How it all began

I was a thin kid. My dad used to call me the bottomless pit because I could eat and eat and eat and I still stayed rail thin. Then puberty hit when I was 11. I was tall, 5’9″ by the time I was 13. In sixth grade I was taller than everyone in my class including the teacher. Then came the hips and chest, enough so that at 12-13 I was easily mistaken for a 16 or 17 year old. I liked food, but I wasn’t a glutton. Eating was something you did three times a day. If you got to have dessert, cool, but I wasn’t dying for it.

I didn’t really think about body image at all except for the ravages of acne that came to visit along with puberty. When I graduated 8th grade my dad sent me to Sicily for 6 weeks to stay with my aunt over the summer before I started high school. I got off the plane in a black dress and black nylons in 90 degree heat (those were the days when you dressed up to take a plane flight). My aunt came up to greet me and said. “You need to lose 20 pounds, I’m putting you on a diet.”  I remember being surprised and feeling a bit resentful because I hadn’t really thought about my weight. I was 5’9″ and 150 pounds and I didn’t feel fat. But my aunt was tall and slender and cosmopolitan…I mean she moved to Italy when she was around the age of 19 and had stayed there. And I was a newly minted teenager whose face was ravaged by acne, a girl taller than all the boys who wore non-fashionable glasses, and the new kid in class since we’d moved to a new town after my parents divorced and then my mother died suddenly in a car accident two years earlier.

I was about to start high school. I didn’t want to be fat. So I dieted. I didn’t really have a choice. I was in a foreign country, didn’t speak the language, with no money of my own. I remember feeling frustrated sometimes, but I still had a great summer. I got burnt to a crisp when I fell asleep in the sun and then awoke to turn over only to fall asleep again. But the burn turned into a really dark tan and my acne cleared up. Several times when I was out sightseeing by myself I was approached by older men trying to pick me up and I was terrified because I had no idea what to do, but at the same time I felt attractive for the first time. This theme would repeat itself several times over my life, but that’s for a different post.

By the end of my trip I was sleek and tanned, with clear skin. When I got home I walked up to my Dad who was reading the newspaper and stood in front of him. He looked up at me and then back down at the paper. I said, “Dad.” He glanced up at me with dawning recognition and a look of utter shock on his face and said, “My God, you’re a goddess.” So, as much as I had resented being put on a diet, I was pleased with the resultant attention. But I also remember when we  stopped for lunch before heading home I bought the largest plate of macaroni and cheese that I could find and inhaled it all.

When I got home all of my friends were wowed by my new look and several of the guys who had never given me a second thought were paying attention. I was in heaven. But I was also making up for all of the foods I felt I’d been denied when I’d been in Italy, more than making up for it. Within a couple of months the new jeans I’d bought when I got home no longer fit, and the tan faded and the acne came back. And I had a new affinity for fattening foods. I’d always liked sweets, but now I was doing things like buying boxes of Twinkies and keeping them in my room to eat at my leisure. And my new favorite treat was melting a thick slab of butter and then stirring in confectioners sugar until I had big yellow balls of buttery sugar and eating those just like that.

I didn’t get super fat. I was on the Softball and the Volleyball teams and would often have to walk the seven miles home from practice. But I also was not the slender goddess that had stepped off of the plane from Italy either. And I had started to treat food as a comfort. There were a lot of devastating things that happened in my younger life that led me to feel the need for such a comfort, but I hadn’t identified food as a comfort mechanism until that time. A comfort that I would turn to again and again throughout my life until now, forty years later I finally decided to end this love affair with food once and for all. I made the decision to do something I swore I would never do. I went under the knife to hopefully solve this problem once and for all. Yup. I paid a surgeon to reroute my innards to hopefully help me accomplish the one thing I have never been able to accomplish long term through sheer willpower alone…a healthy weight for the rest of my life.

So please feel free to come along on this new journey with me. I need all the help I can get.