The Story of My Weight and Body Image

This post is hard for me to publish.  It is much more frank (and public) self-disclosure than I ever thought I would be comfortable with.  People have asked for my “story,” and for “before” photos, so I am publishing this in the hopes that it will help someone else, and that it will help me too.  So here goes nothing…

Recently I spent some time thinking about where I’ve been with my weight and body image.  In order to do that, I went through over 10 years of photos, which ended up being a pretty emotional experience.  It  brought up a lot of memories of happy times, but also a lot of memories about how I’ve been punishing myself and hating my body in ways that have robbed me of so much joy during such a fun time in my life.

These photos of me were during the most fun times throughout my 20’s and early 30’s—vacations, weddings, holidays, parties—and so many of these experiences were marred by how I felt about my body.  I saw a photo of myself at a friend’s wedding smiling for the camera, and remembered about how hours before I cried on the hotel bed about how fat I looked in my outfit, while my now-husband looked on, totally baffled as to how to convince me I looked good the way I was.

My body image issues aren’t news to me: my husband has wanted me to improve my self-image for years.  He has loved me and my appearance at all of my various weights, but I haven’t been nearly so kind to myself.  It makes me sad to think about times in my life that I’ve only half-way enjoyed because of an exaggerated sense of Being Fat.

Going back over pictures, my body image issues came into incredibly sharp focus.  I saw a glimpse into the truth: I am the same cute woman I have always been, at 160 pounds or 110 pounds.  I have not appreciated what I have, not now and not for as long as I can remember.  I have never had an eating disorder, but like many (I would venture to say most) women, I have had a dysfunctional way of looking at myself and at food.  I have binged and felt guilty;  I have hugely magnified my flaws and had an inaccurate view of my body size.  The most painful consequence of all this is that I have avoided people and places because I couldn’t bear to be seen at my current weight.  As if any one else in the world—or even any of my friends or loved ones—cared about what my body looked like on the outside.  As if it looked hideous. As if my appearance should matter at all, let alone more than seeing loved ones and gaining new experiences.

Growing up, I did gymnastics and swim team as a child, and  I danced 2-4 hours a day of ballet and contemporary classes in middle and high school.  Not surprisingly, I was always slim.  But I was never skin-and-bones.  Unsurprisingly, the dancing culture is practically an Anorexia Factory.  We were all routinely told by instructors and other dancers that we needed to cull a few pounds.  Like a milder version of the modeling industry, we were all aspiring to a certain appearance that wasn’t realistic for most of us.  I remember my barely 100-pound, twelve-year-old self in a ballet leotard, fretting over my thighs looking “fat.”  My love for my body has been conditional ever since that time.  “I will love myself if I look like X; if I weigh X.”  In high school, I remember girls in my dance company standing around looking in the mirror, criticizing imagined flaws on their basically perfect bodies.  Didn’t they know that they were the envy of the school, that they were so close to the Ideal that it wasn’t even funny?  I thought I was different than them, but now I see that I was wrong.

The seeds of a dysfunctional body image were already planted, and so were the seeds of unhealthy eating habits.  I ate whatever I wanted when I was younger.  My eating habits were pretty bad.  My mom worked full-time and raised us practically singlehandedly, because my dad was often gone for work.  Like most busy families, we ate a lot of fast food and sugary packaged foods (Froot Loops and Spaghetti-O’s).  There was always plenty of soda in our house.

In high school and college, my weight fluctuated between 110 and 125 (I’m a Shortie—5’2”—so that put my weight right in the middle of the “healthy” range with a BMI of 21 or 22).   I didn’t really become overweight until after college, about 10 years ago.  A stressful job out of college seemed to go hand and hand with a new sedentary lifestyle.  The extra pounds crept up quickly over the three years I worked before starting grad school, maxing out around 150 in 2003 (about 15 pounds above the healthy weight range for my height).  I remember working hard to get my weight under 140 for my wedding six years ago.  Mostly, it’s been around 150 over the past 7-8 years.

Within that time, I’ve dieted seriously around 3 -4 times.  My most “successful” attempt was about 4 years ago.  I followed the South Beach Diet and was going to Curves regularly, and got down to about 125.  Around New Years’ 2009, another revitalization of South Beach got me back in the healthy weight range.  I gained 10 pounds back rather quickly.

Not surprisingly, each time I stopped dieting and I started gaining weight back.  When I moved to Pittsburgh in the summer of 2009, I was about 140-145.  I have gained around 15-20 pounds in a year—maxing out at my all-time highest weight of 164—and I barely even noticed it happening.  I wasn’t exercising, obviously, and was eating out 2, sometimes 3 times a day.  My husband and I ordered pizza at least once a week, sometimes more.  But I really had no idea it had gotten that high.

I have come to view my own struggle with food to be like a drug addiction.  While this isn’t a perfect comparison, there are many parallels.  Like someone trying to kick that liter-a-day alcohol habit, I have felt stuck in a cycle of change and relapse.  In my case, I persist in eating lots of delicious pizza and Mexican food and plopping myself in front of the TV, despite the consequences to my health, my finances, my sense of self-control, and my sense of self-worth.

Like an alcoholic, there is an impulsive quality to my eating behaviors.  I am a champion consumer of restaurant food, usually eating out one or more times a day, every day.  Not only do I often eat more than I intend because it just tastes So Freakin’ Good, I get uncontrollable food cravings that I routinely obey.   Usually, I’ll think something like, “damn, a falafel wrap would taste good for lunch today,” and I cannot get it out of my head until I’ve found that food I’m craving.  It gives me a mild high that I’ve gotten to do what I wanted, to seek and achieve my goal, and to do something novel in an otherwise routine and obligation-bound day. Food has come to represent freedom of choice, independence, and an antidote to boredom.

That’s a big reason why I’ve been stuck, plus a refusal to learn how to cook.  I know the burden of 30 or so extra pounds may seem like a small challenge to some people.  I also know that part of my “recovery” is not just losing weight and gaining healthy habits, it is learning how to really love and accept myself, no matter what I look like.  I have to find a place in which my self-love is not conditional.  Let’s face it: my Inner Body Critic has been around much longer than my weight problem, and will surely outlast it.  Finding true self-acceptance will contribute more to my lasting happiness than any number on the scale, and working on my own perceptions will be one important task in Grown-Up University.