Fat and Me

When I was younger and skinnier, I used to always say that I would never have a weight problem, because I would never lose myself to food.  I could eat whatever I wanted and never put on a pound, so I thought it couldn't happen to me.  I thought, somehow, that I had been born with this innate ability to consume large amounts of food and have it not affect me in any way.  In high school, almost every single day Matt and I would share a Dominoes pizza (we were at a big enough high school that we had a lot of options, and Dominoes was there every single day selling small pizzas to eager high school kids who were too cool for cafeteria food), sometimes some carnie fries (again, we were cool enough to have a carnie food wagon on campus), and soda.  I stayed the same weight all through high school.  Momma used to tell me that I needed to be careful, that someday it would catch up to me.  Yeah..right.

Fast forward three or four years.  Actually, my heaviest was in 2010 after I had Kellen.  At my two-month postpartum appointment after giving birth to my second child, I weighed in at a whopping 220 pounds.  For my 5'6" frame and build, that is not a good number.  If I was 6'5" and a dude, it might not be too horribly bad.

Seriously, I just told you how much I weighed at my fattest.  I want to write a candid blog about my weight struggles.  Some of you will be fascinated, some will be annoyed, some really won't care one way or another, but if you are interested at all, I hope you will read this with an open mind. Parts of this story may come as a shock to some, as I'll share a few things that I have shared with few others.  I'm not proud of having been fat, but I am rather proud of coming as far as I have in the last year and a half. 

The first time I remember realizing that I had put on some weight was when I looked in the mirror one day and noticed that my shirts were fitting a little tighter around my tummy.  A few months later I went shopping for jeans and had to buy the next size up.  Crap, I thought.  The size wasn't huge, but I definitely didn't like that I had to buy a bigger size.  I still didn't do anything about it.

Then one day I was getting dressed, and I noticed something new: I had stretch-marks! I thought only pregnant women got stretch marks!  I was horrified.  And what's worse, is kept getting more of them.  They started on the insides of my thighs (at least they could be hidden), and I kept getting more and more until most of the insides of my thighs were covered with them.  I read everything I could about ways to make them go away.  I couldn't afford professional treatments or expensive creams.  What could I do?  I had to do something.  Matt was on his mission at the time, and since we planned on getting married when he got home, I was embarrassed to think that I would have these gross red marks on my body when we got married that he would have to see.  I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Let me preface this by saying I didn't really understand what stretch marks were, or what part of the skin they affected.  One day when no one else was home, I snuck out to the garage and found the roughest piece of sand-paper I could find.  My plan was to scrub the insides of my thighs with the sand paper until I got down to the stretchmarks and "sanded" them away.  If I couldn't sand them away, then my hope was to scar the insides of my legs badly enough that the scar tissue would cover up my stretch marks, and since scar tissue turns flesh color after it heals anyway, it wouldn't be so ugly anymore! Pretty stupid, huh? Or desperate.  I rubbed and I rubbed until I was in tears, but still I rubbed that sandpaper into my legs until they looked like raw ground meat.  It's a wonder really that I didn't get some horrid infection and die.  After I was raw and bleeding and couldn't take anymore, I waddled into the bathroom and found some gauze, covered my raw bleeding thighs with Neosporin, and gingerly wrapped them with the gauze.  One thing I didn't think about was the pain I would be in afterward. It was all I could do to walk normally.  I wore long pants so no one could see what I had done, but it pained me to walk anywhere.  It hurt so badly!  But, I could handle the pain, especially since I had every hope that my plan would work and the stretch marks would go away once everything healed up.

I was wrong.

After several days of horrible pain, and another week or two of healing, the raw skin healed up, and my stretch marks were still there.  I was heart-broken, but realized then that there was nothing I could do about them.  They would forever be a reminder of the beginning of my battle of the bulge.

After that little episode, I gradually continue to put on some weight.  It wasn't a massive amount.  As a matter of fact, when I got married in 2004, I wasn't more than about twenty pounds heavier than I was when I graduated high school two and a half years earlier.  It was AFTER the wedding that I really started to pack on the pounds.

I have seen a lot of newly-weds put on weight after their wedding (not everyone, but some).  My theory is that when you're newly married, broke, and going go school, your health become the least important thing on your list, and you buy a lot of super cheap pastas and sauces because they fast, inexpensive, and easy.  I started packing on the pounds quick.  At the beginning of 2008, after putting on about thirty pounds since my wedding, I decided to finally do something about.  See my trick for four years was that I just didn't step onto a scale at all, so I didn't have to see what kind of damage I had really done.  My only indication was the steady increase in the size of clothes I was buying.  I didn't think I looked too fat in the mirror, and if I didn't see that number on the scale, well, then I could be in happy denial of the whole situation.

In early 2008 my mom and decided to join LA Weight Loss.  I weighed in that first day at 196 pounds.  LA Weight loss was awesome - they taught me portion control and healthy eating habits.  They of course had their selection of food that they want you to buy, but I didn't take that route because I wanted to learn how to eat regular food I could buy from the grocery store.

Turns out, before my trip to Europe that April, I was able to drop 23 lbs. I was so excited! I still wasn't exactly where I wanted, but I had made some progress, which was awesome.  I had a wonderful trip to Europe feeling thinner and much more attractive.  My confidence had shot up as the scale went down, which was a great feeling. Even though I didn't know how much I weighed until the weight in at LA Weight loss, I knew I was fat, and it really affected my self-esteem.  I put on the facade that so many fat people do, that I was comfortable with my body and happy the way I was, that it really didn't bother me that I felt like a heifer deep down.  BS! I can tell you that most of the time when a fat person tells you that it really doesn't bother them that they are overweight, it really does bother them.  They feel helpless and unattractive and powerless to do anything about it, because it's so much work that they can't ever possibly get to the weight they want to be.

