My Weight Loss Journey - Part III, Getting Obese

FYI, from time to time I'll include links in a post that take you to whatever it is I'm talking about.  I may get compensated if you purchase something from clicking the link.  My blog is purely for my personal amusement, but if you make a purchase because of something I said, well, it's cool to get something back from the provider. 

Where last we left off in my weight loss journey, it was the early aughts.  I'd lost nearly 40 pounds doing Weight Watchers®, hit a plateau, struggled, started re-gaining, went to Mexico with a friend with a killer body and she went shopping at Zara and I still didn't fit into anything even though a size 12 isn't that big, so I just gave up on the whole watching-what-I-eat-and-exercising thing because that's always an effective way to get to and stay at a healthy weight.

Ugh.

Gaining weight is one of those insidious things that just kind of creeps up on you until you look in the mirror one day and say 'what the hell happened?!' I managed to stay a size 12 through a trip to Prague, Vienna and Budapest in 2004. (Sidebar: this 10-day trip was done with two carry-on size bags.  This was back in the day when you could still fly with full-size shampoo, keep your shoes on during security check, and bring two fairly large carry-ons.  How did a fashion plate such as myself accomplish a 10-day funfest with such small bags? The garbage.  That's how I did it.  I packed clothes that I could happily part with, knowing I'd be acquiring new pieces; at the end of each day I'd toss what I'd worn that day into the trash.  It was AWESOME.  I felt very clever. And while I've never repeated such a feat I always pack as many nice-but-unnecessary things as I can when I travel.  This is super hard for business trips and trips to cold places, but give it a whirl - you may surprise yourself.)

I was a size 14 a year later when I went to Colorado. (Note that these were wide-leg Lucky 240s, the first pair of jeans I'd ever bought that cost more than $35.  They were $90 in 2003 when I was in Vegas on business and a friend I met there convinced me to try something other than The Gap; the Lucky store associate was so kind - I was marveling that I fit into a 10 but freaking out at the price so she cut 20% off the tag.  Remind me that I need to do a post on how to negotiate when shopping for clothes.  Hint: just ask. Anyhow, I'd bought the larger 12s at the local store shortly before heading to Europe but by the time I went to Colorado I could only find 14s on eBay and was a little concerned because that's as big as they got. Spoiler: I got bigger.) That trip sucked a little. I was with three slim girls I worked with, and I huffed and puffed trying to keep up with them, and I had a super hard time bending down to tie my laces and my long wool coat barely buttoned.

Then life got really wacky. My dad was diagnosed with brain cancer; prognosis: 44 weeks. My employer wasn't too keen on me taking two unpaid days a month to fly cross-country to spend time with him before he died so I quit my six-figure job with the fancy title. (And I will never work for a small privately-held company that isn't compelled to offer FMHLA.) I promptly took a vacation to Alaska where my expanding waistline continued posing challenges to my traveling enjoyment. (Note: tour operators that use twin prop planes for hour-long sight-seeing tours do NOT like having fatties throwing off the balance of the plane. And it's uncomfortable for a big gal - those planes are not spacious.) 

I spent the next year bouncing between Texas and my parents' home three hours' flight away. And I was unemployed for 16 months. It freaked me out. I didn't have unemployment because I'd quit my job (well-played, douchebag former employer). But somehow I survived, and found contract work in 2006. By the time my contract was up in early-2009, I was a size 16. 

This time I was almost giddy to be out of work.  I'd survived it before, and this time I was going to enjoy myself. I spent a lot of time meeting friends for lunch, because I could. 

Found my third new job in five years, and I weighed 190; I'd re-gained everything I lost in 2002 and then some, over a period of 7 years. By then I'd discovered Chico's Travelers Collection - perfect for the fatty-in-denial: unstructured, elastic waist, wide legs.  Everything a girl needs to make herself feel stylish-while-obese. Remarkably, I felt really good about myself. Part of that was having a boss who was pushing 400 pounds.

Alas, said 400-pound-boss was also a raging narcissist. If you've ever worked for one of those, it's nucking futs. 

By the time I was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, I tipped the scales at 225. I was up 90 pounds in the 17 years that I'd been in Texas. That's the equivalent of a newborn calf.  But it didn't happen all of a sudden.  Even with the year or so of losing a lot and looking good, that's an average gain of a little more than 5 pounds a year, or about half a pound a month.  I'm telling you, it's slow and insidious that weight gain thing.

