Feminine 101

In January 2024, I began a “health journey.” This is to share where I came from, what I’ve achieved, and how I got from point A to point B. Please note, I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, or any other sort of professional. I’m just a woman who took her health in hand and made some changes.

Who has not struggled with this? I am not a small person. I am five foot seven inches and reached that height at age twelve when I towered over my shorter-than-average tribe. In second grade I think I wore a two piece bathing suit for a while, but I remember being a size 10 even in seventh grade. My stomach has never been flat. Never. I have admired women whose belly buttons are perfect tiny bowls in the middle of delicately curving abs. That is not me and never has been. 

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Growing up my mother was always in the overweight category. Whose mother does not struggle with this, honestly? She was the kind of woman who would look in the mirror and just hate her body. Her mother gave her dieting pills when she was a teen and she remembers sensing how dangerous they were (It was in the late sixties so cut them some slack for not knowing.). My youth was punctuated by my mother’s self-loathing warning, “Be careful. I don’t want you to end up like me.” 

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By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I weighed in at 180 pounds. I was not overly bothered by this. I knew I couldn’t wear bikinis or crop tops though, as a pretty muscular girl, I think I carried the weight better than many. I have always had an hourglass figure. I scoffed at the notion of skipping dessert or not eating the foods that I loved. I’m not that fat! And, really, I wasn’t. 

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After I graduated high school, I stepped into the shower one morning. As the hot water ran down my back and chest, I looked down. I couldn’t see my feet! My belly was entirely obscuring them. Now, I fixed that in a hurry by standing up straighter, but the damage was done. Something needed to change. I weighed 184 pounds and wore loose-fitting size 14 and 16 jeans. 

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I stopped eating breakfast and lunch. This was well before anyone in our tiny town had ever heard of intermittent fasting so call me a pioneer. My rule was simple: eat whatever and however much you want for supper and nothing else. I did not cut out sugar or fat or soda or anything. I didn’t watch what calories I was drinking. I, daily, drank Sprite or Dr. Pepper. Nevertheless, it was very effective. With very little exercise beyond 30-minute walks a couple times a week, my weight plummeted to 133 pounds at the lowest! Great, right? 

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Except…as some of you may have guessed, there were other, less desirable, side effects. The foremost among them was consistently getting light-headed and dizzy in the mornings. I’m not a doctor, but a quick internet search will tell you that my blood pressure was probably low because I hadn’t had anything to eat for 12 hours. To counteract this, I decided that I should start having something in the mornings. I remembered a teacher in high school stating that milk was “nature’s most perfect food.” I started buying a pint of chocolate milk because plain milk is gross. I know, I’m getting controversial. But, this slowly morphed into picking up a small lunch and, you’ve probably guessed that the weight started to creep back up immediately.

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By the time I was pregnant with my husband’s and my first child three years later, my weight was back up to 166 pounds. Being pregnant terrified me because I had a vivid imagination that painted all sorts of colorful pictures of the havoc pregnancy would wreak on my body. I started eating yogurt–not sugar free or fat free or anything nasty like that, but regular old strawberry yogurt–for my lunches. Three months into the pregnancy, I had lost 11 pounds. Except you aren’t supposed to lose weight during pregnancies. The doctor wasn’t totally alarmed, but did caution me. So, I did what any sane person would do when they learn that they can eat what they want without consequences. 

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I ate whatever I wanted. After giving birth to our baby, I still ended up at 155 pounds. But, unfortunately there were consequences. A growing bad habit of eating whatever I wanted had emerged so my post-baby weight didn’t stay that way for long. I bounced up to 170. 

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I started counting calories. I got down to where I was eating 1200-1600 calories every day and running regularly which, for the record, I have always hated and will always hate with the heated passion of a thousand burning suns. But I did it. I ran which I hated and I counted calories until I was sick of it. I got down to the 150s again. 

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It’s worth noting that I still wasn’t being careful of the types of food I was eating. I could eat corn dogs and drink soft drinks, so long as that magic number stayed below my daily allotment. It was such a pain. And it didn’t last. 

All it took was a Christmas vacation where I gave myself the liberty to eat whatever I wanted. I gained 10 pounds in a week. I just threw up my hands and said, “Screw it.” My weight rocketed up to 190. I still walked in the summer, but I was done counting calories and running.

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Oh there were a few half-hearted attempts in there and, when my weight jumped up to 216–the heaviest I have ever been–I did run some to get it back down. But, the 190-200 range is where I settled for the long haul. My only solace is that, technically, I was not “obese.” 

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However, my mother’s warning, now decades old, rang louder and louder in my mind.

If you enjoyed this post, you can continue my story by clicking here.