My daughter always tells me that in a group of people she can generally pick out the Air Traffic Controllers pretty easily. Many of them have a bit of a “nerdy” look to them. And lots of them are overweight. Let’s face it Air Traffic Control is a high-stress, sedentary job. The tower controllers probably get the most actual movement while on position, but that is usually only when they are working ground (controlling taxiing aircraft) and sometimes when they are working the local control position (clearing planes for takeoff and landing). Radar controllers sit in front of a scope and the only things usually moving are their hands and their brains and their mouths at a mile a minute. So take someone like me who has always had issues with food and put them in a high stress sedentary job and the weight problem isn’t going to get any better.
When I arrived at Seattle Tower, though, I discovered that many of the controllers were in pretty good shape. I think it has something to do with the active lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest. There is a lot of biking and hiking and running and mountain climbing and kayaking going on. Perhaps I never would have gained so much weight back if I’d been transferred to Seattle a year or two earlier because it would have been easier to remain active in such an environment. But once you are heavy, it takes a lot more effort to get active. And I’d already done the Optifast regimen twice and I really didn’t want to do it again.
For the first eight months I was in Seattle it was just me and my dog and two cats. I’d driven across country with them in the car. In Idaho I tripped and fell while walking the dog (a white German Shepherd puppy about 8 months old) at a rest stop. I ended up driving for about another hundred miles before finally giving in and stopping at a hospital to see what I had done to my hand. Turns out it was broken. I’m pretty sure that I would not have broken it had I not been so heavy, but all of that excess weight landing on just one hand when I tripped was more than that bone could handle. So, I started at Seattle Tower with a cast on my hand and living in a hotel with a puppy and two cats all by myself while I tried to find a place to live and starting my training program in a much busier facility than the previous one.
I was focused on learning and making it through the training program without getting washed out. The tower was attached to the main terminal at that time and so I had lots of places to choose from to get food while at work. And when I got home the last thing I wanted to do was exercise or watch what I was eating. I made a few halfhearted attempts to lose weight, but I never lost that much and I never stuck to them for long. When my husband was finally able to join me in Seattle we both continued on our path of bad eating. I contented myself with the fact that I was married and in a facility where I could see spending the rest of my career so things were pretty good. I figured I was just one of those people who was destined to be fat.
I certified as a full performance level controller and we purchased a new house in the month of November, 1995. I was thirty five and was starting to worry that I was never going to have a child. I had always wanted several children and it was looking like I’d be lucky to have even one. Our animal family had grown to three very large dogs and three cats, but our new house had eight bedrooms so it wasn’t like we couldn’t fit a couple kids in it. But I also knew that I was pretty unhealthy at my weight and I didn’t want to add forty more pounds of baby weight on top of that. I would already be considered a high risk pregnancy at my age and I had always heard that the weight you had prior to pregnancy tended to stay with you forever after the baby was born.
I had been in a car accident before my husband moved out to Seattle and ended up in Physical Therapy for soft tissue injury in my neck. Then a while after he moved out we were involved in another accident and I ended up back in PT for a recurrence of the injury. The doctor I started seeing for the neck problems also had a bariatric practice and oversaw a Medifast program for weight loss. I’d never tried Medifast, and I wasn’t anxious to go back on a liquid fast, so the first time he broached the subject I said I wasn’t interested. But I knew I had to lose weight if I wanted to be able to get pregnant. I also knew that liquid fasts worked for me. So, in 1996 I gave in and began Medifast. By early 1997 I was down 122 pounds to 145. I hadn’t been that thin since high school. The doctor wanted me to continue on the fast for a little while longer, but I knew that I would continue to lose weight even while starting to eat foods again. And I had lost so much weight that my periods had stopped. He pooh poohed my concerns about that, but since I wanted to get pregnant, the last thing I needed was to have my menstrual cycle out of whack. So, I started weaning my way off of the fast onto light foods.
There was a part of me that was concerned about immediately gaining weight back once I got pregnant after all of my hard work. But I knew it was now or never if I ever wanted to be a mom. I was the fourth Isabel in a line of Isabels and I always dreamed of having a little girl to be the fifth. Once I started eating again, my menstrual cycle came back and I started using ovulation predictor kits to try to better my chances of getting pregnant. The doctor had said that once I lost a lot of weight my fertility would increase. Turns out he wasn’t kidding because the very first time we tried, I got pregnant.