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.<\/p>\n
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.” \u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a0stopped for lunch before heading home I bought the largest plate of macaroni and cheese that I could find and inhaled it all.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So please feel free to come along on this new journey with me. I need all the help I can get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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