In which I indulge in shameless autobiography in an effort to suggest to those whose suffering comes from inside themselves that I used to suffer a lot, and now suffer less.

I grew up a fat kid, into an obese teenager, into an obese 20-something. There was no question of ever being attractive to men. Even when I was younger and cuter and a mere 200 pounds, no men were interested in me. I seethed with resentment over my thin girl friends with their flat midriffs and taut breasts. Confoundingly, I didn’t seem to eat more than most people around me – I just started fat and stayed that way. 

My obesity defined me in absolutely every important way – what I could accomplish at work, how I got around, who I could have relationships with, how I thought of myself, what I thought my future would be…you name it, my weight impacted it. My whole self-image was wrapped up in trying to prove my worth when I wore my shame on the outside, for absolutely everyone to see. Obesity was the single defining feature of my life. I was judged, I was self-conscious, I was ashamed. 

Things got much, much worse. In my 30s, my pattern was to buy mountains of fast food and a half rack of beer and eat and drink until I couldn’t eat any more. I could hardly be bothered to care that I was getting heavier and heavier, since I was so obese to start with that normal life seemed impossible. Sure, my whole life, I’d try dieting sporadically – “For the next three years, I’m only going to eat spinach salads with lemon, raw vegetable sandwiches on spelt, and a piece of fruit for dessert.” Every time, my resolve would collapse into misery and failure. All seemed hopeless. Ten years later, I was about 350 pounds.

Turns out there’s a big difference between 200 and 350 pounds in terms of quality of life. My mobility was severely impaired – walking for pleasure was a ridiculous idea, and my 10-minute walk to and from the commuter train was all I could handle. Riding the commuter train was an exercise in humiliation. I couldn’t fit in just one seat, so if the train was full, I had to stand – which was torture. I planned my commutes for when I would most likely have conjoined seats available, and agonized when I didn’t. Travel is my favorite thing to do with my time and money, but fitting into an airplane seat was out of the question. The one time I flew at my heaviest, I bought two seats. Putting shoes on was a feat of engineering. I couldn’t reach everywhere necessary for hygiene. Walking anywhere was exhausting – Dan is an avid hiker, but we couldn’t go to the woods, or anywhere that involved going uphill. I broke chairs and stairs and toilet seats. 

Then, inevitably, I was pre-diabetic. What a fresh hell this idea was. Now I faced debilitating consequences for binge eating. Skin problems, amputations, heart disease, kidney dialysis. I still felt powerless to avoid this trainwreck. For the second time in my life, I started to seriously explore bariatric surgery. One of the requirements is to demonstrate you have sufficient control over your eating to be able to lose something like 5-10% of your body weight – if you can’t control your food intake, you can literally bust a gut. I couldn’t do even that. 

In about January of 2016, Dan started keto, and started losing weight. Around this time, I visited a dear friend who’s had her own struggles with weight (nothing like mine; she’s gorgeous), and was amazed to see that she had lost a visible amount of weight on keto too. I started the diet, and there was much to love. The food was delicious, and I was free to eat as much as I wanted, as long as it was food without carbs. It didn’t cost anything, and I didn’t have to follow a guru. It was easy to put on auto-pilot – I did a trip or two through the grocery store where I spent a lot of time reading labels, and after that, just bought things on the approved list, and never had to think about it much again. That was 5 years ago, and the industrial food chain provides so much fun keto food now (although it’s hilarious to me, if unsurprising, that if food producers put “keto” on the label, they’ll charge three times as much). 

I lost 200 pounds in 18 months.  

Before (Late 2015)

After 3 years (Late 2018)

https://simplysohealthy.com/low-carb-homemade-nutella-fudge/

My whole story about individual change starts with my weight loss experience. My weight had tormented me my whole life – from age 7, I’d wanted and been unable to lose weight. I had basically never been able to manage this life-defining problem, and almost without trying, it was just…fixed. I was morbidly obese to a degree that was inconvenient, shameful, limiting, and downright lethal. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of hating something about yourself for 40 years that suddenly disappears, but it’s mind-blowing.

I had never pictured myself as someone who could successfully resist urges until keto. It started with controlling my diet, moved to controlling my drinking, and eventually to quitting cigarettes too. With every behavioral health hurdle I overcame, I felt like more of an Amazon Warrior. I felt strong, capable. It was downright empowering. 

I had never seen myself as having any control over my own behavior. I thought I was powerless, and all of my history showed I was powerless. I was unable to keep any kind of commitment to myself until I found the right diet. Finding that power didn’t only change my weight, but it changed my whole self-concept as a person who could exercise self-control. I still don’t fully understand why this diet worked when no others did. What I do know is that I was able to change something I thought would never change. I didn’t make a conscious decision to change one troubling thing after another about my life. I just started thinking about these problems in a different way, with a degree of confidence that maybe I had the self-discipline to solve this problem. Me – self-disciplined! 

Food still plagues me. I’ll have to write more about that soon. I still have intense food issues, and sometimes eat like an alcoholic (binge days happen more like every 2 months, rather than my old habit of every single day). But every day, I’m grateful to fight that fight at 170 pounds, not 350. 

I heard something good in a support group for food issues recently – “The solution is kinder than the disease ever was.” I’d lived with this problem for so long, I didn’t think it could ever improve. To my total astonishment, this was a problem with a solution. My journey to seeing my behavioral and psychological problems as solvable starts with this weight loss. And every time I strap into an airplane seat, it’s a sweet, sweet victory lap.