Dieting and Me

Short Version: I've lost 18.5 pounds.

Long Version: I've been on a diet since approximately 1977. I was a senior in high school, and it was kind of fun. Avoid fat and sugar for a week, drop five pounds. Considering I weighed a whopping 130 at the time, five pounds was 4% of my entire self. I felt successful.

Unfortunately, my success led to a thirty-year bad habit: I didn't continue counting calories and writing down every morsel I ate, but I did continue drinking diet soda.

Fortunately, I was in college by this time, and it was easy to take a PE class each quarter to stay in shape.

My next serious diet commenced in 1985, after a day of shopping when I noticed I looked terrible in everything. At home, I weighed myself and I discovered I'd surpassed 150 pounds. For some reason that number clanged an ominous bell in my head, so I signed up for aerobics class and started buying 1% milk. For lunch, I ate a yogurt and maybe a piece of fruit, and for dinner I stuck to salads and avoided meat. I got down to 135, and felt pretty good about myself.

It seemed odd to me that I'd gained weight in my early twenties. I was living with my husband, and we ate a low-fat, high-fiber diet. We avoided meat, enjoyed pasta at least once a week, ate cereal for breakfast, and seldom had any dessert. It was a stark change from my childhood diet of meat, potatoes and gravy, and vegetables drenched in butter. In my mom's kitchen you'd find whole milk, ice cream, butter, and eggs. Yet as a child, I'd always been underweight.

The other big difference in my life during my twenties was that I had a string of awful colds. I'd get so sick that I'd miss two and three and four days of work...for a cold. When I asked my doctor what I should do, she prescribed antibiotics. I got to the point where I'd visit the doctor as soon as I felt the first signs of a cold, knowing that the antibiotics would help prevent the infections that made me so sick. I also had bladder infections. It took a while to figure out that the spermicide used with my diaphragm was killing off all the good bacteria; until then, I took more anti-biotics. I've read that the gut flora of slender people is different from those who are heavy. It resonated with me, because before my antibiotics era, I was able to lose weight with minimal effort. But after my twenties, it became virtually impossible.

I had my first child when I was twenty-seven. I gained a horrifying 35 pounds, but everyone said nursing would help me lose it, so I didn't worry.  I should have. I couldn't lose an ounce, despite joining a gym and pushing my daughter's stroller around my hilly neighborhood for what must have been thousands of miles.

And then I got pregnant again. Again, I gained over 35 pounds. After I delivered this one, I weighed over 200 pounds.

By this time, I didn't much care about my weight. I had two small children, a demanding job, and a busy life. I continued my "good" eating habits during these years, never buying any butter and using so little mayo that even the smallest jar would dry up and get crusty before we finished it. I steamed veggies, sauteed meat in the smallest amounts of oil possible, and if I wanted a snack, I stuck to popcorn or pretzels. Yet the pounds kept creeping on.

In 1996 I quit my demanding job and decided losing weight would be my top priority. Every morning, I took the kids to the bus and went straight to the gym to work out. I did a circuit of weights and then walked on the treadmill for an hour. On the weekends I'd walk a 2-mile loop in the hilliest part of the neighborhood. I recorded everything I ate, each bowl of Cheerios with 1% milk, each carton of yogurt, each ounce of chicken. After six months I'd lost nine pounds.

So I took my food journal to the doctor and asked her what I was doing wrong. She gave me a prescription for phentermine, a drug that suppressed my appetite and boosted my metabolism perfectly. I quickly reached my goal weight and felt terrific. I bought an wardrobe of new clothes. It was heavenly.  Unfortunately, you can't take an amphetamine for too long, and she ended my prescription after two years.

It was as if I'd never lost the weight at all. Looking back, I wish I'd weighed myself daily so I could quantify how quickly it returned. All I know is that in virtually no time at all, I gained it all back, plus an extra twenty or so.

I concluded that losing weight wasn't for me. Up until this point, every time I'd been successful at losing weight, I'd not only gain the weight back, but also gain a few bonus pounds. It was as if my body anticipated imminent starvation. Both of my parents faced severe food shortages in their lifetimes. Had I somehow "inherited" an unusually high need to pack calories away for the future? My doctor convinced me that genetic changes take far longer to show up, but I can't help noticing that all of my relatives on my dad's size are as heavy as I am. I also had a baby that weighed over ten pounds at birth. I wondered if my body was carefully socking away enough fat to support the growth of another ten-pounder.

As my kids got older and I got heavier, I decided that my worth as a person had little to do with my weight, and stopped worrying about it. I worried much more about the migraines that plagued me, and after some stomach issues--likely caused by my Aleve habit--I started examining my food triggers. After a good deal of trial and error, I eschewed most anything that came in a package in favor of fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables.

But then my husband started worrying about his weight. And he learned different habits than I had. He read books about avoiding carbohydrates instead of fat. He read books about eating bacon and eggs, but not the toast. Eventually we both ate very low-carb diets. I gave up the sugar I'd always had in my tea, something I never expected to be able to do. I stopped eating cereal entirely.