Weight: 153.8 (exactly. again.)
When I take a little time every day to write about what I am thinking about as I wage my own personal war against obesity and the chronic diseases that obesity contributes to, I do better. I've tried writing in a journal but I tire of that very quickly. I need to pretend that someone is going to read what I write or I lose interest in writing. Blogging helps me stay true to myself. It helps me keep my thoughts linear and it keeps me from getting caught up in a downward spiral of negative self-talk. Visualize a whirlpool that is created when you drain the sink, that is what my thought pattern can be like sometimes. The dark thoughts go round and round in a circle, they get tighter and faster and darker, until I'm sucked into a pit. Once I am in that pit, all bets are off, I lose my sense of self and I go off program. Maybe slowly at first, maybe not. It's not pretty, either way. Blogging helps. I acknowledge my thoughts when I blog, think them through, write them down, and then they pretty much stay right there and stop tugging me down the drain. Acknowledging the voice in yesterday's post was that way. After blogging about it, the voice quieted down. One of the reasons for this is pretty obvious. As I started to complain about the voice I started to wonder if there was a good physiological reason for that voice that kept saying, "Eat." Maybe I was subtly hungry and I just didn't feel hungry because my stomach wasn't growling at me. As I was writing that blog post, I decided to count the calories I ate the day before and was surprised to find out that I ate about 150 calories less than I would have guessed. One hundred fifty calories may not seem like a lot, but the difference between 1350 calories and 1500 calories is fairly significant. That explained a lot. It explained why I had this nagging desire to eat, I am underfeeding myself a little bit every day. It also explained why I am losing weight fairly consistently, I've lost almost 10 pounds since Operation Re-Start began. All of a sudden I realized that this voice may very well be temporary and when I start eating enough to stop losing weight it might go away. My sister made the same observation, which reinforced this idea. After that, the voice became much quieter, barely a whisper. It's easy for me to tolerate annoyances when I believe they are temporary. I don't become exasperated as easily when I don't think I have to put up with something forever. This blog really helps me stay on track. I appreciate the fact that there are a few people that actually read my blog, because knowing someone (even if it is just one person) is going to click on my page today urges me to put up a post, even if I have nothing to say.
In the very first sentence of the above paragraph I talk about waging my own personal war against obesity. Yet you've seen my recent pictures so you know as well I do that I am not obese. In fact, if you look at the infamous BMI charts, I am now no longer overweight, I am normal weight. But, for a significant portion of my adult life, I was obese. That sounds like such an awful word, doesn't it? Even if I just say it in my mind, "Obese," I flinch a little. The picture that word conjures up is awful.
I don't need to conjure up that picture in my mind, I have that picture. I have several pictures, in fact. I thought about destroying pictures of my fat self, then changed my mind. They're real. It's not something to be ashamed of. At those moments in time, when those picture were taken, I was significantly overweight. Fact. In spite of the fact that I don't like the sound of the word, "Obese," I don't object to the use of the words fat and obese. I don't know why exactly. They are succinct, descriptive words. I vehemently object to name calling and belittling people because of their weight (or sex or race or age or sexual orientation or religion or anything else that makes one person different from another), but I don't object to statements of fact. When I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today, I was obese. I was there. For a long time. It is part of my past. I was severely overweight or obese for a significant part of my adult life. I am bound and determined to never be obese again.
Is obesity a disease? I don't know. I don't think of it as a disease as much as I think of it as a condition that contributes to disease. I've read a lot about chronic diseases such as diabetes, dementia, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, arthritis and even certain cancers. They all have something in common; chronic systemic inflammation. Obesity is a significant contributing factor to chronic systemic inflammation. It is an established fact that obesity is a contributing factor to chronic disease. It is hard on my body to be 100 pounds overweight. I cannot deny that. In addition to being physically hard on me, it was mentally hard on me. Being overweight contributed to my depression. My depression contributed to my poor diet. Which...well, we all know where that leads.
I started my story a few days ago with a few paragraphs about how my experience with Tae Kwon Do was the beginning of the end of my life as an obese person. That was fifteen years ago. Tae Kwon Do was the first step of many, including a few back slides, that have gotten me to where I am today. Fifteen years. Wow, when I look at it that way, this has been one hell of a journey. It is true, though. Life before Tae Kwon Do was different than life after Tae Kwon Do. That was a turning point.
