I don’t ever remember even thinking about my weight until I was in college. Somehow, I bypassed the worry and fear of weight and food that so many girls get, starting even as young as 8 or 9. I think my mom has had weight concerns most of her life, but one of her biggest (of many) successes as a parent was not passing that on to me. I remember my mom as someone who loved to lift weights and go to aerobics class (it was the 80s!) because it made her feel good, not because it was about losing weight. We had a big garden and ate fresh vegetables right off the plants. We canned tomatoes and made pesto. Food was about being healthy, feeling good, and yes, tasting good - but that didn’t include a lot of junk. Sodas were left for birthday parties and dessert might be a fruit popsicle in the summertime or homemade cookies once in a while. I feel very fortunate to have been brought up in an environment that didn’t glorify nor denigrate food. It was just that, food. We grew it. Not everything we ate but a lot of it, especially in the vegetables department.
In middle and high school, I played sports. Three of them a year, all three school sport seasons plus I swam in the summers. And so I ate, frequently and a lot. Most of it was pretty healthy but I did usually have one soda a day at that point and didn’t pay a lot of attention to nutrition. I remember going up to the small mall near school before basketball practices in the afternoon and getting something called a “double doozy” from the cookie shop - two snickerdoodles with icing in between them. Or Chick-fil-a! Before a practice! And somehow I always made it through practice without “blowing my cookies,” literally. Food was fuel and I wasn’t afraid of it. I couldn’t have told you what I weighed. I only know now because I went to Costa Rica for two weeks one summer and lost about 5-8 pounds because we were hiking and walking so much and I was eating basically rice and beans and fruit.
When I went to college, I joined the cheerleading squad to stay active and a part of the athletic department. We had practices 3 times a week plus two lifting and conditioning sessions. Despite the all-you-can-eat buffet and late-night pizza and quesadillas, I never gained any of the dreaded “freshman 15.” However, my roommate brought a scale with her to college. Maybe I never would have cared about it even then except my best friend across the hall would come over frequently to weight herself, despite being then (and still being today) an extremely thin and rather tall person - she only weighed about 10 pounds more than I did but is at least 4-5 inches taller.
I really think my problems with food started, though, during the second part of sophomore year when I got into the relationship that would eventually turn into my first marriage. It was intense and, through the eyes of my 34 year old self now, somewhat desperate love. I started to gain weight that next year and kept putting it on. Not a ton, probably 15 pounds, but enough to certainly notice.
I got married 6 weeks after graduation. I do not recommend this to anyone - it is a rare 22 year old that knows him or herself well enough to get married this young. I thought we had a good relationship but again, with the benefit of hindsight, and a lot of therapy, I don’t think we were that happy. Not truly happy. Couple this with my first full-time job and a desk job plus feeling isolated and without friends after the hubub of college, I was unhappy. And so we drank a lot of wine. And I gained weight. Again, not a lot. I was probably 130 lbs when we got married and 145 I’m pretty sure was my highest weight. But it wasn’t healthy weight. I could easily weigh 145 if it were mostly muscle and look great. This wasn’t muscle. This was wine weight and loneliness weight and never feeling good enough for my husband weight. There’s a picture of me, taken in France with my sister almost three years into my 1st marriage, and I just look puffy and big. And I’m actually only about 8-10 pounds heavier than I am right now.
What I remember about this time period of my first marriage was really hating my body. I remember starting to measure my portions and almost crying over it. I remember trying to get myself to run and hating every second.
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