Preparing Myself

It's been a long road to this place. I feel like I've been preparing for a marathon for the past 4 years, even longer really, more like 8 years now & it's time to run.

A little about what has led up to this point - in 1990 I was about 150 lbs., working out 3 times a week, burning the candle at both ends & about to get engaged to Kurt. I was a size 10/12. I ended up getting the basic cold sore virus & it sent my body into a tail spin that I haven't gotten out of in 19 years. I developed chronic fatigue and gained about 100 lbs. in the first year. Some of the weight gain was the change of lifestyle and the illness & A LOT of it was due to my developing a serious food addiction. I would eat to try to comfort myself every day.

Once I hit 300 lbs. I decided I had better stop gaining weight. This happened probably by 1999. I joined several weight loss programs, tried to create support groups amongst my friends, read several books, went to hospital sponsored educational events and saw many different counselors. I literally felt crazy in how I was behaving towards food. I didn't understand how I could want something so much in my mind & be so unable to control the actions of my body. I would think all the way to Wendy's to buy the frosty "I don't want this. I don't want this. I don't want this." & yet I would drive there, buy it & eat it. I couldn't even begin to understand what was happening. All the counseling and reading began a basic understanding what was happening and then my husband & I decided to have kids.

In 2002 my daughter was born. Thankfully, I dropped the weight that I had gained with her & settled to about 320. Then in 2005 I gave birth to twin boys. Again, I dropped back down to 325 a few months after their birth & have stayed there for 4 years.

The most meaningful and life changing process was done with Ellen Shuman with A Weigh Out Coaching (http://www.aweighout.com/) in 2006 after the twins were born. Let me back up - I was watching Oprah one day & James Frey was on that had written "A Million Little Pieces" and he talked about addiction and he mentioned food addiction in the sentence. Up until now I had "poo pooed" the idea that there was such a thing as food addiction - but hearing him describe his addiction really made me think that I too suffered from addiction. So I googled food addiction/emotional eating and ended up on Ellen's site & after checking her out, decided to work with her. I was so angry that none of the counselors that I had seen up until now had never mentioned food addiction or even opened up the notion that this existed.

So working with Ellen for about a year 1) helped me understand food addiction/emotional eating 2) helped me through a very difficult bout of post partum depression 3) helped save my marriage. But it didn't help me lose weight - at least not yet. There was still a bunch of internal work to be done. . . .