I'll admit it, I'm a pack rat. I have stuff all the way back to grade school (and at 42 years old that's a little ways back). I like to take these artifacts out on occasion and look at them to remind myself what things were like. Who doesn't like taking a stroll down memory lane? Unless it's the weight loss memory lane. But that's how I'm going to start this blog.
Start with a look back and then focus on looking ahead.
I was a normal weight child until I was about 4 or 5 years old and spent the summer with my grandparents in Kansas. They were pastry chiefs and thought food = love. You can imagine when I returned home after the summer my parents hardly recognized me. But neither of them were well versed in childhood weight loss (or childhood obesity for that matter). My mom had always been naturally thin, limiting herself to only celery sticks, Ritz crackers and iced tea when her pants were too tight. She knew that probably wasn't an option for a 5 year old. She certainly wasn't a nutritionist and looking back I know we ate a lot of carbs and fatty proteins (kind of common in the 70s) for dinner. And don't even get me started on the amount of processed stuff we ate (can you say spaghetti-os, hamburger helper, fruit cocktail in heavy syrup, etc)
I have struggled with my weight ever since. I never got to be thin as a child or a teenager which is sometimes helpful when people in their 40s say "I remember when I could eat whatever I wanted and not gain weight". That was never me. I walked by pizza and it attached to my hips. I looked at the candy dish and it went straight to my butt. Which started the vicious cycle of being overweight, being depressed about it, eating bowl after bowl of ice cream, being depressed about it, and so on and so on.
When I was 17 I joined Weight Watchers for the first time. The meeting was in a church basement and they had the big medical scale. Surprisingly enough I do not have any record of that first weigh in or documents from that time (well maybe I do but I don't know where they are). I do know that I was losing weight doing the program and I was really learning, for the first time, what healthy foods were and how to exercise portion control. Then, a falling out with my father prompted me to move out of the house after high school graduation and I stopped attending Weight Watchers. You can imagine what happened.
The second time I joined Weight Watchers I was 22 years old (January 13, 1992). I weighed in at 256 1/4 lbs (I noticed they didn't do the decimal yet). In a little over a year I lost 91 lbs. But that didn't last. And I never made it to goal. (yes, I still have all the membership books from that time)
The third time I joined Weight Watchers I was 30 years old (October 1999). I weighed in at 279 lbs. I guess what they say is true; you lose big, you gain back big. I lost about 20lbs in the next two months and then....
To be continued...
