Hello, my name is Jen, and I am morbidly obese.
Sounds like the opening for an addicts meeting. I can't really say that I'm a food addict though. I'm not the girl that goes through the McDonald's drive through every day. Hell I don't even go through it every month. But I'll explain that in detail later.
Let me start from the beginning.
I was always a little chubby. But I never really considered myself as overweight until I was in the 7th grade. I had a very embarrassing incident where we were having a school dance where the girls asked the boys to the dance. There was a boy in our class that I really had a huge crush on. It took me awhile to get the courage to ask him to the dance, but I finally walked up to him and asked. We were in the cafeteria and he was sitting with all the jocks. He laughed in my face and said "I don't date fat chicks!" and all the jocks started laughing. I was completely humiliated by this. I had never seen myself as fat until that moment.
When I look back at pictures of myself from 7th grade, I still don't see myself as being fat. Sure I wasnt the size 0 that most of the other girls were, but I was a size 7, and really not that big! But that boy made me feel like a whale. And that was when I started feeling fat, started seeing myself as fat.
This is my 7th grade photo. I don't see that I was any bigger then the other girls in the photo. But after being so publicly humiliated the way I was, I no longer saw myself in the same way.
Over the years, my weight started creeping up. I did stay active. I was in marching band and winter color guard, and I went to aerobics classes (this WAS the 80s after all!). I even had a very minor stint in a modern ballet class (because I was obsessed with the movie and TV show "Fame"). I was on a weekly bowling league, and my best friend and I went roller skating all the time. So it was never a matter of me sitting around shoveling food in my face.
My mom made healthy meals. She encouraged me to try all different veggies. Unfortunately I never took to veggies. Didn't matter how she made them, I hated them. The textures, the smells, the tastes....blech. To me, any root vegetable always tastes like dirt, no matter how much you wash them. Trying to force myself to eat them just ends up making me gag. So...I don't eat many veggies. As I grew older, I did manage to come around to enjoying green beans and corn. But otherwise....nada.
I don't want it to sound like I blame this one boy for wrecking my self esteem. It certainly didn't help. I was sexually assaulted by a family member when I was 10. He touched my breasts and told me how pretty they were. That, more then anything, wrecked my self esteem. I found myself hiding my body under larger clothing hoping I wouldn't get noticed, and hiding myself away when that person came around. It only happened one time, but it was one time too many.
Looking back now, I think that I used my weight as a way to hold men away from me, even though I wanted to date, and wanted a boyfriend, that one incident was always in the back of my mind, for all of my life and I felt the need to keep myself insulated. I did have boyfriends. But I feel now that most of them were more as a way to feel "normal" and "wanted" but I don't believe that any of them REALLY wanted me, because I was just a fat girl, so I must have been "easy". That's how I felt. It always felt to me that people thought if a girl was fat, they had to be easy, because they were desperate and couldn't get anything better.
Eventually I just lost myself under all the fat. I had a baby at the end of my senior year, in 1988. That put on more weight that I never fully got rid of. I lost interest in all of the activities I used to do, and was just too busy with life to really focus on my health. College full time, working full time, a new baby. I was a single mother, so there was never money for good food. As we all know, processed crappy foods are cheap. We ate a lot of spaghetti and macaroni-n-cheese. A lot of frozen pizzas. A lot of take out. A lot of pizzas were ordered. To me it was easier to do that then to buy good food, because I wasn't a very good cook to begin with. I hated it. (Still do!) And with my limited time, it was easier to just order a pizza or pick something up on the way home.
After my dad died in 1992, I found myself swirling down into a deep depression. One that I thought I had crawled out of but once my mom died in 1999, it got very bad. I stayed in that dark hole for many years, and it wasn't until over the past 2 years or so that I've been able to claw my way out of it. I still have my bad days (I'm bi-polar after all), but for the most part, I'm pretty happy with life these days.
So these are my "excuses" for getting to the point that I was at. Not my reasons. My reasons were...well....honestly I don't know. Genetics played a big part in it as well of course. My paternal side of the family is big. I had an aunt that was the same size I was. Actually I think she got to 500 pounds, but I'm not positive of that. She ended up dying from a blood clot. My father was a big man, and had cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart) due to his size and smoking. I had an uncle who had diabetes. My grandparents were big people too. I also have hypothyroidism, so that certainly doesn't help either.
On June 19, 2017 I had a gastric sleeve surgery. I will be writing about my steps to making that decision, and the steps it took to have the surgery done, as well as updating my progress. My hope is that someone out there will be inspired to change their lives as well, whether through surgery or just diet alone. It doesn't matter how it's done. What matters is that you are ready, well informed, and dedicated to whatever process you choose.
