Motivation and the Art of Self-Disclosure

(Warning: This is probably going to be a long one. Get yourself a nice healthy snack, maybe a pillow... and feel free to stand up and stretch partway through. ;)

I received a very heartwarming message from one of my high school friends after she read one of my blog entries, and as I was responding to her, I realized that some of the things I was telling her were things that I think are pretty central to who I am and where I am on this really long, arduous journey. I had planned another post to come next but this one is more relevant right now. So here. Read.

A lot of the beauty and purpose of this blog lies in two things: the catharsis for me of being able to put into written word the challenges I have faced and am facing, and the ability to get the input of others; and the accountability that not keeping any secrets creates. I can't hide from my weight, I can't hide from my health issues, I can't hide from my struggles with exercise, because every one of you who read this are watching me. I have an innate and overwhelming fear of failure, and an uncontrollable desire for everyone to approve of me -- this means that when I say I am going to get healthy, I have to do it, because otherwise, the very few of you who read this will have all the power to say "I told you so", or to call me a failure. To quote the wise Marshall Mathers, "success is my only motherfuckin' option, failure's not". To be successful, I have to be real, no matter how hard it may be.

So, with that being said, there is some more background about how I got here that I'd like to share now, and in the future, I'm promising myself that I'm not going to hold anything back. Things that I've never told anyone may come spilling out, all in an effort to be completely transparent and open with the people who are supporting me. I'm making a conscious effort to keep things light-hearted and upbeat, but my life hasn't always been that way so this blog may not be either. I apologize in advance for bumming any of you out. ;)

It's taken me a long time to get to the place where I realized I had to actually, oh, I don't know, do WORK to get healthy. As I mentioned in other entries, I've been a 'big girl' for almost as long as I can remember. The weight started creeping on around 2nd grade, and snowballed when being the biggest girl in the class meant taunting and teasing from my classmates, which led to me going home after school to cry into a bag of potato chips. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In high school, I finally found a group of friends that I felt looked past my weight and accepted the rest of who I was. It didn't stop me from being unhappy with the way I looked or felt, and it didn't stop me from wishing that I could shop at the same clothing stores they did, or that I had the same energy they did. In the end, a lot of the time, I still felt excluded, even though sometimes it was probably myself that was doing the excluding, not them.

In college, things started off pretty rough. It was hard for me at first to accept the fact that I was away from home, away from my friends, and forced, as a socially-awkward kid, to meet new people. Between this anxiety and the nastiness that was Hibbs Dining Hall, I managed to lose the freshman 20 instead of gaining the freshman 15. However, I quickly made some good friends (some that I'm still very close to even now, ten years --omgtenyearswtfi'mgettingold-- later) and discovered all the better-tasting-but-worse-for-me food on campus. My weight skyrocketed, and none of my friends cared enough to make me aware of it. (Clarification: When I say that they didn't care enough, I absolutely don't mean that they didn't care about me -- I mean that my weight wasn't an issue for them. They didn't judge me for my size, they never made me feel less-than for being bigger. I was just Sarah. Not 'Fat Sarah'. As a result, through some miracle, a lot of the time I was actually able to forget that I was bigger than everyone else. I was actually happy, to an extent, and to the friends who may or may not be reading this who got me there, I can't say thank you enough.)

Now, I'm sure a lot of you can relate to having bad eating habits in college. Late night study sessions require pizza, and maybe things have changed since I graduated but there were not a lot of healthy restaurants on or near campus that catered to a college student's budget (read: dining dollars and meal plan swipes). Not to mention, it's far easier to grab a quick lunch from the campus Chick-Fil-A before running to class than it is to sit down and eat a salad. So, anyway, I gained more weight. And more weight. And more weight.

THEN, after I graduated, I started to realize how bad it was getting but felt like I was still too young to have to worry about it. 23-year olds don't have heart attacks, duh. I'm not going to die from one more order of french fries. Duh. More weight crept on, and I kept feeling worse about myself. Most of my college friends were still in the Richmond area, or at the very least not anywhere near me, and I'd lost ties with all of my local high school friends. I was really, really lonely. Not to mention really, really broke, and the cheapest food was the bad-for-you food. I'd come home from work and eat an entire box of fish sticks for dinner, or an entire box of macaroni and cheese. I'd go through a twelve-pack of diet soda in like 3-4 days. It was awful but I didn't see any other way. If I'm being honest with myself, maybe I didn't feel like I was worth any other way.

Finally, I had an epiphany. It was the holiday season of 2007, and for some reason TLC had been airing an inordinate number of shows about the super-morbidly obese. I was drawn to "The World's Largest Man", and shows about men and women not much older than myself who tipped the scales at no less than 400 pounds, some more than 800-1000 pounds. I tried hard not to judge them, but inevitably compared myself to them and decided I came out on top. I'm nowhere NEAR that bad! I'll NEVER be that big!, I'd think to myself as I watched a man eat like 8,000 calories in a day. How could he do this to himself? But then, it hit me. Like a truck. These people didn't wake up one day and weigh 800 pounds. All of the unhealthy choices they made when they were a healthy weight kept adding up, until they were 200 pounds, 300 pounds, 400 pounds, and so on. The same unhealthy choices I was making. As I watched these shows, and saw that not only did all of these people suffer from serious health problems, lack of mobility, etc., but some of them actually succumbed to their own weight and died... I realized that if I didn't get the ball rolling on starting a new, healthier life, they would be me. Their lives would be my life. I sobbed as I let this realization sink in.