So I dropped the 23 lbs, and then I found out I was pregnant.  Not the best news when you're trying to decrease your own surface area, but we had been planning on a baby for several months, so I was ecstatic to find out I was pregnant!  I immediately called and canceled my LA Weight Loss plan, and started my journey of becoming happily pregnant fat and happy.  The only problem was I enjoyed my pregnancy a little too much (well after the first three month of puking my guts up every day), and proceeded to put on fifty pounds during my pregnancy.  I loved to eat while I was pregnant! I remember this one time going out to eat  with family.  At the end of dinner, everyone got to-go boxes but me. Yup, I finished my plate. I was glad I had the pregnant-lady excuse of "eating for two", when I really I was eating for about five! 

Before the end of my pregnancy, our local LA Weight Loss closed their doors, so I didn't get to re-start like I wanted to.  Without that motivation and weekly accountability, I really didn't get into weight-loss mode to lose the baby weight, so I continued to pack it around for a year after having Audrey, only to find out I was pregnant just after Audrey's first birthday!  (Again, a pregnancy we planned on - it just happened faster than we thought it would!)  When I weight in at my first doctor's appointment with that pregnancy, I was right back where I started.  196 lbs. Ugh! Not a good place to start a new pregnancy, especially considering I gained fifty pounds with Audrey.  The doctor told me to try to keep my weight gain to no more than 15 lbs, and I thought, yeah right!

I gained forty pounds with Kellen.  By the end of that pregnancy, there was only one pair of maternity pants I could wear, and two or three maternity shirts. I was as big as a tent, horribly uncomfortable, and felt like a hot-air balloon.  Turns out Kellen was much bigger than Audrey (he was 9 lbs 10 oz, versus Audrey's petite 6 lbs 11 oz), which helps explain my ginormous size, but circling back around to my story, I weighed in at 220 lbs two months after giving birth to him.  The week before I went back to work after having him I had to go to the store to buy a pair of pants for work, and when I went into the dressing room with my size 18 pants, I stood in there and cried.  Seriously, how did I go from a size 6 only a handful of years earlier to a size 18????

Well, from that moment on I decided to change.  I knocked my calories down to 1200 per day, and after three or four months of that, we decided to get a gym membership.  It took about two months to drop my first twenty pounds, and over the next eight months I steadily lost a total of 45.  By the end of 2011 I had dropped fifty, and after the first few months of 2012 I was at 60 lbs down.  Woohoo!  When I began, my goal was to lose 50 lbs, but when I hit fifty and realized I still wasn't the weight or size I wanted to be I chose to keep going. 

My final goal is to weigh 145 lbs and/or fit into a size 7/8 pants.  I am currently in a size 10 pant, so I have a little more work to do.  The frustrating part of it all is that the weight doesn't want to come off nearly as quickly or easy as it did when I was really heavy.  I keep losing five, then putting it back on, then losing five again, and putting it back on.  I am hoping by the end of the year, I will reach my goal weight and size, and will be able to go into maintenance mode.

For those of you who are wanting to lose weight and don't know where to begin, start slow by cutting the crap. Literally - cut out the crap food you are eating and count your calories.  It doesn't take a genius to lose weight, but it does take a lot of time and a lot of patience, which is definitely the hardest part.  I am not an expert.  I'm not going to give you medical weight loss advice or tell you what you are doing wrong. I just wanted to share my story with you all.  I want to tell you it can be done. If I can do it, you absolutely can!   Being fat isn't hopeless - you just have to get up and do something about it.  If you have never struggled with your weight, you are lucky.  I didn't have the self-discipline to stay away from crap or keep track of what I was eating. I was weak, I'll be the first to admit it! Sometimes I still am.  To overcome obesity, which is where I started a year and a half ago, is a major accomplishment, and I hope and I pray to never find myself in that position ever again. Being fat is no fun.  It really, really sucks in fact.  Being a thinner me is much more enjoyable - I can run without feeling like my legs are going to snap, and I can finally buy cute clothes again.  I'll even admit that sometimes I like getting checked out (sorry Honey, but it's true)  :)   That certainly didn't happen for a very long time.

I am very grateful for my supportive friends and family.  You guys all lift me up and make me feel good about myself, and make me feel like I have really accomplished something special.  I am married to an amazing wonderful man who has always made me feel loved and sexy no matter how fat I was - I am the luckiest girl in the world to be married to him.  <3 always="always" beautiful="beautiful" feel="feel" for="for" making="making" me="me" nbsp="nbsp" p="p" thanks="thanks">
I hope my story inspires you a little bit.  If you want to come hang out with me at the gym sometime, you can usually find me on a bike or elliptical.  I'm not much of a group exercise person - I like to blast my own music on my IPOD and concentrate on the work I'm doing on my machine. I'm even planning on running my first 5k this fall!

Sayonara, fatty Kristina! Hope to never see you again! 

Pregnant with Kellen, Angie pregnant with Lundynn (I think this was the day before she went into labor. I was still three month away!

Kellen's birthday at my biggest!

Before and after (some of you have seen this before)