And a funny thing about cancer (because cancer is hilarious). I talked in an earlier post about losing my hair (it wasn't that bad) but let me tell you cancer did NOT make me lose weight. I had six rounds of chemo, and for each round my tastebuds would stop working for two weeks. Most people would say about their meal, 'hey, this doesn't taste like anything so I'm just not going to eat this because why?'  Not me! No sirree, I was all 'hey, this doesn't taste like anything but perhaps another bite with a lot more salt will be delicious. No? How about THIS bite?'

The only thing that kept me from getting even bigger was radiation. Since my abdomen was getting nuked, my intestines were getting cooked a little bit and becoming more susceptible to bugs. I wound up getting some mad intestinal infection and food poisoning at the same time and lost 25 pounds over a very short period of time. But then chemo started up again, and so did my weight.

So this is what I looked like in 2013, a year after my cancer treatment was done:

Me in 2013.  I am obese. 

I have officially spent way too much time detailing how I got super-fat. There's still a couple chapters to go in the story of My Weight Loss Journey. But let me give you a bit of a spoiler/happy ending...this is what I look like now:

Me in 2018. Size 8 jeans. How'd I do it? Hint: Weight Watchers®

To be continued...

My Weight Loss Journey - Part I

FYI, from time to time I'll include links in a post that take you to whatever it is I'm talking about.  I may get compensated if you purchase something from clicking the link.  My blog is purely for my personal amusement, but if you make a purchase because of something I said, well, it's cool to get something back from the provider. 

January 2017 at 225 pounds vs October 2018 at 156 pounds

Let's talk about weight, baby, let's talk about weight and me, let's talk about all the best things and the worst things we can be.

I've been a big girl pretty much all my life (I'm in my 50s...not quite sure how THAT happened but it's better than the alternative).  My mother is fond of telling me how my pediatrician referred to me as a "real chowhound" when I was a baby. She was also sure to tell me when a neighbor said I had "a weight problem" (I was in junior high). Of course I look at pictures from my teenage years and wish I was that 'fat'.  

I was a size 12 going into college. I gained the obligatory Freshman 15 (and then some), spent the summer working out, returned a size 12...lather, rinse repeat x4. I'd start the school year looking good at size 10 or 12 and finish the year size 14. When I graduated college I moved to New York City.  There's a lot of walking when you live there, so I did a pretty good job of staying size 10 or 12. 

Despite the walking, there was also a lot of great pizza and an abundance of bars and restaurants and food carts.  I'd gotten up to 150 pounds on my short frame (I'm 5'2" on a good day) and my 12s were getting uncomfortably tight. (During the work week, on the 6-block walk from the subway to the office I'd hit up a food cart for breakfast which was either a ginormous bagel with a schmear or 2-3 donuts; lunch was usually a massive deli sandwich unless the gyro cart showed up and dinner was often delivery Chinese, pasta or a grilled cheese sandwich.  Weekends were for bagels, brunches and bars.  Oh, and I was smoking a pack a day.)

The first time I remember trying to learn how to lose weight was during these NYC years, after reading Susan Powter's "Stop the Insanity".  That was in the early-1990s and Powter's story got a ton of attention - she'd lost a bazillion pounds, shaved her head and became an aerobics instructor or something. She was all about cutting fat out of your diet and getting your body moving. That a gram of fat had twice the calories as a gram of carbs or protein was mind-blowing. For real!

So I started counting fat grams. And I stopped eating donuts, cream cheese on the bagel, cheddar and roast beef in the deli sammies, slices of pizza.  I switched to fat-free salad dressings and lower-fat margarines.  I joined a gym, going 3-4 times a week and mixing cardio with weight machines.

And 20 pounds melted away.  At 130 I looked awesome! And then I moved to Texas.

NO ONE WALKS IN TEXAS! It's too freaking hot TBH. I joined a gym, but without the extra walking the weight started creeping back up.  My low-fat-no-more carb-tastic diet was also doing me no favors. I spent the late-1990s bouncing between 150-160.  And just past Y2K I found myself at 186.

It got worse before it got better. Sit tight, and Part II will be here before you know it.