How On Earth Did I Get Here?

Once I got over the shock of finding myself having joined the over 9 million adult Americans who are morbidly obese, I began to try and figure out how I got into this state. One obvious answer is eating too much. Another is eating the wrong things. But perhaps those answers are a little too facile. There are a myriad of causes of weight gain, and not all of those causes are within the control of the individual. Does it sound like I’m trying to dodge acceptance of responsibility for where I was? It may sound that way to you, but is really not the case. I accept the fact that I was occasionally eating too much, and in many cases eating the wrong things, but there are more factors which influence weight control, and some of them, I as an individual have no control over. In fact, many people who know me well will tell you I am not really a big eater. And, I could be a closet eater – only eating when others are not around, but I’m not.

So, what happened? How could I possibly mount an attack of a problem when I didn’t have a good handle on the root causes? How did I get from being slightly overweight at 145 pounds to being over 300 pounds? As with most people, it didn’t happen overnight. The following are a few of the reasons my weight has increased over the years (in no particular order).

• Yo-yo dieting – I would gain a few pounds and then resort to drastic measures to get the weight off as quickly as possible. I would go off the diet and then the weight would come back and bring some extra unwanted pounds along. Repeat the cycle. I’ve tried several fad diets, diet pills, and even tried some crazy things on my own. Each time I would have success, but none of the things could be sustained, and I always ended up weighing a little more afterward. That’s why I never forget now that diet is a four letter word.

• Physiological system imbalance – in my twenties there was a period of time where I experienced a severe physiological system imbalance resulting in depression, inability to eat, and weight gain – yes, that’s right. I couldn’t keep anything down and gained weight. Talk about depressing.

• Travel – I worked for a company that had me traveling all of the time, so you’re always on the road and eating out in restaurants, and not getting the exercise through your more normal activities. At one point, I was continuously living in a hotel for a period of 7 months, and because of the hours I was putting in during the transition of centralizing several offices into one location, by the time I got back to the hotel after having eaten out, I was too tired to even think about exercise. Say hello to about 50 pounds.

• Marriage to the Junk Food King – I am not blaming Denny for my weight gain, but it is a factor in my rising weight. His idea of a meal, and his lifestyle prior to being married was to figure out which fast food establishment he wants to visit on any given day. He doesn’t cook and it becomes far too easy when you’re coming home tired and trying to figure out what to make for dinner, when he suggests fast food, you just fall in with the suggestion, or at least I did. I was never big on fast food, but the dratted convenience of it was my downfall after marriage.

• Pregnancy – Although I didn’t carry the baby to full term, after I lost the baby, my body kept on pumping out those hormones and I gained weight. Did I mention that I have an incredibly delicate system?

• Surgery – After I lost the baby, I had a myomectomy to remove the fibroids which essentially pushed my baby out of the womb too soon. 6 weeks of bed rest followed.

• In-vitro – after the loss of the baby, we tried for a year and were unable to achieve pregnancy again, so we tried in-vitro fertilization. During the process you are playing with your body’s system balance (and mine as already discovered is a very delicate thing) and most women gain weight during this process. The funny thing is that while we were going through in-vitro, I didn’t gain any weight. I actually felt pretty smug about the fact that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t battling weight gain. Well, fate always has the last laugh, and after the entire process was completed, I gained 70 pounds overnight (ok – it just felt like it was overnight).

• Genetics – now this is something that I do not have any control over, but studies are finding increasing evidence of where genetics play a role in obesity. As with most negative traits, I get the obesity gene from both sides of my family.

Now that I had listed out all of the reasons for the periods of weight gain over my adulthood, what did that tell me, other than I had developed some poor habits and exercise had become a thing of the past? Well, it very clearly underlined that what I was after was a lifestyle change and not a diet. A diet would fail, just as it had so many times in the past, so I needed something that would help me change my habits and help me strive toward health.

And just a bit of trivia to conclude this with:

If the entire morbidly obese population lived in one state, it would be the 12th largest state in population.

For me, that puts the obesity epidemic in perspective – it is huge.

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LK Gardner-Griffie
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