My Story (Before)

This won’t come to anyone as a surprise.

I have been struggling with weight problems since early childhood. It’s so wrong that a couple of parental mistakes might stay with us for the rest of our lives. I have created this blog to document my fight against my parents’ mistakes.

I’m a girl, and I was born in September 1984.

My parents divorced when I was 4. As my mum and my older brother say, I went to spend a summer with my father and grandma at the age of 6, and I came back fat as a little piggy. Unfortunately bad habits stayed with me after that. I was a happy child at my grandma’s place, they let me eat as much and as often as I wanted. So when I came back home, my mother’s side of the family tried to control my portions. Needless to say, this only made me angry, so I started to steal food out of the kitchen, and buy myself multiple bags of chips everytime I had some pennies on me. I would eat that away from my family, in the park, or on my way back from the store. In my mind I felt some sort of weird pleasure and adrenaline by doing that, it was so exciting to break the rules!

The love for chips and savory food stayed with me for life, and even now I’ll crack to a bag of salt&vinegar walkers, or KFC chicken, rather than a piece of cake or chocolate.

Anyway, since then I was always the fat kid in class, the fat friend of my friends. My weight problems were pointed out to me multiple times by other people. I was 9 the first time someone said it painfully to my face, and it was the school nurse. She was right, and I know this now, but I still don’t think what she did back then was right. She took my weight, height, blood pressure, she then put it on the chart and showed me how far off the ‘normal’ scale I was. As we were called into the room in pairs, my skinny best friend witnessed it all. That was the first embarassing day of my life. The metrics in elementary school were taken every two years. After that first event I did everything I could to at least go into the room alone, so that I’d face my nemezis alone.

The second time round (I was 11) the nurse called our PE teacher to the room. He was super hot, and we all had a slight crush on him. She’d show him the ‘fat kid’, me, sitting in a chair, with high blood pressure, asking about my PE and how I’m doing. Good thing is that I was a surprisingly active child, and I was doing great in PE. Still, another embarassing day. Stuff like that kept happening to me all the time. I was taught the calorie tables by the age of 12, but was still too rebelious to diet. I don’t think people understand, that you can’t just tell anyone to go on a diet! You can’t force them to! So dear adults, fuck the hell off and let your kids grow to this decision themselves.

My mum and grandma used to say “she’s not interrested in boys yet, but she will one day, and it’ll all change!”. Well, they were not wrong :-)

I call my junior high and high school years my ‘thin’ years. I wasn’t really even that thin, still the fattest friend, but I didn’t care! I was doing a lot of sports, was super-fit, and even though I’ve never had my dream figure, I was quite popular, and people liked me.

Uhh, I miss looking like that! Yes, I have a curvacious figure by nature. But my belly was flat, and this is the weight I’m aiming for now.

Things started to fall apart at the end of highschool. My best friend&soulmate got pregnant and killed herself. My mother had an afair which ended badly, and she was hospitalised in a mental facility. We’ve lost our house, we had no money, and I was about to start college, which at that time seemed impossible. I guess this is when I started to fall into depression, and compulsive comfort eating. I worked the whole summer to collect money, and finally I moved to another city and got into college. The money I had lasted for the first semester, after that I could fight for scholarships. The 2 scholarships I got were enough to keep renting a small flat with my bf, and buy food. Nothing more. No clothes, almost no cosmetics.. There were times when I couldn’t afford a loaf of bread. So I kept eating as much as I could whenever I COULD, cause there might not be more later. This is how poor people think, and, well, I was poor as hell. I gained 40 kilograms by doing that, and graduated at the weight of 120 kg (246,5 lbs) and at the age of 23.

This is me at the party on graduation day.

It’s been off and on ever since.

I started working right after the graduation, moved to yet another city again. There was no more time to exercise, and quite frankly I was more concerned about my financial situation than my weight problems. It hit me again two years later. My and my bf bought an elliptical trainer to our flat, to help us start becoming fit. It was delivered in a packade of 50 kilos (110 lbs), which we had to carry to the 1st floor. This is when I had my accident, and permanently injured my spine.

I have a vertically cracked vertebra, a constant L5-S1 issues, and also a bunch of other spine-related medical terms I can’t even begin to try to translate to ‘human’ language. Fucking bummer, cause it’s in my way of getting fit. The irony is I got this from carrying an elliptical up the stairs…

So now - no more ‘impact’ sports, like running. No more heavy lifting. No more doing most of it. But to be honest, two months later I was happy I could walk and sit!

In April 2010 I had my back injury terribly renewed by diving off the boat into the Red Sea in Egypt. It was treated by a local doctor, but I was messed up pretty badly. It’s been two years, and I must say, I’m much more carefull now. Although with the renewed injury my depression came back, as I thought I won’t be able to ever walk or sit again.The compulsive eating came back as well. I gained more than I ever had on me…

It’s not like I haven’t been treated/medicated for obesity, I have. I had a couple of meetings with dietician and endocrinologist. The dietician was ok, but she charged A LOT for each visit, and it was very difficult to set up a meeting. But the idiot endocrinologist was far, FAR worse. You could only set up a visit a month in advance or so, she was so booked up, and she had a habit of constantly undermining the dietician, like “she allows you to eat that!?”. GOD, I was already being interrogated about every single calorie I injested, why do I have to explain other doctor’s decisions to her!? They made me eat about 800 kcal a day. The dietician composed a diet cutting out fatty products, and the endocrinologist cut out products with high glicemic factor. There was barely anything left there to eat. The diet was all wrong, I was hungry and miserable. At some point my sugar level dropped so low I almost fainted. I threw myself at a can of sugary Pepsi and sucked it dry.

As you have probably guessed already, I gained few kilos back and stopped going to them both in fear of being yelled at again. One day I simply said enough is enough. I still can’t believe a doctor, a fucking professional, can make you feel THIS BAD about yourself and your body. Aren’t they supposed to HELP?

I know there must be good doctors out there, but it was a terrible experience, and I hate the idea of repeating it, and constantly reporting evey single calorie to someone. I feel like I’ve already recieved more help by reading healthy diet blogs than at that time.

I want my life back, and I want it better.

I want to have less health issues.

I want to be able to have a child in my early 30s.

I’m 27 and this is my journey to becoming fit.

Stats taken on May 3rd 2012:

Weight: 281,97 lbs / 127,9 kg

Height: 5 feet 8 inches / 173 cm