My Weight Loss Story

My story will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to lose weight. By the time I was 20 years old, I had packed 230 pounds onto my 5’3” frame. Even before I started kindergarten, my mother had me on my first diet. She did not want a fat daughter. Her solution? Cottage cheese on potatoes instead of butter. Jello instead of cupcakes. No melons, no buttermilk -- no to a lot of things she assumed were fattening even though they weren’t. If she thought I’d had enough, she’d snatch away my plate and dump the rest down the garbage disposal. I soon became, and remained, the faster eater on the block.

My older sister was thin. No, she was skinny, but she was held up to me as the girlish ideal of beauty. She was a picky eater, which my parents considered delicate and feminine. I might as well be a horse with a feedbag over my face. My sister was constantly being offered strawberry malteds and delicate cupcakes frosted with toasted flecks of fragrant coconut. She had to have gravy with her meat or an extra pat of butter on her mashed potatoes. Before bedtime, she was wooed with chocolate chip ice cream slathered with chocolate sauce.

While my mother was alive, I wasn’t actually overweight, even though I’d taken to stealing food and eating it while hiding in the basement. But, when she died of breast cancer, I quickly ballooned and became her worst nightmare. I went from being a 10 year old who was on the high side of normal to an obese child within months. I ate, and I ate, and I ate. Doctor diets, weight loss pills that made me shake and kept me awake nights, liquid diets, grapefruit diets, group diets, starvation diets—nothing worked. In fact, each time I lost weight, I’d fall off the wagon and gain back everything I’d lost plus an additional 5-10 pounds.

Each year, when we had the class weigh-in at school, I’d die of shame. My classmates would snicker and tease me, taunt me on the playground, call me “whale” and “fatso” and “piggy.” The more they mocked me, the more I ate for comfort. If no one wanted to be my friend, so what? Food was my friend.

By the time I entered college, I was up to 194 pounds. By my junior year, I weighed close to 230 pounds.

People who are morbidly obese do not get that way because they love to eat, or because they are lazy or self-indulgent. People who gorge are eating for emotional reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with food.

So, how did I go from a 230-pound college student to a mature woman who lost over half of her body weight? How did I do it? But, more importantly, how do I keep it off? Join me as I share my story, my struggle to create a plan that worked and my triumph over emotional eating.