My whole life I have been larger than life, at least when viewed through my own eyes. Most of my life I have been tall, larger boned, fairly well-muscled and most of my life I have seen myself as "large". Looking at pictures, I will tell you that I was tall, but I was a normal size. Without pictures for proof, you could never have convinced me that I was normal in size.
As a child people would say to my dad, "look at that gal grow! What have you been doing, putting cow manure in her shoes?" Only 15 months older than my brother, Danny, I was at least a head taller and significantly larger bodied in most every way I could think of. I was proud that I was growing up big and tall, but somewhere along the way I realized that big could also mean fat.
My mom asked me one day , when I was about 9, why I was squinting all the time and I started crying and told her that her sister, my Aunt Po had told me that I had "fat eyes". My Aunt did not actually tell me that I had "fat eyes", she told me that I had "large pupils", but I decided that I would squint so that people couldn't see that my eyes were fat too!
The idea of being bigger, the idea that I should be a "certain size" was never lost on me, and my whole adult life has been in pursuit of being smaller. This meant dieting because I knew that I was never going to be shorter, so thinner I would be!
It wasn't until I was taking a course online this fall that I came upon two ideas that stopped me in my tracks and actually made me cry. One of the sessions in the course was about eating disorders and body image. When I think of eating disorders, visions of Karen Carpenter come to my mind. Karen and her brother, Richard were pop music idols in the 60s and 70s and only about 10 years older. Karen Carpenter lost her life due to complications of anorexia and her story seemed to be sprawled across all manner of newspapers in the checkout aisles of grocery stores. I had also seen patients struggle with body image who felt they needed to lose weight when they clearly didn't. Those are images that stay with you and remind you that people, especially women will make some pretty awful decisions to control their size and weight.
During this fall course, I was reminded of my own time line....I began exercising and eating relatively few calories in college while following popular dieting advice proposed by Jane Fonda. I ran 5 miles a day, lost a lot of weight and stopped menstruating, but I couldn't maintain the little bit of food for long and then binged...I was so hungry. Then, along came all of the other eating plans, low-fat, the stupid food pyramid, keto and finally intermittent dieting. I owned a franchise of Ideal Protein and dropped 70lbs in 16 weeks, but couldn't maintain it, when my body had enough of the nonsense, it would just cease to lose and begin to gain. For more than 10 years I have gained the weight with an inability to lose, no matter what. I have tried nearly every diet on the market and then some. I have been desperate and contemplated surgery and shots, but I know that wouldn't be okay with me. I have changed my metabolism, and with all of the "noise" on social media and elsewhere, I scarcely know what to eat anymore or when to eat it. I rarely feel hungry and have some remorse when I eat something I shouldn't.
The two things that stuck me during this course, was that I didn't have an eating disorder, but as the result of all of my dieting, I have disordered eating and altered metabolism. Everything I tried had one thing in common, they were all about deprivation and lack. Both of these revelations have opened my eyes to many things and make me feel incredibly sad.
As a result of this (new to me) information, I have decided to do a little deeper dive into this conundrum to try to understand my lived experience from a different perspective and not let it be about weight loss. My inability to lose weight, while intrinsically related to food, isn't about "diet", it is about my body not getting what it needs. It is unbalanced in some way. The problem could be a lack of good sleep, or a need for better hydration or lack of movement, but one thing is for sure, I refuse to go on a "diet" ever again.
Being unable to lose weight may make me more susceptible to arthritis, diabetes, hypertension and other metabolic diseases, but what's a girl to do?
I have decided to work with a nutritionist, which has been helpful and given me some guidelines. Today I applied a Stelo glucose biosensor to track my blood sugars and I will get moving more. I have a plan that is suited to my individual needs. We are all different and one-size-fits all things rarely fit everyone.
I am thankful for the course that shed the light on the issues I am facing and perhaps leading me to good solutions. Being a certain size, or a certain weight or a certain BMI is not necessarily a goal. Being well and living well is. I hope that you will join me on this journey, rocky as it might be, and feel inspired to make some changes so that you will be well and live well too! Know that if you struggle with your own health puzzle, I will try my best to help you. You are welcome here @ J Steele Wellness
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