Eating Candy in Fat Prison

I used to be morbidly obese. I was what I would call mega fat. I mean, crazy, ridiculous, can-barely-move fat. It was an awful life. My body was became incarceration for my soul, rather than a vehicle to express it. My body was a prison made from fat that I could not escape. Just getting out of the recliner was a heavy-ho effort that often made my back and knees creak painfully. I was well over one hundred pounds overweight by my twenty seventh birthday and had the energy level of a terminally ill senior citizen. My life was miserable.

I went on a business trip when I was at my heaviest and the seat belt barely fit my belly. I was horrified. I am a nervous flyer and MUST HAVE my seat belt on for sanity’s sake. I kept it painfully buckled over my enormous lap, cutting into my stomach rather deeply for an eight hour flight. It was a wake up call that took almost another year for me to finally see as such. My denial was so strong that I actually blamed the design of the plane rather than accept the idea that I was getting too big to fit in an airplane seat as a short, twenty-something woman. I was fucking delusional but had no idea that I was.

I wasn’t overweight until after I lost my father at age seven. Emotional overeating is certainly a common way to deal with grief and I used that coping mechanism to my best advantage. I sought comfort in pizza and Mike 'N Ike's with reckless abandon. 

My family members were also overweight and so there wasn’t a good example of how to eat nutritiously as much as how to eat for optimal flavor. Our portions were huge, sweets and carbs were plentiful and fresh produce was rare. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve gained and lost more than 300 pounds because my upbringing and the way I viewed food. My fat battle has raged on for decades because of long-held beliefs that were working against me. Several times over, I’ve steadily climbed up in weight, lost a bunch and then gained it back, with interest. It was infuriating. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just stay slim. It looked easy for other people, but I was hiking uphill all the time.

I started dieting in elementary school but couldn’t stick to it until high school. After going through my sophomore and junior years of high school at over 200 pounds on my five-foot-one frame, I wanted to get into better shape for my senior year. I knew that I wanted to have a fun, active lifestyle and the only way to do that was to start exercising. I lost seventy pounds that summer – by starting to jog a mile every day and eating only chips and salsa (bizarre choice, but they’re my favorite!). Oh, and I smoked two packs of Marlboros and put down a six pack of Diet Coke on the daily. When you’re seventeen, you care about being skinny, not being healthy.
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