my body just isn't built for that), I see myself being able to shop in normal stores, not having to frequent Lane Bryant (though their stuff is nice, and I love their bras, lol). I want to be able to walk into a store and pick up a shirt off of a rack and have it fit. I am going to get to that point. I am confident, and hopeful, and motivated.

The scale is still my enemy, and I need to force myself to not weigh myself more than once a week or so, for fear that I will get back into my old habits. But seeing that number go down on a daily basis is definitely helping. A lot.