Ever since I was young there has been a focus on the number of my weight. My mother would frequently put me on a diet and there would be weigh-ins at least once a week, if she was feeling overly worried about the issue she would have me get on the scale every day. I remember this one time when I’d come back from a beloved aunt and uncle’s house and she was pissed because I had gained weight over my weekend visit. I don’t remember how much it was, but it was enough for her to be pissed and put me on one of the strictest diets I had ever been on. It took a few years of this, but eventually I just stopped eating. Since my mother’s solution of loosing weight was to not eat something from your daily intake list, then my brain construed that into: if I don’t eat anything then I’ll loose even more weight! And thus, by the time I was 12 I had decided not eating anything during the week.
When I moved out of her house, at the age of 15, everything was flipped. There was no need for food to be monitored, there was no need for me to ask permission to have something to eat. If I was hungry, then I made myself something to eat. Simple as that!
It was such a relief! But there was a scale in my dad’s house and once in a great while I’d hop onto it and see if I was keeping a balance, and guess what?! I was!
For me the greatest oddity of this is that I was not dieting – for the first time in my life I was actually eating food! And not gaining weight! It was during this time that I was able to realize that my mother’s advice of not eating food did not equal a maintenance of weight, it just made me hungry and cranky and gave me outrageous headaches.
Over the years I have become less and less focused on the numbers that appear on the scale and more focused on my ability to move, my ability to play with my children, my ability to keep up with my husband as he traipses effortlessly between the trees …
I had thought that these mother issues had been resolved, I had thought that I had concurred them, but a few weeks ago I found that I had not.
I was at my dad’s visiting relatives from Canada and was feeling pretty fabulous in my skinny skinny jeans that were beginning to feel loose on me! I was again at the point where the need for the next size down was coming close, my belt was cinched down to the next notch and my mental state was calm and level for the entire visit!
But then I made the mistake of hopping onto the scale and saw that I had lost another 5 pounds. I had a brief thought of, so that’s why these jeans are loose! And then on the ride home and over the next few days the panic began to settle in and the words of concerned family members rang in my head. What if I am sick? Since I haven’t been trying to loose this weight, since it would appear that the only reason why I have done so would be due to stress and sickness, therefore doesn’t that mean that there is something wrong with me? What could it possibly be and how the hell are we going to afford it?! Since we do not currently have health insurance, nor any prospect of attaining health insurance, major health issues were seriously going to cut into our budget!
And so, rather than being happy with my weight loss and the prospect of buying the next size down I began to overeat, challenging my body to maintain it’s weight. And that’s when I realized my mother issues have not disappeared and there is nothing worse than contemplating your starved childhood and feeling fat! Ugh!
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