Weight Management

I've struggled with carrying extra weight since childhood. As a third-grader, I remember racing home from school to eat an entire package of Top Ramen every day, which I have since learned is packed with calories and fat and makes me wonder what my mother was thinking??? Getting braces in seventh grade helped me drop a few pounds, since my mouth was frequently too sore for me to eat for a few days after the orthodontist would tighten them up. By tenth grade I had discovered boys and partying and food was the last thing I cared about. Then I went to college and gained the freshmen fifteen or twenty or whatever I wound up packing on. Eating French fries and iceberg salad slathered in ranch dressing from the dorm cafeteria every day didn't help. Neither did beer.

When I was twenty-four I joined Weight Watchers in preparation for my wedding. Was it really as easy as I remember? The romanticized hindsight of my memory has me believing I lost a good three to five pounds each week when I would step on the scale. Maybe I did. I was twenty-four, after all. I do know for sure that my seamstress told me I had to STOP losing weight or she wouldn't be able to alter my dress small enough to fit for the big day. Not long after the wedding we moved to San Francisco and there was a bar literally downstairs from our apartment. I spent far too much time there, followed by ordering pizza late night, and eventually got big again. By this time I was battling reoccurring bouts of acute pancreatitis triggered by my genetic triglyceride malfunction. I've had four over the course of my life and would be remiss if I didn't admit I've never had a pancreas attack when I wasn't 1) overweight and 2) off triglyceride medication.

One attack was so severe I spent two weeks in the hospital and almost died. That experience changed me. I quit drinking and eating fatty or fried foods and started exercising and again, the weight fell off. Unfortunately a few months later my symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as CFS and fibro started. The ups and downs I've gone through since 2005 make up the majority of this blog so I'm not going to rehash. Long story skipped, I find myself sitting here today not obese, per se, but not healthy either. So back to Weight Watchers, now known as WW, I go. The thing is I signed up earlier in the year, didn't have anything close to the success I experienced in my twenties, and quit. But with no accountability I make ridiculous choices (like eating a bagel slathered in cream cheese every morning for breakfast) and while I've only gained back five of the ten I lost in the spring, in actuality I still need to lose twenty-five.

Like many things in life, my high expectations had set me up for failure. I thought I would input my food consumption into the app and the weight would fall off like it did when I was in my early twenties. I mean I was eating so much better! Yet no dice. So this time I'm going into it with reasonable anticipation. If I lose a pound a week and it takes me a year, so be it. It's better than gaining weight. If I stick to my points five or six days a week and fly off the rails on Saturday or Sunday, it's drastically better than what I was doing before. And if I have a glass of wine at night but don't have three, that's a marked improvement. Showing myself an ounce of compassion is worth the slow and steady climb toward health if that means I can stick to something long-term and actually get off the yo-yo for good.

Thanks for joining,

Leah