Losing - Two

I was 25 years old, married and overweight. I was only a week into the rigors of limiting my portions and watching my fat and fiber intake under the eye of Weight Watchers. Only one week of discipline produced nearly 5 lbs of weight loss!

I was elated.

So I dove with a whole heart into their plan. I was religious about food intake and never had a "cheat" day. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went and I never ate a cookie or a piece of candy.

By December of that year, only 2 months after I began, I had lost 20 pounds. My clothes were loose and other people began to notice. By now I was into a rhythm with the program and I counted my flex points in my head without having to keep a food diary. Only then did I start to exercise because only then did I feel comfortable in the gym.

Sometime in the new year, I felt that I might be able to try to run on the treadmill. The last time I had run had been in high school when I was forced to run the dreaded Mile in PE. I would always be lapped multiple times by the track and volleyball girls, but I would never be last. I would run the first quarter or half mile as fast as I could and then stopped to walk when my legs and lungs burned.

Now it was different. I was different. I was beginning to feel good about my body and my confidence in myself was growing. I bought running shoes, donned a couple of sports bras at once to keep everything in place and I got on the treadmill. I thought that if I could only make it one mile, I would be satisfied. I ran, slowly, but I ran a whole mile. Breathing heavily at the end, I felt throbbing in muscles that had really never been used before, and I was tired, but I was so happy. I felt like I had accomplished something that I had never been able to complete even when I was younger. I was now in some kind of club that I had always longed to be a part of.

During the next five months, I lost another 35 pounds bringing my weight loss to 55 pounds altogether. I got up every morning at 4 am, was at the gym at 4:30 and taught middle school at 7:30. I only took Sundays off. I counted every morsel I ingested and became obsessed with calories and metabolism. I ate less than I should have and weighed myself every day. On my weigh in days at Weight Watchers, I didn't eat lunch and stopped all fluid intake after noon for my 4pm meeting with the scale. I didn't want anything to jeopardize my "number" that afternoon.

158.4
157.2
155.8
152.0...
The new number would become my identity and I would cling to it for the whole next week. Each pound lost would give me another ounce of false confidence in myself and my appearance, and each desert NOT eaten would make me feel that much more prideful in my own ability to exhibit self-control. As my waist was shrinking, my pride was expanding and my sense of identity was becoming wrapped within my new thinness. I began to wear more revealing clothes and felt validated by the attention I was receiving from everyone.

Most people were astonished by my transformation, but some were offended. I was now thinner than many women that I had previously looked up to as symbols of beauty. I had become part of a "thin" secret society and in a twisted way, it made me feel good. I was becoming arrogant and caught up in myself.

When I reached my goal of 145 pounds, well within the healthy range for a woman of my height (5'8"), we decided to try to become pregnant. High off of my nearly 8 months of careful food intake and obsessive gym trips I was able to keep my weight down during my pregnancy with Hope only gaining 30 pounds.

Even though I could feel my daughter in my belly and could feel the mother-baby bond begin to grow within me as well, each gained pound seemed like a step backward. During my whole pregnancy I battled depression that left me crying most nights. It was more than the hormones, and it went deeper than the weight gain. My body transformation over the past year had also transformed my soul: I became self-absorbed and intensely worried about my own appearance. My complete identity was based in my new "look", and the accompanying feelings of superiority.

I was depressed because I didn't know who I was. If I wasn't thin anymore, who was I?

(Part three in my weight loss story will be posted on Thursday)