My Battle With Weight

I've been thinking a lot lately about my mortality. I have a great fear that because of my weight I will die young and leave my children motherless. It scares me.

This picture makes me sad. I had a very happy childhood, but I remember always feeling fat. In this picture, if you look closely, you'll see that I'm sucking in my cheeks. I think I'm five years old here and I was already self conscious about my fat face. Looking back, I probably wasn't that far from normal, but I felt ugly and awkward. 

I was always the heaviest of all my friends and even though I played sports, I was never thin. My senior year in high school I started running and lifting weights. I also replaced lunch and all my snacks with apples. By the time I graduated, I weighed 150 pounds and was a size 10. That's the smallest I've ever been.

My weight went up and down throughout college and my mission. Looking back at pictures, I realize that a lot of times I looked okay, but I always felt fat. I weighed 220 pounds when I left on my mission.

At the end of my  mission, I weighed around 180 pounds. Over the next few years, my weight kept creeping up.

When I got married, I weighed 240 pounds. I've always been grateful that David loved me and has never noticed my weight. He has never been anything but supportive of me. That being said, I know he has concerns about my health.

It was during our struggles with infertility that I finally decided I had to get serious about weight loss. I was diagnosed with PCOS and knew that I would need to lose weight if we were to have any hope of getting pregnant. Unfortunately, the infertility treatments caused me to gain even more weight. I also found that I had hypothyroidism, which makes it even harder to lose weight. I finally joined Weight Watchers  in February of 2006. I lost 73 pounds over the next two years, but still didn't get pregnant. I reached my lowest Weight Watchers weight of 223.8 on May 17, two months after Baylie was born. 

After adopting Baylie, I gradually started to gain the weight back and I couldn't seem to stop it. It happened little by little, but by last fall - about 3 1/2 years after hitting my lowest WW weight, I had gained most of the weight back.

And here I am today. (I'm not as brave as my friend Dayna that posted her actual weight on her blog.) I can't even stand to look at myself. I have recently started watching The Biggest Loser on Netflix and it has really motivated me to change my life and get control. I had never wanted to watch the show because I thought it was negative and competitive instead of supportive, but it's not that way at all. David and I have started working out and it feels good to be exercising my body again. A couple friends and I have been doing Weight Watchers online with little success, but now we have a weekly meeting to encourage and support each other. In the three weeks since we started meeting, I've lost five pounds. I refuse to give up.

Here's what motivates me:

• I want to be alive when my kids grow up. 
• I want to teach them to be more healthy. 
• I want to wear cute clothes.
• I don't want to feel tired all the time.
• I want to have energy.
• I want to sit in a seat at the theater or on an airplane or in a public restroom and not worry about fitting.

I found some websites that calculate your life expectancy. THIS ONE gave me an expectancy of 86 and THIS ONE 82 (this one requires an e-mail address). This has given me great hope and I feel a little less stressed about dying young. Now I'm just going to focus on getting healthy and enjoying whatever time I do have.