I had more responses to that blog post then just about any other. Those responses encouraged me to continue the story; you said that you found my personal story inspirational and asked me to tell more of it. If there is one meaningful thing I want to be able to do with the rest of my life, it is to help others win their own personal battles with food, exercise, and, yes, depression. This has not been easy and I have relied heavily on words written by other people to get here. I will continue to rely on the words of other people to keep me motivated for the rest of my life. So a little encouragement is all it will take to keep me telling my story. As the saying goes, if it helps one person, it's worth it. Therefore, I will continue on with the story, but instead of continuing the story chronologically, which is what I said I was going to do, I am going to go back in time a bit, prior to Tae Kwon Do. Why was I obese, in the first place? What were the circumstances that led me to this place that I allowed my physical health to take last place to everything else in my life?
Of course, it's a long story. Or perhaps it's a short story. In any event, it's, unfortunately, a fairly common story; a common story with it's own unique chapters.
I'll start by saying that I love hot weather, and I mean very hot weather, for a reason. When I was 15 years old, we moved to New Delhi, India, where I spent my last year of high school. For a couple of significant reasons, this is the first time in my life that I was happy; so to this day I associate hot weather with happiness. As summer rolls around and the heat starts to get oppressive and everyone else starts to complain, I start humming my happy songs. My mood lifts. Yeah, I'm hot. Yeah, I get uncomfortable. Yeah, I admit that sometimes I seek the shade and the air conditioning. But I'm happy. Everyone else says, "Man it's hot." And I respond with, "It is getting kind of warm, isn't it?" Yep, I love summertime and I believe it is because I associate hot weather with being happy.
One of the significant differences between life in India vs. life in the U.S. was my high school experience. At Glenelg High School, in rural Maryland (yes, there really is - or was - a rural Maryland), I was ostracized. That is not an exaggeration. I had a friend. A friend. As in one friend. Her name was Sheila Somerlock. Though we don't spend any time together anymore and her name is no longer Somerlock and I just checked Facebook to make sure I am spelling her maiden name correctly, she was and still is one of my best friends. I am not sure what I would have done of we had not found each other in high school. I don't recall sharing a tremendous number of classes together, but we spent a lot of time together outside of school. After I came back to the U.S. and graduated from college, I moved back to Maryland and Sheila and I reconnected. We spent many a late night playing cards with Nick (now her husband) and Nick's friend, Joe, who I have lost track of. My friendship with Sheila was critical to my surviving (and I mean that literally) my high school years at Glenelg. Other than that friendship, life back then was pretty bleak. I was teased, made fun of because I was fat (I wasn't really fat back then. A little overweight, yes, but nowhere near obese.), and labeled (in a very insulting way that I still don't really understand) a homemaker because I enjoyed "domestic" hobbies like sewing and cooking. I was uncool in every definition of the word and was a social outcast. I felt like a loser. A Big-Fat-Loser. I wanted to die most of the time. Again, this is not an exaggeration. I thought about it a lot. Death would be by far the simpler solution. Just give up. Why should I face this misery another day? The number of times I contemplated my own death cannot be counted. I was so miserable I seriously considered taking my own life. The primary reason I didn't take my own life is because I kept imagining the mess it would make and how awful it would be for the person that found me and had to clean it up. It didn't occur to me that anyone (except for Sheila) would be sad that I was gone, I just didn't want someone else to have to clean up the mess. Shit. That says a lot.
Then we moved to India. I'll never forget the day Dad asked me and my brother George how we felt about this idea. He asked the question with some trepidation. I am sure he expected the normal teenage response of, "Are you crazy, we can't move to India! We're graduating from high school next year!" But he got just the opposite, we both enthusiastically embraced the idea from the first moment that he asked us about it. You mean we get to escape this school a year early? Hell, yeah! We're in. When do we leave? Honestly, he didn't have a clue how fucked up our world was back then. That's a fact. I don't blame him, I really don't. How could he know unless we told him? Something I've learned through my many years of therapy is parents, including myself, do their absolute best to raise their kids given the skill set, life experience, and means at their disposal. I also don't begrudge the fact that my life was difficult. I am who I am because of my childhood. I am strong, independent, assertive, well educated, and moderately successful in my chosen profession. I am a loving, caring, and nurturing human being. I am optimistic and hopeful about the future. These are all bits of who I am and I wouldn't want it any other way. It's all OK. I have thought about this a lot, particularly as I was raising my own children. My childhood was not easy. I will go so far to say that it was incredibly difficult. It wasn't as God awful as some, but it was a far cry from idyllic. Life is not easy and if childhood is meant as a preparation for life as an adult, then the first sixteen years of my life was one hell of an excellent learning experience. I've proven, again and again, that I can handle whatever life throws at me. I heard this saying just the other day, "It's not how often you're knocked down, but how often you get back up." There is a lot of truth to that. So there was the first fifteen years and then there was the sixteenth year of my childhood, India.
Why was India so different? Why did it have such a tremendous impact on me? Well, I guess that will be chapter three.
Until then...
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