When Getting Healthy Means Getting Fat - Part 1: How It All Began

I've been thinking a lot lately about making my first post.  What to talk about, how to say it, whether I'll ever get to post again.  I work on a government installation that blocks most blogs and social networking.  Thing is, my job is very hurry up & wait - I'm here just in case a phone call or e-mail comes in or I actually have a file to work on.  But it's the slow season for scientific grants.  It'll ramp up next month. But for now, there's not a whole lot to do.  It's the kind of work I could do at home, if I qualified to work at home. I finally realize they're not blocking Shine anytime soon, so since I have the time I might as well take the plunge.  And here it is, my first post.

Anyway, I was reading a post the other day on "secrets of thin people" or some such.  It got me really thinking about my weight loss journeys over the years and I went ahead and commented as someone who has never suffered health issues when fat, only while thin.  And I wasn't even that thin during the brief period I weighed 120 lbs.  I'm 5'2" as an adult. 

You see, I have been fat my whole life.  As a toddler I was a butter ball with rubber-band wrists and chipmonk cheeks.  My parents were very different in parenting philosophy.  My mother had witnessed abuse at the hands of her mother, so was very permissive.  My father was much more the disciplinarian.  These two extremes fueled a recipie for a fat kid.

Although, I have to add that genetics plays a big part in this.  How do I know?  My sister.  She has never been overweight, could eat whatever junk food she wanted, and didn't get stretch marks in her first pregnancy until the 8th month.  And even then it was just a few thin stripes around her navel, which actually poked out.  Not to mention all that baby weight came right off.  Anyway, it's not just her.  My mother's side of the family proudly boasts generations of "thunder thighs" and "child-bearing hips."  I'm built like my maternal grandmother - short and fat with a spitfire personality.

As I dined on cookies and Little Debbies when my dad was on business trips, just as my sister did, I outgrew more clothes in width than in length.  I've always been short, so that was really awkward in the 80's when they didn't make pants to fit chubbier girls.  I always hated shopping in the "Pretty Plus" section of the stores, with the drop-waisted dresses and giant bows on everything.  Ugh.  And the shoulder pads.  Guu! 

Then Dad would come home.  He was an alcoholic, too.  He'd get particularly aggressive when he was drinking.  He would "close" the kitchen and forbid me to go in there when it wasn't mealtime.  I would fein getting a drink to sneak sugary sweets my mom insisted on keeping in the pantry.  If I got caught, I faced spankings.  But sometimes it was so worth it for that rush of a twinkie or leftover pumpkin pie around the holidays.  Oh, and the cookie dough!  Back when they were gigantic logs before corporations raised the price and cut the volume.  Eating was a way to comfort myself when he would get angry or violent.  It was a way to deal with the constant berating tone.  It wasn't just my weight that wasn't good enough - my grades, my laziness, my messiness.

At my maternal grandmother's house, there were always cookies and pies and brownies and dumplings.  She cooked old-fashioned Southern-fried everything.  She made food from scratch - even had her own pecan tree for pies growing in the back yard.  Her cookie jar was glass with a metal lid.  When I would venture for a cookie, it would make this obvious "ding!" noise as the glass rim hit the lid.  If my father was there, that ding would be followed by a "Hey! What are you doing?" and then quickly the sound of metal cupping glass as I put the lid back on quickly and came out to prove I was empty-handed to avoid punishment.

At my paternal grandmother's house, it was a totally different story.  She had diabetes.  She was constantly on weight watchers.  She was a nit-picky ninny of a meddling mother-in-law.  Visits to her house were full of weigh-ins, lectures on what a terrible mother my mom was, exercise videos, and "incentive" clothing always at least a size too small.  I remember being 11 and absolutely elated that I weighed in at 130 lbs - I had lost 10 lbs!  The only real treat she'd ever let me have is if I spent the night.  I could have half a graham cracker and sugar-free hot cocoa.  But this could not be a daily thing lest I get too much of a good thing.  She would take me to her doctors who would diagnose me as overweight, getting signatures on paper to confront my mother with.  As we had interventions every couple of years with my dad about his drinking, so too would there be interventions with my mother on my eating.  Oh, and since she was a diabetic I also got my fingers pricked at least once every visit to their house to test my blood sugar. 

Imagine my glee when it was not I that fell prey to diabetes, but my younger, skinnier, blonde-haired, blue-eyed cousin.  The pretty one got the fat girls' disease.  Of course, back then I didn't know the difference between Type I and Type II diabetes.  I just knew that my mother and I, as emotionally closed off as she was after years of my dad's drinking, had something to bond over - my grandmother was wrong.  We gleefully laughed about it over ice cream one evening when my dad was out drinking or fooling around.

That, my friends, was my childhood up until I was 15 and my parents finally divorced.  My world revolved around getting some kind of pleasure, usually food, but later sex, tobacco, and drugs. 

So I turn it over you you, Shine readers.  What about your upbringing introduced unhealthy habits?  What did you do to overcome them? Did you overcome them?  What are your weight and body image struggles now?

Stay tuned for Part 2...