Losing weight is difficult, especially for a woman and double especially if you are a woman with PCOS. I am a woman with PCOS. I was officially diagnosed this past Spring, how I wish I would have known sooner so I could have done something about it! My body is sick because I am overweight, but it also fights the losing of weight. It is a horrible, ironic thing. The worst thing to me, is that I have lost a lot of weight in the past and then chose to put it back on thinking to myself, "I lost it once, I can do it again." WOW. How stupid am I? Turns out that decision perfectly timed up with emotional trauma.
I realize that I made this choice because I have strategically used my weight as a sort of "body armor" in the world, emotionally and physically. I always told myself that being fat is kinda a good thing because it wards off shallow people that would only like me because of the way I looked. I actually don't mind being fat, I love myself through and through and think I am a beautiful person. To me FAT is not a cuss word! However, being overweight as I am while also aging, is starting to take its toll.
If I am not exercising regularly my ankles, knees, hips and back hurt with every step and even more so when I am climbing stairs. I am not even 30 and I feel 65. I don't have children yet and am hoping to embark on that journey in the next couple of years. My fiance and I are planning our wedding for August 2015 and it would be SO awesome to feel and look great at my wedding. I want to bring our children into the world with a healthy Mom who can run and play with them until they are exhausted! My fiance is quite fit and active and encourages me on my journey.
I am fighting a daily fight to shed each pound for my future and for the health and longevity of my life. I know I will probably have to have skin surgery and that it won't be easy or cheap! Deciding to shed my emotional armor is also a little scary. I am going to have to completely reprogram how I see myself and unravel the "proud curvy girl" part of my personality. In the last few years I have taken on unraveling my addictions and healing my psychological childhood traumas, which is how the array of addictions got there in the first place. I feel like taking on my food addiction and fat armor issues is the last step to being my authentic self. What is the journey of self if not self-discovery to realize all your "flaws" were just your subconscious trying to protect you in the first place!
What addictions you say? Well, let's just be honest and it won't be pretty. I will be honest with you though in case someone else is gong through the same thing, they will know after reading this that they too can overcome what holds them back in life. I completely agree with the statement, "Fall down seven times, stand up eight."
So it all begins, like most stories, at the beginning. I was a young girl, fresh to the world, very trusting, curious and innocent. I was full of energy, imagination and loved to be loved! I used to dress up and pretend to be in a beauty pageant or spend days playing out dramas with my Barbie family. I was the first born child into my family on both sides, so at first, I got ALL the attention. My Grandma on my Dad's side would make me these poofy dresses and costumes all the time. I think I was their little doll for awhile! I remember that part of my life very fondly, I was very happy and fulfilled.
It wasn't long until Cousins and a little Brother arrived and life was still pretty great. I was the boss and had to tell all the stories. Once, I remember I slapped the shit out of my younger Cousin for blowing out my birthday candles. I guess this is where I get my dominate, bossy personality. I won't lie, I was a little mean. I think that was my first emotional mis-step, buying into the fear that I wasn't good enough anymore. So, I developed this thing where I tried to outshine, get more love, love me, love me, love me! So silly, but it was the precursor for several of my addictions as a teenager and young adult.
When I was about four, I had an incident with an older female babysitter. I won't go into gory details but, things happened that shouldn't have happened and it exposed me to sex way before I should have been exposed. The guilt part of it was that I liked it. I liked the attention and it made me feel like I was making her happy with me. This is a very important event in my life because it ties into my sexual addictions. Of course I didn't tell anyone and kept this secret until I was a teenager.
When I was six and my little Brother was four my Mom and Dad divorced and she met a man in another state. She wanted to be with him, marry him and make a life with him so she decided to move us a thousand miles away from our family and home to do so. When we got to where we were going I think my Brother and I were both in shock. It was so different! We were taken away from our familiar surroundings and we couldn't see our Dad anymore. I missed my Grandparents and Cousins, I felt so empty sometimes and lonely.
When my Mom re-married we gained two older Step-Brothers and one older Step-Sister but there was about an eight to twelve year age gap and we were kind of looked at as these things they had to deal with now. My oldest Step-Brother was great though! We were good friends, he protected me and was almost a father figure roll to me at times. Through my life he took me under his wing and we forged a strong bond of the "black sheep" of the family. But I digress.
So here I am, a new bird in a new land. I remember going to my new first grade class in the middle of the year and bringing my Barbie to school like all the other girls did in my old school. I was made fun of forever about that. Immediately I was branded as the "new, weird girl with out of date clothes, frizzy brown hair, a red face and gap teeth." Kids can be cruel, can't they? I guess styles and behaviors were different from state to state! This event sent me down the road of being in the "nerd, geek and loser" crowd. Which was fine because I was smart and had already learned how to read so I just hid in books and behind my academic achievements.
In the third grade I acted out quite horribly. I don't know why the adults didn't see this as a huge flashing sign that maybe this kid has some emotional issues? Anyways, there was this popular girl at school. She was blonde with blue eyes, always wore this little gold cross necklace and was way into gymnastics with her other popular friends. My anger and animosity had reached a boiling point. I had discovered the genre of horror in the library and had been reading all kinds of books. So with this girl being the focal point of everything I wasn't, I decided to in other words "get even."