So, two days later, on January 2nd, 2008, I joined WeightWatchers Online. At my very first weigh-in, I cried when I looked down on my freshly-purchased scale and saw 277.2. The highest weight I'd ever seen in my adult life. Just 22.8 measly pounds away from three hundred pounds. This was it. This had to be the beginning of something new for me because otherwise, I'd die fat and miserable.

WeightWatchers worked really well for me. I had some hiccups over the first couple months, but I was able to lose 15-20 pounds in a reasonable time frame. It may not have been at lightning speed, but the number on the scale was going down and I was ecstatic. I became a master of my points, portion sizes, and budgeting for the "good" stuff. I still ate macaroni and cheese and pizza, but I knew I'd be eating a lot of celery sticks to make up for it. This was and always will be what I love about WeightWatchers. Nothing is absolutely off-limits. My food choices are dictated by me and me only, not some "plan" that I'm supposed to follow. I didn't feel deprived at all, and that's what I knew I needed.

But then... in April of 2008, I took a trip to Suffolk, Virginia with a college friend to visit another college friend for the weekend. I was nervous about breaking my WeightWatchers routine and being away from my comfort zone, but I felt like over the course of four months I'd become a pro at making 'better' decisions, if not always 'good' decisions. Besides, I'd been on this regimen for a while, I wanted a break. I wanted to enjoy time with my friends. So, I told myself that I'd be careful, but I wouldn't track points. I'd make better decisions when eating out, but I wouldn't fret about it and I wouldn't go without. As I expected, when I weighed in that next weekend, I had gained a little. It was no surprise, so I didn't beat myself up about it, and moved on. Things went okay but then I realized that I had gotten bored with tracking everything, so I'd 'guesstimate' how many points I had left, or how much pasta was in one cup.

Also, around the time we got back, the friend that I went down to Suffolk with decided SHE was ready to make a change and she joined WeightWatchers as well, with the idea that having a support system would be great for keeping each other on track. We were wrong. Very, very wrong. For the most part, we tried hard, but we let each other get lazy and make mistakes. We joined a gym (yay!) but then after the gym we'd go out to dinner so that we wouldn't have to go home and cook so late. Typically, we'd go to Ruby Tuesday so we could be wise and get the yummy salad bar, but that salad bar ain't so wise when it's a side dish for your chicken fingers and fries.

And then we stopped going to the gym but we'd still go out to eat. We'd go to Baja Fresh for dinner and buy a metric shit-ton of food (don't forget the churros!), then come back to my place and watch The Biggest Loser. We'd get so inspired and wax philosophical about what was going wrong for us, when the whole time, what was going wrong was at the bottom of those bowls of queso. We were standing in our own damn way, and what's worse, we were enabling each other. If she made a bad choice during the day, I felt entitled to my own bad choice, and vice versa. I went from spending every night at home alone, cooking for myself, to spending 4-6 nights a week with her, eating out. Eventually (after a lot of post-BL conversations and gained weight), we decided that doing it together wasn't going to work anymore and while we were still obviously ridiculously supportive of each other, we couldn't be 'partners' in our own unhealthy crime.

However, for me, the damage was done, through no fault of my friend. I still lacked the motivation to track what I was eating, and had gotten so used to eating out that even though I wasn't hanging out with my friend, I would order something so I wouldn't have to cook. Well, when you have to order two meals' worth of food to get them to deliver... this causes problems for fat girls who don't know when to say 'I'm full!'

So the weight crept back on. Fast forward to 2010, I had managed to plateau a little bit and get things slightly under control, but I went to my gynecologist and started on birth control. That notorious little weight gainer. In late 2010, I started dating Derek... we ate out a lot and I got comfortable with him so I felt like I could stop trying so hard. Then, at the beginning of 2011, I got my first driver's license (spare the judgment, please) and bought my first car. Suddenly, I was not only gaining weight from this dumb little baby-blocker, but I could go to whatever drive-thru I wanted and eat whatever I wanted, when I wanted. Derek moved in and we never felt like cooking, so we ate out. All. The. Time.

This went on forever, until June 2012 I finally had had enough again. I stepped on the scale for the first time in several months and the scale read quite possibly the scariest number I had ever seen. 298.8. I was less than two pounds away from that dreaded number-that-starts-with-a-three. Aside from that, none of my clothes fit right but there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that I was going to buy BIGGER ones. I had to lose it once and for all.

Around this time, I started taking Metformin for my PCOS. Metformin, as you may know, is a diabetes medication, but it has proven effective for PCOS patients in helping regulate their menstrual cycles (the same way birth control does, but with the benefit of not being a contraceptive - helpful for those who actually want to conceive) with the added benefit of being an appetite suppressant and helping to shed the weight that is very difficult to lose when you have PCOS. I was happy. I was being proactive, and I was hopeful that with some healthy changes, Metformin would help me get to the place I was in 2008 -- losing weight and happy about it.

Except for me, right away the only side effect Metformin had was to make me nauseous. I wasn't really eating much less, but afterward, regardless of what I ate, I felt awful. This is a known side effect and it passes, but the lack of appetite lingers, allowing weight loss. Well, it hasn't worked for me. Once in a while I find myself getting full just halfway through a meal, and I'll stop, but more often than not, I don't feel full until after I've eaten a full plate. But then I feel like absolute crap. Like, let me go lay down before I throw up, crap. Somehow, however, that didn't dissuade me from continuing to eat crap food. I have managed to lose some weight, still, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. I'm supposing that a higher dose of Metformin would be more helpful, but I've been hesitant to talk to my gyno about it because I'm not eager to go through the nausea again, so before I do, I resolved to try harder.

So here I am. And now, a million words later, you know my story. Phew!