Keep reading for my updates!
Sounds like the opening for an addicts meeting. I can't really say that I'm a food addict though. I'm not the girl that goes through the McDonald's drive through every day. Hell I don't even go through it every month. But I'll explain that in detail later.
Let me start from the beginning.
I was always a little chubby. But I never really considered myself as overweight until I was in the 7th grade. I had a very embarrassing incident where we were having a school dance where the girls asked the boys to the dance. There was a boy in our class that I really had a huge crush on. It took me awhile to get the courage to ask him to the dance, but I finally walked up to him and asked. We were in the cafeteria and he was sitting with all the jocks. He laughed in my face and said "I don't date fat chicks!" and all the jocks started laughing. I was completely humiliated by this. I had never seen myself as fat until that moment.
When I look back at pictures of myself from 7th grade, I still don't see myself as being fat. Sure I wasnt the size 0 that most of the other girls were, but I was a size 7, and really not that big! But that boy made me feel like a whale. And that was when I started feeling fat, started seeing myself as fat.
This is my 7th grade photo. I don't see that I was any bigger then the other girls in the photo. But after being so publicly humiliated the way I was, I no longer saw myself in the same way.
Over the years, my weight started creeping up. I did stay active. I was in marching band and winter color guard, and I went to aerobics classes (this WAS the 80s after all!). I even had a very minor stint in a modern ballet class (because I was obsessed with the movie and TV show "Fame"). I was on a weekly bowling league, and my best friend and I went roller skating all the time. So it was never a matter of me sitting around shoveling food in my face.
My mom made healthy meals. She encouraged me to try all different veggies. Unfortunately I never took to veggies. Didn't matter how she made them, I hated them. The textures, the smells, the tastes....blech. To me, any root vegetable always tastes like dirt, no matter how much you wash them. Trying to force myself to eat them just ends up making me gag. So...I don't eat many veggies. As I grew older, I did manage to come around to enjoying green beans and corn. But otherwise....nada.
I don't want it to sound like I blame this one boy for wrecking my self esteem. It certainly didn't help. I was sexually assaulted by a family member when I was 10. He touched my breasts and told me how pretty they were. That, more then anything, wrecked my self esteem. I found myself hiding my body under larger clothing hoping I wouldn't get noticed, and hiding myself away when that person came around. It only happened one time, but it was one time too many.
Looking back now, I think that I used my weight as a way to hold men away from me, even though I wanted to date, and wanted a boyfriend, that one incident was always in the back of my mind, for all of my life and I felt the need to keep myself insulated. I did have boyfriends. But I feel now that most of them were more as a way to feel "normal" and "wanted" but I don't believe that any of them REALLY wanted me, because I was just a fat girl, so I must have been "easy". That's how I felt. It always felt to me that people thought if a girl was fat, they had to be easy, because they were desperate and couldn't get anything better.
Eventually I just lost myself under all the fat. I had a baby at the end of my senior year, in 1988. That put on more weight that I never fully got rid of. I lost interest in all of the activities I used to do, and was just too busy with life to really focus on my health. College full time, working full time, a new baby. I was a single mother, so there was never money for good food. As we all know, processed crappy foods are cheap. We ate a lot of spaghetti and macaroni-n-cheese. A lot of frozen pizzas. A lot of take out. A lot of pizzas were ordered. To me it was easier to do that then to buy good food, because I wasn't a very good cook to begin with. I hated it. (Still do!) And with my limited time, it was easier to just order a pizza or pick something up on the way home.
After my dad died in 1992, I found myself swirling down into a deep depression. One that I thought I had crawled out of but once my mom died in 1999, it got very bad. I stayed in that dark hole for many years, and it wasn't until over the past 2 years or so that I've been able to claw my way out of it. I still have my bad days (I'm bi-polar after all), but for the most part, I'm pretty happy with life these days.
So these are my "excuses" for getting to the point that I was at. Not my reasons. My reasons were...well....honestly I don't know. Genetics played a big part in it as well of course. My paternal side of the family is big. I had an aunt that was the same size I was. Actually I think she got to 500 pounds, but I'm not positive of that. She ended up dying from a blood clot. My father was a big man, and had cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart) due to his size and smoking. I had an uncle who had diabetes. My grandparents were big people too. I also have hypothyroidism, so that certainly doesn't help either.
On June 19, 2017 I had a gastric sleeve surgery. I will be writing about my steps to making that decision, and the steps it took to have the surgery done, as well as updating my progress. My hope is that someone out there will be inspired to change their lives as well, whether through surgery or just diet alone. It doesn't matter how it's done. What matters is that you are ready, well informed, and dedicated to whatever process you choose.
Keep reading for my updates!
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