#health fitness fat blog jennycraig weightloss depression mentalillness

[calpert]

Fat Girl Writing

This is probably my tenth attempt at writing a blog. For some reason I can never be consistent with my posts. I should be writing at least every week. Well I decided to write this blog because I feel very stuck right now. I'm an overweight, depressed woman who desperately wants to lose weight, but hasn't really taken the steps to do so. So here I am, pouring my heart out to the internet in hopes I will hold myself accountable to making my life better. Here is some information about me: I am a 28 year old woman. I am 5'5" and I weigh 185 pounds. I am diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADD. I take a number of medications including antidepressants, Xanax, a stabilizer, and Adderall. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and first given the medication when I was 19-years-old. I wasn't diagnosed with ADD until I was 26, but it was obvious I've had it most of my life. I have struggled with my weight most of my life. I have always loved eating. When I was a baby, I had a Polish Catholic nanny whose philosophy was food equals love. And boy, did she love me. I had an older sister, but because I was the new baby, I was all she wanted. My nanny fed me so much to the point where when I laid on my belly, my arms and legs couldn’t touch the ground. My favorite thing was apple juice. After she left, my mother tried to give me water, but I refused and cried until I received the sweet sugary liquid. Ever since then I have had an addiction to sugar especially sweet drinks like soda, slushees, and of course sugary cocktails and other colorful alcoholic beverages.  Luckily, when I was a child, my metabolism was high and I was active enough that I was not overweight. I enjoyed playing sports and playing outside. But I loved food even more. Every meal I had I would lick my plate clean. My brother and sister were both picky eaters and would only eat certain foods prepared a certain way. But not me. I tried anything and everything. The good thing is this included vegetables. It really didn’t matter what form the food was in or what type of food it was. I didn’t discriminate. For the first ten years of my life, I didn’t think twice about what I put into my mouth. I didn’t think about my body or how it looked or what others thought of it. It was the most mentally peaceful time in my life. The demon hadn’t come out to play. When I was eleven years old and in sixth grade, I got my period. My breasts started to develop and my skinny legs turned into full thighs. Obviously I started to feel uncomfortable in my own body. Most of the girls in my class did not look like me. They were still skinny and flat chested. I felt like there was something wrong with me because I didn’t look like them. I blamed my body type and thought I was just born unlucky.  One day that same year, we had to take the presidential fitness test. This required us to do a certain amount of push ups, pulls ups, sit ups and to record our results. We also had to measure our height and weight so the school could gauge the overall health of our grade. Before I stepped on the scale, I looked at the results of the other girls around me. Most of them were shorter than me and weighed anywhere between 85 and 100 pounds.  It was time for me to step on the scale. I hadn’t really ever weighed myself before except maybe at the doctor’s. I didn’t know what to expect. But I was nervous. As I stepped on the old fashioned scale, I saw the ruler tip up and up and up until it reached the number 120. This was the first time I ever cared about how much I weighed. It probably was fairly healthy for a girl who was five foot two, but I was mortified. When you’re a child in school, all you can do is compare yourself to the other kids around you and see where you fit. I felt like I was the fat girl in the class. All I wanted was to be like everyone else, but the scale did not lie. The next year I started to become less active. As much as I enjoyed dancing and moving, I was not an athlete. This was the year I discovered my true passion: theater. Because of this, I quit the swim team I had been on for a few years. Although I understood that what you eat and how much you moved affected your body, I was in denial of what it would do to mine. I gained about 15 pounds that year and so my mother decided to take action and put me on a diet.  Jenny Craig is a popular diet that has been around for years. It is focused on portion control so they provide small microwavable meals. When you see ads for it, you mainly see women who are trying to lose their baby weight or middle aged women trying to get back on track to a healthy weight. I was only twelve-years-old when I went on it. It was one of the most embarrassing moments for me. My classmates couldn’t understand why I was on this diet or even what a diet really was. They even tried to sabotage the diet by telling me to eat the donuts or other food that was offered in school. When I told teachers I was on a diet, they were appalled. My science teacher said “Twelve-year-old girls should not be on diets”. I was conflicted. I felt like I was the only kid who had to do this. It felt wrong, but I knew my own mother wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. I knew she was just terrified that I would become obese and so was I. I lost the 15 pounds I had to lose in a few months and felt great about myself. Seventh grade turned out to be a good year.  The next year, however, was one of the worst years of my life. I was at the same school I was in seventh grade, but the children seemed to have become even more cruel. I was made fun of constantly. I attended a private school and there were less than twenty kids in my grade. They tried to create clicks and weeded out the weak ones which included myself. I was seen as weak because I was nice to everyone and did anything to fit in. Then one day, my mother told my siblings and I that she would be moving to Chicago to get a job since we were in financial trouble. We had to stay with my dad in Arizona until the school year ended six months later. My dad wasn’t home much and he never cooked. We often had to fend for ourselves and once a week we ordered pizza. I think I was afraid of starving. A few months later, my father sat us down and informed us that he and my mother were getting a divorce. This was the first time I felt real pain. Of course when I look back at it, divorce is common and not something to be devastated over, but in the moment it felt like someone ripped my heart from my chest. I didn’t know how I was ever going to feel better. It was then I realized that food comforted me. It was always there and it was delicious and it made me feel good. My parents weren’t around to discipline me so I ate my feelings. That year I gained thirty pounds and was at my heaviest yet. I knew my parents were ashamed of me just as much as I was ashamed of myself. So I went back on Jenny Craig again. We didn’t have enough money for me to complete the program so I only lost about half the weight I had gained. This would not be the last time I was on the Jenny Craig diet program. So you see, this is something I am trying to get a handle on. It's been very difficult for me and this winter weather plus my depression has made motivation an impossible thing to grasp. But I am hoping that once I start writing about it, I will be able to turn things around. -Claudia Alpert