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.  

Our Journey Begins...

Sherikate

I don't have a good name for this blog and don't really know why I'm doing it... other than I have too many ideas swirling around in my mind at 1am in the morning to sleep and one day my friends are going to be tired of hearing me blabber on.  

So here it goes...

My name is Sherikate...
*hi, Sherikate*
And I'm about 2 weeks out from having gastric bypass surgery
*silence falls*

There needs to be a 12-step program for fat girls like me.  I've spent so much of my life trying to NOT obsess about how much I weigh and what I look like.  Hell, I spent most of my academic career conducting feminist analysis of things like the "beauty myth" and the effects of pornography and objectification on women's self-esteem.  Now I run a nonprofit that helps women transition to work by - among other things - helping them look the part by giving them professional clothing.

I'm a contradiction in terms.  

So now I'm just adding a new one to the mix, I suppose.

Something changed in my life this past June.  I woke up - or better never fell asleep - with a terrible pain in my right side.  By 4am I was in such pain that I did the unthinkable - I went to the emergency room.  I was admitted immediately with a kidney stone the size of an M&M.  The next thing I knew, the girl who had never had any major medical procedure spent 2 days in the hospital and had 2 procedures 2 weeks apart to remove the stone (wow... that was alot of 2s!).

And the stone was my wake up call, I guess.  

2 years ago (wow - there's another 2!), my doctor used 2 small words to convey on big (no pun intended!) concept for me:  morbidly obese.

Wait a minute!  I was just a fat girl!  I wasn't morbidly obese.  

What did that mean, anyway?  

I spent the better part of the last 2 years contemplating what this meant.  I'd look at people on the street and compare them to me - was I that big?  Were they fatter than me?  Was I healthier than they were? 

Suddenly medical problems started mounting up - pre-diabetes was hovering around the 'do not pass go and collect $100 mark' into full-blown diabetes.  I'd always snored, but now they called it sleep apnea and said I could die without a breathing machine.  Pain in my back from cysts meant I could no longer walk the 2 miles to work.  And now I had kidney stones.

The writing was on the wall - I was, in my own words, too fat to live.  Or at least too fat to live the life I wanted.  

I didn't want my niece to look at me and ask "why is your stomach fat."

I didn't want my friends to worry that I wouldn't see retirement with them.

I didn't want to spend Saturdays in a shame spiral brought on by my "lumpy toad frog" moments.

I was tired of being embarrassed everywhere I went that I was taking up too much space.

  

And it was time to do something about it.

My doctor had mentioned surgery and 2 years ago, I thought that was insane.  I'd lost weight before, after all, why not just do it again?  But then I started reviewing my own personal weight loss journey - as people like Oprah and Doctor Oz are so apt to call it.  It wasn't a journey, though, it was more like a  the time warp from Rocky Horror: 

It's just a jump to the left . And then a step to the right / With your hands on your hips / You bring your knees in tight

In other words... it was going nowhere.

Not telling anyone what I was thinking, I spent hours online researching because that's what I do.  And all those hours and hours of researching and introspection have lead me here.  

I'm hoping that now it's a journey.  I'm hoping it will lead me to a place where I am healthy.  Where I have more confidence.  Where I can be the person on the outside that I feel like I am on the inside.

So here we go...