Time Warp: History of Dieting and Self-Loathing

I'll be 42 on my next birthday, and have been dieting since I was 10 or 12.  I don't remember the age.  I do remember being the only girl in elementary school with breasts.  Not knowing what a period was when it came for the first time (and no, I hadn't read the Judy Blume book yet!).  I remember being in the pool with my best friend and having a boy from our class look at me and say something like "you are even fatter under water."

I'm the "fat" one in front!

Fat?  What was that? 

I didn't know, but I knew it was me.  I had a definition suddenly.  I was the 'fat girl.'

And those facts coupled with my parent's apparent belief that there was something wrong with me, lead to the *drum roll, please* Diet Workshop.  Counting calories and "points" at 10 or 12, standing up with middle aged women and telling them my weight. Learning to "cook" right when cooking should have meant making peanut butter and jelly.

Yes, I liked the Breakfast Club,
why do you ask?

This blog could be "Tales of the 4th Grade Fat Girl" but that would be really depressing and probably annoy my parents.  

Fast forward a few years and I'm in junior high and then high school.  I start to excel at things:  school, speech and debate, school government.  Looking back, I was part of that crowd that you might call "popular nerds."  If we had had a show like Glee - that would have been my group.  Still getting slushied by the popular jocks, but we had our own clique or niche.  

This was fat in the 80s!

And we all dieted insanely.  Aerobics 3 times a week.  Talking about how fat we were when we ate McDonald's on a daily basis.  Looking back at pictures of myself from this age, I see that I wasn't overweight.  In fact, my Molly Ringwald hair and fashion sense senior pictures tell me that I was what is defined as my "ideal weight" currently.  

Then came college - and a rejection of all things that society told me girls... umm... I mean 'women'... should be.  Feminism came into my life and I stopped caring about what I looked like (but, you know, not *really*) or what boys thought.  I surrounded myself with women I liked to be with and ideas that I found fascinating.  It would lead me to the best friends in my life - my surrogate or chosen family. And it would take me away from my midwest home to my adopted home on the East Coast and a career I love and would not trade for all the size 6 jeans in the world.

My support group!

I clearly remember having a conversation with my doctor probably 5 years ago.  She was telling me - again - that I needed to lose weight and I just lost it.  With tears running down my cheeks, I told her that I felt like I could do everything else in my life, but this.  

I was the straight A student.  I was the good daughter who didn't ask too much of her parents.  I was the friend who would drop anything to help someone.  I was the woman who spent her professional life running a nonprofit to help other women.  And I did most things well.  

But we aren't all perfect, and my weight was living proof of that.  It was - in many ways - the one area that allowed myself not to do well.  Who knew it was the one thing that might end up killing me.

Wow, that is a hard concept to come to terms with.  

And at the end of the day, I have a confession to make... I don't think I want to be skinny.  

I don't want to be a skinny girl that fits into a size 2 or even 10.  I'd be happy to stop seeing a "2" as the first number of my weight.  And let's not even talk about the 3 that was there for a while!   You know when the scale groans and refuses to display your weight that it is time for a change.

Okay, enough with the introspection and walk down memory lane... on to the future.