Nothing like a good ol' health scare to motivate you...

wisdomfromyou

Just wanted to say Hello and present my story.
I am a 40 yo mother of two small children (5 and 7) who has been having weight-related issues since turning 15. I was a perfectly normal, well-proportioned child before that time, raised on super high-quality, 100% organic foods (which at that time, in that place, was simply known as "food" - Eastern Europe); the kind of foods only the American rich or well-off can can hope (maybe!) to get at Whole Foods or straight from "boutique"-type farmers in exchange of a lot of money.

At the age of 15, I visited my mom in the hospital where she stayed a few weeks for a weight loss program. She wasn't obese at that time but she needed to drop some weight and she got admitted for some weight loss supervision. While visiting, I was there with my mom and the dr., and my mom suggested I get weighed in too, just for fun. I weighed 115 pounds at 5'6"... and the dr. said : "you're fine now, just make sure you don't put on any more weight in the future".

What a bad thing that was to tell a 15 yo who had a perfectly healthy weight. That was the BING moment, as I had been completely unaware of weight-related issues before that moment, and I did have a perfectly beautiful body, as pictures testify.

From that second on, the idea of "I will be fat/I need to diet" got embedded into my brain and a lifetime of yo-yo dieting, binging, and stress-driven comfort eating began - just an all around terrible relationship with food.
By the time I reached 17, I weighed 180 pounds at 5'6", with a nicely added portion of cellulite on thighs ... and I felt I was the most undesirable young woman in the world - especially in a country where all teen-age girls weighed around 100 lbs and looked beyond spiffy and cute.

In my mid to late 20's I arrived in the US as a PhD student and learned a thing or two about self-esteem, nutrition, exercise, gyms and generally spending a lot of time "focusing on yourself" (something you just didn't get to do in Eastern Europe, definitely not in my time)...so I temporarily managed to slim down to 145 lbs, started to discover how cute I could actually be :-), got married, finished school, had kids. Then the 30's came with all of the incredible stress of managing career and kids in the US - without any extended family help. That was the end of the "I am taking good care of myself" American BS.

Long story short, this past year I had gone up to my highest weight ever - 194 lbs. Being married to an extremely sweet, loyal and faithful man who loves me no matter how I twist it, I never had "husband betrayal" apprehensions. Likewise, being the cerebral type, I have never been motivated by vanity. I have never really yearned to achieve a "smoking" body or anything like that, and I have always been inclined to play up my face in the "looks" department (not too bad) as opposed to my pear-shaped, fluffy, cellulite-ish, always somewhat overweight body.

All good until this May when I suddenly got some abnormal bleeding / a very early period. Went to the gyno and she discovered a small fibroid. Read more about fibroids and other estrogen-related troubles ...then remembered that my GP also found me vitamin D deficient last year...read more about this crap too and how many dangers it can forecast...and just went into a frenzy of fear that I am basically letting my body go down the path of possibly very dangerous illness.

So that was the end of bad eating and sitting.

I entered a state of shock and the first few weeks I could barely eat anything. I started exercising 5 days a week. My period went back to normal and the weight started to come off fast, probably because of a very large calorie deficit. Of course, I was basically eating almost nothing so you would hope!.
Dropped 18 lbs in a month...and here I am in July at 175 lbs with the long-term goal of 145 lbs.

I understood that nothing is as huge of a motivator for me as health and being around my children for a long, long time. All of my grandparents lived closed to 100 yo, nobody in my family had cancer, my parents are both alive and doing relatively well (although my mom is diabetic and still overweight though much less heavy than in the past)...and I have always walked around with this sense of false security that OF COURSE the genes in my family will get me to 100 as well!

Until it dawned on me that I have been living in US for over 14 years now, with a lifestyle hardly similar to that of my parents, let alone my grand-parents, at much higher risk for ingesting crappy foods, a sedentary suburban life, lack of sunshine, and all around huge stress related to an extremely fast-pace of life and tons of obligations and fires screaming to be put out at any minute.

My next goal is to learn to say "F You!" - and just simply not care if things don't get done, especially at work. I can "slack" at work but I cannot slack on my kids...so something's gonna have to give, Protestant work ethic or not. It is, of course, not "slacking" but simply refusing to engage in the overloads that they push on you in the name of "stellar productivity".

And maybe in a few years, we will be able to move back overseas, to a saner place. Who knows.

For now - fear of illness seems to work for me. Nothing else ever has.

Crochetluvr

I applaud you for wanting to take charge of your health. And I understand about health scares...I developed T2 diabetes. So losing weight was the only option for me.

But please, DON'T eat next to nothing. You will lose yes, but you will slow your metabolism down to a crawl even with the exercise. You don't have to eat like a bird....you can eat like a human and still lose weight. I am certainly proof of that. And I am nearly 20 years older than you.

Good luck on your journey. Slow and steady keeps it off. No more yo-yo-ing.

QuietBloom

That was the end of the "I am taking good care of myself" American BS.

I'm a little confused. Are you saying that taking good care of yourself is BS? Or somehow uniquely American?

As for the rest, good for you for wanting to take better care of yourself. Just for perspective, my grandparents were American and both lived well into their 90s (my grandmother just passed at 98) so we do live a long time here too. And they didn't exactly have healthy practices either. Genetics can take you far! :drinker:

christarae1

Doesn't sound like you enjoy America too much.

Anyway, best of luck to you.