One day in gym class we were running laps around the room and I ran up to her and started speaking to her in a low, growly voice. I told her that, "I was a demon sent from hell to take her soul and that she better watch out." For the rest of the class she sat in one spot, holding her knee's, rocking back and forth and muttering, "It's not real, it's not real." I got quite the kick out of that. Then when the class went back to our home room I asked to go to the bathroom and snuck out of the school. I wandered into the town that was nearby and eventually found where they parked the busses and I climbed on board an empty school bus, went to the very back, ate a box of Girl Scout cookies I had stole from my house earlier that day and fell asleep.
When I woke up I had no idea what time it was or how long I had been gone so I thought, "I better get back to school because they are probably freaking out." I walked back to school and in the parking lot was a guidance counselor waiting to receive me. They called my Mom to come pick me up, and she took me immediately to the psychologist. I of course didn't open up and tell him anything about how I was feeling, so he suggested to my Mom to take away my horror books until I could get a proper grip on reality. Man, did I throw a fit! It was my only comfort from this awful world! After that, I behaved with the upmost discretion, I didn't want to lose my books again!
My Step-Father was shockingly strict. He was very loud, screaming, yelling at us whenever we did something wrong. He expected my little brother and I to behave with the grace of adults and to never touch what was not ours to touch. We got spankings with a paddle that had holes drilled into it and were grounded almost all the time. My previous experience with discipline was never this strict. I grew so angry over this and held onto it for so long. This style of discipline only made me more rebellious and sneaky. I started to grow a garden of love and hate inside me that would fuel my appetite for my near self destruction in the future. I still get very upset to this day when someone breaks something out of anger or I hear angry yelling near me.
By this time I had learned that sweet, sugary foods made me feel happy. Just being stuffed with food to the brim made me feel so safe and comforted. If there was a tub cookie dough in the fridge, after school, I would eat spoonfuls of it. If my Mom was peeling potatoes for dinner, I would almost always steal one and run and hide under my bed with the salt shaker and eat the whole thing. Cookies, cakes, candy bars, ice cream, sodas...pretty much anything I could get my little hands on to make me feel emotionally "high." The weight started to pile on significantly and by the fourth grade I was officially overweight and addicted to food.
From nine to about twelve years old is kind of a blur. I blocked out most of it because I was so unhappy. I remember I would isolate myself in my room or the laundry room and paint for hours. I would write dark poetry or stories and read books, listen to music, I was the angsty pre-teen. When I was twelve and thirteen I discovered makeup! It was the first time I connected the dots between wearing armor against the world. As soon as I changed my appearance, people reacted differently to me and I liked it! I got some friends, in the same "weirdo" class as me and started being more social.
That is also when I discovered drugs, alcohol and sex in correlation to how good it all made me feel when mixed in the right order. I was this psychological cocktail for addiction and I had finally found the catalyst. At about fourteen, my parents couldn't control me anymore. I was designing my own clothes and dressing goth and grunge. I was coming into my own, finding comfort in the rebellious, punk girl personality. It expressed my inner rage and told the world, "FUCK YOU!" I was pretty saturated with that scene until I was eighteen and I had to start chilling out and making enough money to live, pay my bills and maintain my vehicle. I was still pretty crazy though, dating men much older than me, I loved the attention and it seemed to soothe some kind of "daddy issue" for me. Oh the partying, my life was all about the party.
When I was nineteen I received a phone call from my little Brother who was living with our Grandma and Dad in our home state. He told me that my Dad had been shot in the head during a drug dispute and was on life support. My whole world stopped. Up to that point I was this raw vessel of emotions, partying and barely going to cosmetology school. I had a girlfriend and a boyfriend and others on the side. I would come home from my waitress job and there was always a party at my apartment. I was actually in the middle of a party when I got the phone call about my Dad and had to fly out that night to get to him as fast as possible. Unfortunately while I was on the airplane, he went brain dead. It was weird because I felt it, it was like a million tingles of light blasting through my body and I just knew he had passed.
They kept his body alive until I got to the hospital and it turned out that I was his next of kin. I had to make the decision to donate his organs or not and I did. I remember standing beside his hospital bed with the most ache in my heart and throat I had ever felt. I was coming to terms with the fact I could never hug, kiss or laugh with him again. I loved him so much but we had only got to spend a limited amount of time together. It didn't seem fair that he would not get to walk me down the aisle or hold his grandchildren. I cried so hard and I promised him that I would not waste my life, that I would graduate from cosmetology school and make something of myself. That I would not let addiction take me down like it had taken him down. At that moment his toes started to move and his hand moved as I was holding it. Even though he was brain dead the doctors said it was a natural reaction to his nerves dieing off but I always believed it was him saying he heard what I had to say.
I wanted to keep my promise to him and get my life together. From that point on it was a battle to be the me I had become and become the me I wanted to be. It took me three years to conquer my drug addictions, six years to conquer my alcohol addiction, seven years to conquer my sexual addictions, eight years to conquer my codependency issues, and my last hurdle to jump over is my yo-yo weight, body issues and food addiction.
I have found so much beauty and peace within myself, even though sometimes it has been really, really hard to keep on track. I remember my promise to my Dad, I remember my promise to myself and that helps me keep going. I feel like if I can conquer what I have, then I can definitely conquer the weight and bring it on home to full circle health and happiness. I don't begrudge anything that has happened to me in my life. I feel that everything I went through and every person that I have known, loved and lost has happened to me for a reason. That reason was to build the strong, beautiful person I have flowered into today.
One thing I would like to do before I leave this Earth is to help other people that are struggling with these same issues. I hope my story encourages you. Just remember it is always darkest before the dawn.